EL League Database (Or Like)

[EireBadBoy]

I've been considering it for a while but I'd really like to do it.....

No not lose my cherry! :p

Make a Website with a 'Pannini'-esque feel to it. The type of web site with ALL EL Clubs a small Pen Pic's of Players and a bit of info. is it possible?

I've trawled through all EL team's websites and very few have up to date squads or even pic's what are the chances?

All help appreciated.

[dahamsta]

If you're willing to do the the data entry, I'd be happy to do the backend and host the site here.

adam

[sadloserkid]

I could prolly do Limerick depending on the level of detail you'll require?

[dahamsta]

Myself and Joe were just having a natter about this.

We reckon that a very simple way to tackle this would be to assign each team in the League(s) to one person - presumably the mod for their forum - who'd enter the data for the players of their team into an Excel spreadsheet. This would be straight data entry, we'd leave the player pictures out until later.

When they're done, they email it to us, and we merge all of the spreadsheets together and import the lot into a database, which we give the users access to to upload pictures, which can be thumbnailed on the fly on the server side.

When all that's done, all that would remain is to build an interface around it for the main website. And I don't see any reason why we couldn't put in club staff while we're at it.

The first step would be defining the fields for the spreadsheet that we would distribute, so who wants to kick us off?

adam

[A face]

I am avaiable to take pics .... tie it in with away trips etc. and i am all up for it.

[A face]

I think that this (http://www.eirways.com/citynet/squad/index.php?id=27) is one of the best formats that i have seen.

Add a few more stats to it and away you go. That would be ideal for the league.

[dahamsta]

It would be great if we could get this off the ground, because it could be a foundation for tons of things: fantasy football leagues; photo galleries; interlinked fixtures, results and match reports; live commentaries, etc, etc. The possibilities are endless.

adam

[dahamsta]

FirstName
MiddleName
LastName
DateOfBirth
Club
Squad
SquadNumber
Position
PreviousClubs

[A face]

FirstName
MiddleName
LastName
DateOfBirth
Club
Squad
SquadNumber
Position
PreviousClubs
Height
Place of birth
International Caps/info i.e. U21's etc
Most Goals Scored in a Season

[yur man]

how about the info on the stadiums too. with pics, capacity, average attendances, record attendance etc

[EireBadBoy]

I thought I would leave this a while to see what sort of feedback it got......hence only replying now!

It's damned nice of you Adam to host it and I reckon the list of Stat's you have mentioned above would be spot on. As we all know the hardest thing will be getting similar info. for players from different Clubs, some have the info. available some don't so I think it would be best to see what we come up with before finalising anything.

Let us know how it's going......

[EireBadBoy]

Originally posted by A face
I think that this (http://www.eirways.com/citynet/squad/index.php?id=27) is one of the best formats that i have seen.

Add a few more stats to it and away you go. That would be ideal for the league.

I was hoping it be more like the Sticker book format, with All Players on the same Page, I suppose it could be like that but it would take a hell of a lot more work, better to start simple and build on that, I think. With the interest shown though I think we could eventually reach that standard.

[UCD_4_Life]

I have all the required info for UCD (well except middle names) but I don't have Excel.

I could do it on a Works spreadsheet though (.xlr file extension, I'm not too sure of the difference) if Schumi or one of the others can't do it.

[dahamsta]

Can Works save as CSV (Comma Separated Values) UCD_4_Life? If not, I'm sure we can figure something out.

adam

[UCD_4_Life]

Originally posted by Vetinari
Can Works save as CSV (Comma Separated Values) UCD_4_Life? If not, I'm sure we can figure something out.

adam

It can.

[dahamsta]

Ok, I'm going with these fields:

FirstName
MiddleName
LastName
DateOfBirth
Place of birth
Club
Squad
SquadNumber
Position
PreviousClubs
Height
Caps
MostGoalsWe'll add Biography, Picture and anything else we think of later, but these will do for the moment for a nice clean dataset. If we pull this one off, I'll get one of my DBA (DataBase Administrator) buddies to take a look a designing a full relational league database that we can scale to all Irish leagues and hopefully extend to support the Foot.ie Predictions League and other things like Fantasy Football.

