December 30th, 2008

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

The current number of players from the teams with profiles on Tennis On Campus is .