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| After a marathon effort through the summer, I am very happy to report that every ClubBase now has details for every club playing in a pyramid league (excluding the handful of leagues that still haven't confirmed their line-up for 2012/13). In other news: - The site design is being overhauled. You will have already noticed the new deisgn on the home page and a number of the most visited pages already have the new design in place. The remaining pages will have the new design in place very soon.
- The pages giving details of each league and the clubs in each division have been merged. If you have direct links to the details of any league or division, don't worry - they will produce the correct information.
- The much-loved ground grading page has been updated with the FA's 2012 requirements
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| It may be the holiday season, but recent times have been spent going through the websites of every single league in the Pyramid and gathering details of their members clubs. For some leagues, I will need to cross-check this against outdated details. However, if the league had no clubs in Clubbase at all, there's no need. So, details of all those clubs are now on Clubbase!
There are one or two issues... if you look at the alphabetical listings, you'll see the new clubs fall in a group after the old dataset. Also, there may be some issues with duplicate clubnames.
By the New Year, I will have updated all the 100 or so divisions with outdated details, and made sure everything is in nice alphabetical order. Then I will have to do is find out club websites, post codes, and lattitude/longitude for the 4000+ new clubs...
Earllier this month, I got rather behind on dealing with poster orders. They have now all been sent out, and I think I managed to tell everyone who had contacted me. If you did contact me and I haven't relplied, then my apologies. Hopefully the poster arriving in the post was answer enough.
Finally, I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! | |
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| Ocotober and the first part of November have been spent continueing to update leagues to reflect their members clubs for the 2010/11 season. With today's round of updates all leagues down to level 11 now have the correct membership for this season shown. That leaves only a handful of leagues in lower levels which have out-of-date details, and these will updated soon. Then it will just be a matter of adding details to the 300+ divisions with no clubs currently listed! | |
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| I have just finished uploading the results of a major verification and checking exercise. The last week has been spent going through every single league listed on the site in order to check that each league is listed with the correct number of divisions, that those divisions are shown with the correct names, and that the correct number of clubs is shown. There are now 474 divisions shown on the site, containing a total of 6,472 clubs.
Of course, it's no use the details within each league being correct if leagues are missing feeders, or even shouldn't be shown in the Pyramid! That's why I've been emailing every single league at level 10 or below to verify that I'm showing in the right place, and that they don't have any feeders I don't know about. So far I've got back replies from about half, and generally my information have been correct. The most common change has been the addition of new feeder leagues that simply didn't exist last time I did this exercise.
Enjoy your newly verified Pyramid! | |
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| I have recently placed the "AddThis" button on pages throughout the site. This allows you to share your favourite pages on the site you like with friends via the social media network of your choice! Simply click the "AddThis" button, which you'll find at the bottom of the toolbar on the left of each page, and select your preferred mode of sharing. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Digg... you name it, it's there. You can also email or print your favourite pages using the button. In other news, I've updated the Football League Admission History pages, including the history by club and by year. | |
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| The Pyramid is not a static arrangement. Divisions come and go, leagues change their promotion/relegation agreements - so I have to make sure everything on the site is kept as uptodate as possible. That's why I'm currently in the process of contacting every single league listed on the site below level 9 to check their promotion/relegation arrangements. Then I'll go through and make sure I have the names of all 500+ divisions right (some people have very strong feelings about the difference between "First Division" and "Division One") and check the number of member clubs in each one. Oh, and I also have to continue to update the ClubBase for the not-so-new season. This all obviously takes a great deal of time, so I aim to do a complete check like this only once every three years. However, if you are aware of changes or inaccuracies at any time, don't hesitate to email me so I can update and correct as soon as possible.
ClubBase
The following divisions have been updated for 2010/11: - Kent County Football League - Premier, One East, One West, Two East, Two West
- Liverpool County F.A. Premier League - Premier, One, Two, Three
- West Yorkshire League - Premier, One, Two
- Anglian Combination - Premier, One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six
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| The first piece of news is that the technical issues reported last week have been fixed. For the technical-minded, the .htaccess file from the Linux-baswed hosting was causing problems with the new Windows-based host. Kudos to my hosting company for finding and fixing this.
2010/11 season updates
Today I updated around 1,200 clubs across 71 divisions for the 2010/11 season, covering all divisions down to level 10, plus some as far down as level 14. There are about 70 divisions with out-of-date club details, and about 350 divisions with no club details at all. I plan on dealing with the out-of-date divisions over the coming few weeks, and then adding new divisions throughout the season. Longer term, I plan on upgrading the software I use to manager all the data to make it easier to update things each season.
Pyramid posters
The backlog of orders has finally been cleared, and the most recent orders should go in the post tomorrow. My sincere paologies to everyones who's has had to wait so long.
Leaguemap bug
The LeagueMap is currently out of action, which means I have to delve into the murky world of javascript in order to fix it. Given my somewhat limited javascript abailty, this could take some time.