I've put the fields into a spreadsheet and saved it as CSV (Comma Separated Values) format, so it should open in pretty much any spreadsheet or database program. However note that the CSV format doesn't support much more than plaintext, so keep the data clean and don't p1ss about with formatting and the like, you'll just screw up the dataset. If you don't know a field for certain, just leave it out, and when you're done make sure you save it back to CSV.

You can get the spreadsheet here (http://gerrytwigg.beecher.net/misc/tmp/foot.ie-el-players.csv), and you can email the result to ironyATfootDOTie. Any problems, let me know.

Thanks,
adam

[dahamsta]

I was hoping it be more like the Sticker book format

Meatspace formats rarely carry over to the web EBB. For example, it would be possible to put an entire team on one page, but if you went strictly with the Panini look - which I have to admit would look well - there's a risk that your pages will be fairly hefty. The dataset if often the trickiest bit though, so we'll see how we go with this first.

adam

[tomsoc]

I'd like to lend a hand if anyone wants one too, I have some dba experience, having had it drilled into us at college and I have used a player database on my site (never made public as I can't keep it up to date and have many galring mistakes).

[dahamsta]

I can't guarantee that it'll be worth your while in the long run, but I certainly won't complain if you start designing a relational league database. Here's a few tables that spring to mind off the top of my head:

Leagues
Players
Staff (possible incorporated with Players)
Teams
Scorelines
MatchReports
Photos (with relational fields like Clubs, Players, etc + Caption(s))I couldn't do this for the simple reason that I don't understand the intracacies of leagues well enough, but I'm sure plenty of people here would be able to help. Note that I run MySQL on my servers, in case that has any bearing.

adam

[EireBadBoy]

Good point, I never actually thought of the 'Download' time of a page with such a hefty size of Images/Info.
The reason I had this idea was (A) that youngsters, bless 'em can relate to that format of information, and that was my main impetus behind the idea. Kid's going to EL games don't know Ollie Cahill from Ollie Byrne! - Programmes help a bit but most just give Squad listings and very, very few Pic's. I work in the Newspaper industry and although the Irish League (Glentoran, Linfield etc...Sorry for being patronising, by the way) get's mass coverage, i.e a 16 Page pull out on Monday's no kid in Derry has a clue about what even Liam Coyle looks like! Although the problem is being attended to via Dublin/Southern media I just thought of this as a Kid friendly way of learning the players.

AND (B) well, let's be honest, even me as a die hard does'nt know every EL Player, their history, achievments...You obviously get my point, and seemingly already have considering the list of stats you'd like that it is for info. value.

Let's make this into the fine project that it can be! I thank you for your input, the more idea's the better!

[dahamsta]

We have Longford in progress. Joe said he'd do City too, but he's disappeared since we last talked about it. Anyone else?

adam

[Xlex]

Can we have standard acyroyms for positions

GK - goalkeeper
RB - Right Back
LB - Left Back
CB - centre - back
SW- Sweeper
CM - Centre Midfield
RM - Right-Midfielder
LM - Left-Midfielder
FW - Forward
ST - Striker etc...

Squads...

Senior
U-21
and if we're using CSV, will we putt spaces between clubs rather than comma's??

[joe]

would it be better to just keep it to GK, DF, MD, FW

might get a bit complicated with the more versatile players otherwise?

[sadloserkid]

Well you could go down the Championship Manager route Joe...

e.g: Frank Browne D/DM L

or Paul Finucane D LC

[dahamsta]

Originally posted by Xlex
and if we're using CSV, will we putt spaces between clubs rather than comma's?? Nah, Excel will automatically quote/escape fields that contain commas. Using spaces wouldn't work for clubs like Galway United anyway, would it? ;)

adam

[Xlex]

yeah copped that... used '/'

[Dodge]

Just a couple of points. Think we should leave out the middle name bit and also the Squad field. Its unlikely the middle names will be widely available and it might look bad if some have it and others not. Also surely at the start we should limit it to first team squad members (or am I getting this bit wrong)

And while I'm at it Cork are the only club using squad numbers...

