Question for IHOF Commish

[CraigSca]

VPI97-

I check the IHOF web site at least once a week because I find the mix of owners, teams and the fantastic site to be very interesting. Question for you - exactly how much of the web site is automated? It is, by far, the best league site I've seen. I'm sure if you'd be willing, there would probably be a lot of other sites out there that would love to get a hold of your proprietary scripts and pay $$$ for them.

About how much time a week do you work on the site vs. having things automated?

[VPI97]

Thanks for the compliment on the site and sorry I haven't seen this until now...this forum has been deserted for a while. Regarding the web site, there are only a couple of pages that I update manually (constitution, history pages, static content mostly). The rest are hooked into an online MySQL database that I update right after sims.

The database gets updated via a program I wrote to parse through Jim's HTML output and the boxscores. I save that data off to a local Access database, as well as automatically create update scripts that I run against the online database. At this point, the process takes just under a half an hour to update a week's worth of stats. Of course, I spend much more time working on improving the site...I'm not all that satisfied with it yet...and fixing the small bugs that persist in the current layout.

As for selling any code or anything, I'm totally against that. I've let people have sections of my code in the past and I'll do the same in the future. All anyone has to do is ask and I'm willing to help out. The only caveat is that since my code isn't in a finalized state and is totally non-user friendly, it takes someone who knows programming in order to make sense of it. I don't have the time to make it user friendly and I have no need for the stress that comes with providing support for things like this (I had enough of that with the FOF Almanac). But I'm always willing to answer questions or give advice to anyone who is trying to run a MP league.