I'm debating changing how the leaguemap works... currently I use ASP to produce an XML file with the javascript then processes in order to add to the map. A better way would be to use the ASP to produce a KML file, which can requires only about two lines of code. Plus, I can make the KML available to users! | |
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| It's been a very long since I posted here, but finally I have something to post about! Technical issuesThe website used to be hosted on a Linux-based server, but my hosting company dropped support for ASP on their Linux-based servers, casuing large parts of the site to not work properly. Consequently, last week I had the hosting company switch the site to a Windows-based server to ensure the ASP pages would still work. (I could have re-written them all in PHP and kept the Linux-based hosting, but switching server software was simpler). However, the ASP implemenation on the Windows server is subtley different, which meant I had to do various tweaks. (For the technically inclined, the Windows version doesn't think is null string and ther numerb zero are equal; the Linux version did). Nominally, the ASP pages should now work perfectly... and they do. Sort of. If you visit http://www.thepyramid.info/asp/pyramid3.asp (for example), you'll see two identical error messages at the top, followed by the page rendering as it should. So, I'm in contact with the technical support at my hosting company to get this sorted. Last message from them was it looekd like a scripting error, to which my polite reply was that even the simplest hello world page has this problem. The hosting company has always been very good, so I'm confident we'll get this sorted. 2010/11 season update
I have begun the slow process of updating the ClubBase pages to reflect league membership for the new season. I have some semi-automated scripts that should handle about a third of the clubs, and I hope to update the site accordingly next week. Further, I've got a more streamlined process for handling updates, so I'm hopeful the remaining two-thirds will progress much more quickly than they ever did in previous years. Pyramid posters
It's come to my attention that several people didn't receieve their Pyramid Posters, despire ordering them a (long) time ago. Email me if you're one of them! | |
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| I've removed my guestbook, because the amount (and content) of spam posts was unacceptable. If you wish to leave feedback on the site, feel free to leave comments on my blog entries (no Livejounal account required), or just send me an email. | |
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| During the past week, the ClubBase pages have together received twice as many page views as Structure of The Pyramid page, the most popular page on the site. In fact the Clubs and Leagues pages have together produced 38% of the site's page views this week.
Listening to the build-up to the League play-offs taking place today and tomorrow, it seems an appropriate time to take a look back at the last season, and the changes it brought to the site. After I came home from a trip to Scotland, in the summer I started work on ClubBase. My life was time rich (unusually), and I was able to make good progress. Createing the LeagueMap brought many technical challenges, as I got to grips with JavaScript, XML, VBScript and ASP. At one point, caching issues meant I had to create a new page every time I made a change to my code, which proved tedious. After getting diverted updating the Sectioned Structure pages (which need updating again), I managed to launch the LeagueMap with all desired features present. The have since been some minor changes to the backend, to allow for when leagues are removed from the site, and to automatically produce the drop-down lists used selecting the division(s). The LeagueMap has been a popular and useful addition to the site In November, I installed the guest-book provided by my hosting company. I was dismayed to discover that the creator thought that the plural of comment was comment's. This error took far too much effort to eliminate, and I still haven't heard back from the guest-book's creators. (For other users of phpBook: the relevant word is at line 18 of english.php in the languages folder). The guest-book also experienced major spamming issues, which was a surprise, given it was recommended by my hosting company. After staring at unfamiliar PHP for some time, I managed to eliminate the more common types of spam posts. There are still some spam posts, but analysis of the server's web statistics reveal my measures have blocked the vast majority. The Ground Grading page was also added in November, and has proved a quiet success for something that was really just created out of personal curiosity. (Though that is arguably true of the entire site). 2006 proved to be a record year in terms of visitor statistics.
The New Year saw me switch to this LiveJournal for news and updates. Posting has take place (roughly) when I've done work on the site. Possibly one coudl analyise this to see if there is any pattern to when I work on the site, but I would prefere to use my time more productively. Leagues continued to be added to the ClubBase during January and Febuary, and eventually went public at end of March. (There was a link to ClubBase on a more obscure page prior to it becoming "public", in order to allow search engines to index the page). In the middle of March, the Pyramid Poster went on sale. The invetsment required was fairly large, but I am very happy with the quality of the product. Sales were less than hoped for, but have been ticking over nicely. April was a slower month, but I did narrow dowm the list of leagues with unconfirmed status to just ten. Four of those were uncontactable, and six failed to reply to my email. (Given these emails generally require a one line reply, the lack of reply is asource of great annoyance). Finally, May saw me move house, with obvious disruptive effects to my internet life.
That was the past - what of the furture? As mentioned in the previous post, I have to check every club to see which league and division (if any) it is playing in for the new season. There's also the small matter of over 4,000 clubs that need to be added to the database. I also want to overhaul and update the League Ratings. Aside from including the last two seasons, I want to make it easier for me to produce them. (It currently uses a convuluted Excel file - I may end up cretaing a dedictaed applet to do the job instead). The League Ratings will also appear on the Division Details page. Finally, I want to the ratings to produce predictions for the FA Cup, FA Trophy and FA Vase.
That rounds off my 2006-07 season review. I shall end by wishing you a happy summer. | |
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