Oh and how many previous clubs will we go for? One Pats player has quite a few while others only have Leinster Senioir League clubs, some have reserve/youth team in UK only...

Actually one more thing. Should it have a nationality field. Seems strange it wouldn't in multi-cultural Ireland

[Dodge]

Hate replying to myself but... I think the fields should be

Surname

First name(s)

Nationality

DateOfBirth

Place of birth

Club

Position

Previous Club (last club)

Signed (date)

Height

Caps (For up to Youth level give only youth, for u21 and over give amount of caps)

[dahamsta]

Appreciate the feedback Dodge, but as a general response I'm going to leave the fields the way they are for now. I concede that they're not perfect, but if we start fiddling about with it now it's almost guaranteed that someone will be along later to complain that they had already started, or that something else is wrong. My goal is to get a relatively static dataset that I can build around, we can tweak fields later and mods will have an opportunity to correct data from a proper interface then. More specific responses are inline...

we should leave out the middle name

The middle name is optional, but if we have 'em, I don't see any reason not to fill them in.

Its unlikely the middle names will be widely available and it might look bad if some have it and others not.

I don't see why it would look bad, but if nobody fills 'em in we can say bye-bye to the field. If some people fill 'em in, we can keep the field and not display the data for the moment.

Also surely at the start we should limit it to first team squad members (or am I getting this bit wrong)

Obviously first teams are the priority, but I'm not setting a hard limit on it. If someone wants to fill in the details of every professional, semi-professional and amateur player in the country, I'm not going to stop them.

And while I'm at it Cork are the only club using squad numbers...

I thought another club was using them. No matter, Foot.ie welcomes squad numbers, and will display them prominently on their website to encourage other clubs to take up the practice. Joe, it's your turn to write the press release. :)

Oh and how many previous clubs will we go for?

Many as you like. I'll be putting all Premier and First Division clubs in a separate table in the database, so when I suck this data into a database, I'll be converting all eL club names to their associated keys in that table. Everything else will be listed as a name. I guess historical order will do for the moment, I can munge the data to suit later.

Should it have a nationality field.

It should, but I'm not adding it in now. When we're done with this stage of the, uh, project, I'll consult again on fields and add ones like this to the table. Then the mods will be able to login to the system and update data. Fairy Nuff?

adam

[Dodge]

Course its fair enough, its not my baby, just throwing in my tuppence 9and the nationality one is the only one I feel strongly on). Its just that the fields are fairly ambigous (Most goals - for who/what?) and could do with clarifying but if you're doing this later, fair enough...

Oh and BTW munge is my new favourite word....

[dahamsta]

Yeah, been one of my favourites for years. :)

adam

[dahamsta]

Thanks to Xlex for taking on and delivering the Longford spreadsheet. Only 9 more to go. Or 21, possibly.

adam

[alanb]

i've the galway sheet in progress. will forward it soon lads... best of luck with this!

[dahamsta]

Thanks Alan. Also thanks to UCD_4_Life, who sent me a spreadsheet for UCD.

adam

[Xlex]

what happened this?

[A face]

I will have time soon so i could lend a hand alright ??

It would be great to get something going !!

[EireBadBoy]

Even I forgot about it.....:eek:

A few months before the new Season might be an idea to get it up and running before then.

I'd need to get off my fat arse and do the Derry City one then, considering I queried doing it.

Something useful to do at last! :D

[John83]

Any word on this?

[A face]

Any word on this?

I am working on something along those lines .... it'll replace www.ifgrounds.com hopefully sooner rather than later !!

[town73]

none of the links posted in this post work for me.

[Pablo]

My goodness. is this the level of your ambition lads? is it?


get jobs!

[A face]

My goodness. is this the level of your ambition lads? is it?


get jobs!

What and who is that directed at ???

About time we got a higher authority on ambition !! :p

[John83]

none of the links posted in this post work for me.
They are all rather old - some almost two years!