A few months ago someone suggested that the community needed a dedicated website to provide information and dates for all the LFS leagues and events.

Soon afterwards, the calendar on this forum was improved for this purpose and is now being used by most leagues to promote themselves and to allow racers to easily keep track of the leagues in which they are participating.

I decided, however, to spend some time developing an area on the spdoRacing website specifically to make it easy for racers to find new leagues, as well as allowing them to watch all of their leagues and events in one place.

Progress has been pretty slow, until the last week or so I had just been coding for the odd hour when I had nothing better to do. At last though, I think the database is in a state at which I feel I can announce it, and hopefully get some good feedback.

Planned improvements

• RSS feeds listing upcoming events
  
• Some improvements for IE users
  
• Configurable e-mail notifications for upcoming events
  
• Possibility for web admins to retrieve information from the database for use on their own websites

To get the best out of the site you should register. It doesn't take long and will allow you to watch leagues and events. Registering is also necessary if you want to add or modify items. In addition, registered users can change the timezone from GMT to their own.

Some things may not be displayed 100% correctly in IE, there are also some features missing which are available with a better browser.

Please tell me what you think:

http://www.spdoracing.com/events/

Edit: See this post for info on new updates, including full support for Internet Explorer and the addition of RSS feeds.

Edit 2: Now I'm looking for feedback on a new idea...

Very nice Josh!

Nice database there Josh.

Well, apparently the menu isn't working properly in IE7 which is really frustrating. I spent quite a lot of time making sure it worked in IE5 & IE6; it looks like microsoft are making their browser more and more useless with each addition. I'll probably revert to a more basic menu system in the next couple of days so that the website is actually usable on all browsers.

Firefox and (I hope) Opera users should not experience any problems with popup menus.

Excellent Work Josh I'm sure lots of people will find this very useful.

P.S. Works great in Opera

Great, if the RSS feed is good I'l definately put it on the teampage

Looks fantastic Josh. It's very clear because of the simplistic design, making it a good overview of what's coming up.

Is it manually administrated?

People use IE7?

Thanks for the positive comments guys.

Sam - unless you are using IE7, you should be able to navigate to the "New Item" and "Modify Item" pages through the menu at the top of the page.

The vast majority of the events in the database have been added by me though. There wasn't much interest when I contacted league admins a week or so ago.

Ah yes, I can see it in FF.

(God knows why I was using IE7 at that moment.. FF is all I need.)

I have put in some more work on the database in the last few days.

There are now RSS feeds available, and all of the pages are now fully compliant. This means that everything now works correctly in IE6 and IE7, in addition to the good browsers.

Here is a feed showing the next 10 events from all leagues (including events which took place earlier today in the given timezone):

http://www.spdoracing.com/feed ... &mode=all&tz=1.00

Here is a similar feed, but showing only events which I am watching. If you register you can also get a feed showing your watched events:

http://www.spdoracing.com/feed ... amp;tz=1.00&user_id=3

And here is another feed which shows the all scheduled events for the upcoming OWRL: F1 season:

http://www.spdoracing.com/feed ... gue&id=17&tz=1.00

To change the timezone of a feed, ammend tz=1.00 to your desired offset from UTC (GMT) time.

I will probably add some more xml-type pages this afternoon to allow people to get retrieve more detailed information for use on their team pages.

If you have any feedback or improvement ideas, please post them here!

http://www.spdoracing.com/events/

Me and Misan recently had the idea of enabling people to upload replays and results to the event database. The point of this would be that people could look up league results of any driver in all of the leagues in our database.

There would be a tool provided which would parse replays for results, this would be instantaneous and would not require the replay to be run through. There would probably be the possibilty of also uploading the TSV files which are created by LFS Stats for additional statistical analysis of the results.

Due to the large disk space and bandwidth allowance on our new server, we would probably be able to allow users to upload their race replays too, providing one place to get results, replays and possibly standings from all of the leagues.

This will take some more work though, and while I'm all but certain that I'll do it at some stage, that may be a long time away if there isn't any real demand for this.

Does this idea genuinely appeal to people, and would you be willing to parse replays and upload the results files to the website?

Guess not, I'll crawl back into my hole .

great work there

good work

I was actually looking for feedback on the suggestion made in post #12, not on the current form of the Event Database...

Thanks for the positive comments though .

It's a nice idea, but it seems like a bit of work though, since we already do these kinds of thing at our own league websites/forums (generally speaking from a league manager's standpoint).

Not to mention, you would either have to have a common format for submitting (which may not coincide with league manager's native formats), or have everyone do it manually, which would not be appealing to me.

From a non-league manager standpoint, it would be very cool to be able to look up a single person's results from multiple leagues.

No GFC on there.

Quote from joshdifabio :

Does this idea genuinely appeal to people, and would you be willing to parse replays and upload the results files to the website?

From a user viewpoint, I'd find this interesting but as with most of such things, I'll probably would not make use of it very much. Maybe when I find a friendly driver online and would like to know what kind of experience he has.

If you are going to make this I'll add the OWRL results and replays.

I would use such a database with event results of all important events. But only if its up to date and results dont take to long to be present there.

Ok, thanks for the feedback.

If you have a look here, you can check out the simple tool that we used to use for the Vixen Challenge results. Phlos made this, it's a very simple program. Basically, if you just drag an MPR onto the program icon it will create a parse-able file instantly which contains the race results from that MPR. This wouldn't be the actual tool we would use, but something similar which extracts results quickly from MPR headers would be the basic concept.

I think I will also give users the possibility to upload the TSV files which are created by LFS Stats, to allow more info and extended statistics to be available for each race. These files are always created if you use LFS Stats to parse a replay, and therefore are a good option imo. The TSV files will only ever be optional though.

This all means that results for events can be retrieved instantly, and uploaded to the website pretty much instantly too as the files are tiny.

Edit: The way results would be uploaded would be very quick and simple, users would just need to choose the event from the database, probably through drop-down menus in an upload form, and then upload the results file(s). Using this system for the Vixen Challenge we used to have results and standings up-to-date on the website less than 30 seconds after a race finished.

Quote from Gentlefoot :

No GFC on there.

You can add it if you like, I had a look on the GFC website but couldn't find race lengths etc so I didn't add it. Let me know by PM if that changes.

Josh

superb work

I getting errors when opening the zip file for the Phlos created app.

Quote from joshdifabio :

You can add it if you like, I had a look on the GFC website but couldn't find race lengths etc so I didn't add it. Let me know by PM if that changes.

Josh

All races are approx 75 minutes. It's in the General Details section. How do I add it then mate?