Posts have been sparse around here lately, aside from the occasional game review, but I have been working on a number of infrastructure improvements for displaying stats.
For the next week or so, I’ll be testing Google Docs as a solution, since that will theoretically allow me to embed published spreadsheets into a post, page, or other section of the site. It won’t change the current display much, aside from formatting, but it will hopefully make things easier on me, so that I can do more frequent analysis. Basically all I will have to do is upload the newest Excel version and take 5 minutes or so to check the formatting. That cuts out a lot of manual updating of tables and HTML formatting that I was having to do before.
As of now, I’ve published the GSC/Harding spreadsheet that I will use to build the other tables around the site. In case you want to look at the whole thing, it’s available for you to see here. Over the next few days, I’ll change the stat pages to build from that spreadsheet.
Consider this an open thread for feedback on the new display as I change it. If you don’t like how everything looks, if the tables don’t display right, or if they are difficult to understand (beyond the usual questions that the Stats Primer and Glossary might answer), please let me know what the problem is, and I’ll do my best to fix it.
[UPDATE 2/28: All the basketball stat pages have been switched over now, and here’s my impression:
Pros: Much easier to update on my part, which will probably result in more frequent updates, easy scrolling within the spreadsheet, ability to view the whole stats file at once.
Cons: Tables are no longer sortable, nor are there alternating row colors (although the latter is certainly fixable to some extent), and the pages seem to take longer to load.
For now, I think I’m sticking with it. I like letting Google do all the back-end work, coming up with features I might never have considered. Plus, I can still embed the tables in the context of my own site, rather than sending you over to Google to view them.
As always, feedback is appreciated.]
jfwiii.net 