Lotto Automation

10:11.59 - Thursday 25th September 2003   (Link to This Entry)

Seems the introduction of the new Daily Play Lotto has send a lot of people my way. I added a quick tally to the visitor count history in order to see how many visitors I'd had over the past seven days, and already it's at 1086 for this week. With this in mind, and M moaning about the Daily Play being a pain, I've decided to try and automate the update of the website.

So I dug out my VB6 box and installed that along with the VB MSDN stuff, and I set to work. The plan is to scrape the official Lotto site and check for expected numbers based on some info I've already developed for the site database. The program will look at the page, see if there are new results and if so, update the site and then add those results to it's own database once the site is successfully updated.

To save bandwidth, it will check once a minute or so from 19:55 till 23:59 and only while it doesn't have the expected results for that date in it's own table. Once I'm reasonably confident it's working without problems, I'll have it trigger the email and SMS sending for full automation.