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     1.4 +1. Introduction
     1.5 +
     1.6 +Back in the day, I used to play a lot of Diablo2. In order to keep track of the
     1.7 +items I had collected, I made a PHP/MySQL website so that both myself as my
     1.8 +friends could see what I still missed (and thus, whether it was worth to pick
     1.9 +up an item or just dispose of it :-)
    1.10 +
    1.11 +2. Rewriting the site
    1.12 +
    1.13 +However, as this website worked fine, 1.10 came out, which introduced a lot of
    1.14 +classy new items. As the game got a lot harder, I wanted to be able to search
    1.15 +for items with properties (for example, an overview of all items which give
    1.16 ++ to all resistances) - this was not feasible with the old approach (which just
    1.17 +stored item properties in a MySQL TEXT field), so I decided a rewrite was in
    1.18 +order.
    1.19 +
    1.20 +3. Implementation
    1.21 +
    1.22 +I chose the PostgreSQL database as it's much more feature-complete - and things
    1.23 +like referential integrity and column checks are very useful.
    1.24 +
    1.25 +In order to easily import data, I chose to write everything down as XML which
    1.26 +I could then later import into the database using Perl scripts. The XML files
    1.27 +are provided in the xml/ folder, whereas the scripts are in the scripts/
    1.28 +folder.
    1.29 +
    1.30 +For ease of use, a complete database dump with all items imported is provided
    1.31 +in sql/diablo2-filled.sql.
    1.32 +
    1.33 +4. License
    1.34 +
    1.35 +This work is licensed under the GPL license version 2 or up. All item-images
    1.36 +as provided in www/images/items/ are copyright Blizzard Entertainment.