Album analyzer
From Badges Wiki
A relatively high percentage of the 1000 Badges Club members like to track their achievements. Most of that involves using excel and typing the information manually. Fortunately, ones entire badge album is stored in the badge album web page. (NOTE: this is not the default badge album page that you get by clicking on "my badges" on MSN Games. It's not even supported by MSN.) People handy with Excel can save a lot of time typing if they import the album somehow in Excel.
However, the host of this wiki site has also developed a tool which converts a badge album and stores it into a database. And a webpage reads the database to show it into a handy (Excel-like) format. Advantages are: it's time saving (no more typing), database features (it can detect changes in your album and use it to time stamp your badges, or detect when you have last played a game), and cool cross-album statistics.
Creating / uploading your album
Uploading the album should be very easy. When you are viewing your badge album, you can try to mail it directly. In Internet Explorer 7 use "Page -> Send page by email...". This heavily relies on Microsoft features and may not work with other mail clients than Outlook or Outlook express (not tested). This mail feature can also be found in Internet Explorer 6 under "File -> Send -> Page by mail".
If mailing directly from within the browser does not work there are 2 more options which involve saving the album first to a file and then sending the file as an attachment. Saving the badge album to a file can be done in IE7 and Firefox using "File -> Save (Page) As..." and selecting "Webpage, only HTML" as type to save it as. This will create a .htm file. Mailing the .htm file is enough. After the mail has been sent, you can delete the file. The other option is to use the View -> Source to get your album into a notepad and then save it as something which ends with .htm. Then you can mail the file you just saved as an attachment.
The email address to send the album to is baa@bencastricum.nl. Since this is a program it won't reply, except for the first time you upload when you'll get your login information. For support on this album analyzer use badges@bencastricum.nl.
Once uploaded, your contributions should be online a few seconds after you mailed it. If it is the first time you uploaded your album, it automatically creates a new album for you. All the badges you have will have the current date as timestamp. That's because from its point of view that they are new and new badges get the current date.
Updating your album
Just like an excel sheet, your album still needs updating. But updating the album just involves sending your album again. The analyzer compares the new album with your previous one and updates it with the new info.
If you e-mail your badge album, but get it bounced back with an error like
Authentication failure (wrong email?)
then you are probably using a new e-mail address. The analyzer uses your e-mail for authentication purposes, so others can't easily alter your album. But that does mean that when you change e-mail address, you need to change your e-mail address in the analyzer as well. To do so, login to your album and go to the settings page. There you will find a place where you can update your e-mail (and other things as well).
Important Note
One of the features of the analyzer is that you can compare yourself with other players. However this has lead to some heated discussions on the forum so please take the following into consideration when comparing. Comparing albums as like comparing apples with oranges. All players are different, have different strategies, different amount of time to spend and may or may not use bugs or automated tools to obtain badges or higher scores. So, what comes difficult to one, is easy for someone else. (Just like real life). Keep in mind that the idea here is to enjoy the games, not so much about getting more badges or higher scores than someone else.
The album analyzer is currently located at http://badges.bencastricum.nl/.
