EL League Database (Or Like)

**EireBadBoy** · 22/04/2003, 3:56 AM

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

No not lose my cherry!

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** · 22/04/2003, 7:46 AM

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** · 22/04/2003, 10:46 AM

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

**dahamsta** · 24/04/2003, 5:57 PM

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** · 24/04/2003, 7:35 PM

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

**A face** · 24/04/2003, 8:18 PM

I think that this 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** · 24/04/2003, 8:25 PM

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** · 25/04/2003, 2:07 PM

FirstName
MiddleName
LastName
DateOfBirth
Club
Squad
SquadNumber
Position
PreviousClubs

**A face** · 25/04/2003, 2:22 PM

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** · 25/04/2003, 2:41 PM

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

**EireBadBoy** · 26/04/2003, 1:06 AM

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** · 26/04/2003, 1:12 AM

Originally posted by A face
I think that this 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** · 26/04/2003, 2:53 AM

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** · 26/04/2003, 12:55 PM

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** · 26/04/2003, 3:37 PM

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** · 26/04/2003, 4:48 PM

Ok, I'm going with these fields:

FirstName
MiddleName
LastName
DateOfBirth
Place of birth
Club
Squad
SquadNumber
Position
PreviousClubs
Height
Caps
MostGoals

We'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, and you can email the result to ironyATfootDOTie. Any problems, let me know.

Thanks,
adam

**dahamsta** · 26/04/2003, 4:57 PM

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** · 26/04/2003, 5:01 PM

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** · 26/04/2003, 5:17 PM

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** · 27/04/2003, 2:43 AM

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!