Tennis on Campus Data Project
Over the holidays I was looking for a cool little project to work on. What I realized is that it would be really cool to see how many people and teams are currently tallied up in the Tennis on Campus program.  So I started to think about doing it.
Limitations: Now, this little experiment is limited majory because the Tennis on Campus site is still new and does not list all of the teams. In fact it only lists about 1/5 of the total data right now. However these are the only numbers we have available to us right now
Results: What I ended up doing was writing a screen scapping program that does the following:
- Finds the URLs of all the teams listed on the Tennis on Campus website
- Tallies the total number of teams
- Finds the number of players from each team (listed on the profile page we discovered earlier)
- Adds all of the players up for a total number
I originally was going to stop here because I had the data: 131 teams, and 5,153 people. However, I realized that this little project could go one step further. I could actually create a data page where people could see just how many teams there where (listed on the website), per month. I went about a made everything more dynamic and made the script output the data into files that would be easier for parsing.
Next thing I tought myself was how to parse data in PHP. I hadn't done it before, but it proved to be a very easy process. The end result is that I was able to take all the data and put them into arrays. These arrays can be used in any number of ways now.
What I did with the data was to use it and dynamically create Google Charts using it. So now we can not only see how many people and teams are in the program, but we can see (visually with charts) just how much of an increase the numbers have each month.
To run it each month, the scrapping tool I had built previously is just setup on a cron job to run at the first of every month. The new data is added to the bottom of the data file and is dynamically added into the tables!
Check it out: http://www.petederemer.com/toc
License: GPLv3
Source: Download
WVU Club Tennis Spring 2009 Practices
WVU Club Tennis will following the following practice schedule starting Jan 17th, 2009:
Saturday: 3 pm - 5 pm
Sunday:   8pm - 10 pm
Practice will be held at the Shell building and will not take place when there is a Men's Basketball game that night. Saddly we won't be able to get the Shell building on those days.
We will be using temporary/portable nets that we will have to put up and take down every time we play however, we can play. And at a much lower cost. Grants and such will be used to pay for matches against another team.
Spread The Word!!!
End of a Semester
Well it is the end of the semester and finals are finally over! Not a day to soon either. Between tennis, school, and work I had my work cut out for me and am very due for a break. And boy did I get one! I am spending 3 days at The Greenbrier.
I'll post again soon, after a long 3 day vacation!
WVU LOUD Theme for Linux
I have created a GTK and metacity theme for linux.  Notes from gnome-look.org
Theme based on West Virginia University Colors. Uses the Murrine Engine.
WordPress 2.7
So after yet another switch on the website, I'm back with WordPress! WordPress 2.7 is amazing, and makes posting even one step easier. I plan on taking the site back towards its blog origins and as such wanted something that was a bit easier to post with. Drupal is great, but WordPress is just is easier. Anyways, more to come in the future as I will have a lot of time in the winter to post and get the site back up.
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