wow f'd up title - mean to say "... from a web saavy person to decipher ...".

I developed and maintain a website for a local mens hockey league I play in out here in MN. I was hoping to spend 30 minutes to add a new feature where players in the league could pick their fav. NHL team, then a image of a jersey would be dynamically generated showing their name and number on this jersey. I currently do this for the minnesota wild jersey, but would like to extend it to any nhl team.

I'm a bit hesitant to divulge this info as I have been "borrowing" it for sometime, and would prefer not to lose, but my 30 minute project has turned into spending 30 minutes just looking for unique key mapping.

Keep in mind -I don't charge anyone to make/maintain this. I do it on my free time, so not looking to screw anyone over here or make $. Simply wanna add something cool. So if you feel like trying to solve a problem, and wanna help me out continue reading. Otherwise feel free to flame (as I know you have nothing better to do).

Ok so here is my problem. Today I dynamically render the MN Wild hockey jersey like so:
http://www.kassonbbhl.com/Players/view/52

I borrow the images and the rendering logic from lp.imageg.net. If you look at the source of the link above, you can see the image is rendered as follows:

http://lp.imageg.net/prod?set=key[captain],value[]&set=key[name],value[Becker]&set=key[number],value[15]&set=key[displaysize],value[220]&load=url[http://chains.imageg.net/graphics/dynamic/chains/pG01-1793122_customback.chain]

The key part of the entire thing here is the 'pG01-1793122'. That somehow uniquely maps to the wild. I had it figured out for the capitols as well, but for some reason I have lost how I did it. Nhl.com has replaced customizing jerseys with some flash thing now, however the lp.imagege.net stuff still is out there (its around for some 'custom kids jerseys').

anyways so problem is, how do i find the unique id's for all the teams. I was hoping to figure it out by lookign at the url's for the teams and finding the key for that team. I've tried a few other methods but have not been successful.

I'm hoping either someone has 'borrowed' from imageg.net before and knows how to find this info out, or is smart enough to figure it out some other way.

I know this is a longshot, but thanks in advance.

update - getting closer:
Ok, figured out 2 more. I also figured out it cannot be one of the new RBK jerseys. Here are 2 more examples:

pG01-1794984 - PHO
pG01-1806280 - capitols


[Edited on June 30, 2008 at 6:01 PM. Reason : update]

6/30/2008 5:53:25 PM

write a script to brute it

6/30/2008 8:58:24 PM

How did you find that image URL in the first place? I guess what I'm asking is, can't you just find the site where those custom jerseys are being sold, and pick a sample from each team to get the key?

Also:

[Edited on June 30, 2008 at 10:11 PM. Reason : brain fart]

6/30/2008 10:10:55 PM

^I simply went to the wild store, made a custom jersey, then looked at the image src. From there I figured out how to customize the query string. You are right, I could go through all 30 teams and do the same thing - however I was hoping there was a quicker way, and not all teams have the old ccm customizable jerseys for sale (but I know lp.imageg.net still has the backend data to serve the images).

^^BigMan - could you be more specific? What would the general logic be? Or you saying write a script that loops over the 'http://lp.imageg.net/prod?set=key..." url, incrementing the integer? I've played with that a bit - and thing is not all the images returned are NHL hockey jerseys....

7/1/2008 9:29:30 AM

well, it looks like at this point it would have been faster to make each jersey manually to get the team ID. to brute force it you could just make a request for sequential 7 digit numbers and find out which ones return a 200 status code, then save them as candidates, but then you have to look through each one and find the ones that are nhl jerseys, not to mention that they will probably catch on when there are a million requests from your IP.

7/1/2008 10:07:26 AM

Frankly, I hope you get sued for flagrant copyright violations.

7/1/2008 10:20:14 AM