Author Archives: Mike Walsh

09.01.09
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Charting Results

As I work on results functionality I have several ideas floating around my head.  One is the ability to chart swimmer results over the course of a season or possibly several seasons.  Charting over several seasons raises some issues (e.g. different age groups, event distances, etc.) but charting results for at least one season would be interesting.

I had thought about using the same functionality that the WordPress.com Stats plugin uses which is Open Flash Chart to plot results.  Today while looking for something else, I may have found something which is a better solution:  pChart – a PHP library for building charts!

Hopefully I will get to try it out in the next few weeks.  I have been sidetracked by a WordPress project for my daughter’s soccer team so Swim Team will have wait a little longer.

09.01.09
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What happened to ColorBlender.com?

Another one of the resources I use seems to have crapped out.  ColorBlender.com is still online but the site doesn’t work any more.  It is still possible to browse through some of the old palettes but it isn’t possible to create a new one.  I liked ColorBlender, it came up with some nice color schemes and was easy to  use.

Since it wasn’t working, I went in search for a replacement and found a couple interesting sites.

Of the three, I like the Color Match Remix Color Scheme Tool the best.  For a color neophyte like myself, these sort of resources are really useful.

Another resource I refer to pretty frequently is the Elementik’s Web design tools and resources I use page.  This page has links to all sorts of cool Javascript solutions, CSS tricks, color design resources, and more.

09.01.09
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Continuing with Sandbox

I asked the other day if Sandbox was dead and even though there was a minor update, it appears that Sandbox isn’t really dead but it is in a purgatory of sorts.  Not dead but not actively being developed either.  So

Soccer season has started and I need to update the Soccer theme I used for my daughter’s team because they changed uniform colors.  Since I had based the Soccer theme on Sandbox, I could either continue with it or start again.  For now I am continuing with it because (a) I know it pretty well now and (b) it works.  However, I do want to check out the Elastic theme editor I heard about recently on the WordPress Weekly podcast.

When I did the MacDolphins theme this past spring, I had based some of that work on the Soccer theme but was able to fix much of what had bothered me, in particular, the need to install the Sandbox theme itself and the Soccer theme as a child theme.  I love the idea of a child theme but for the casual user, the relationship between parent and child theme isn’t real obvious and failing the install the parent theme results in a non-functional blog and likely frustration.

By structuring the theme architectures such that it referenced the Sandbox source as a SVN external, I was able to bundle all of the files for the parent theme and child theme together as one theme.  This makes distributing the theme much easier and also solves the problem where the theme preview shows the parent theme instead of the child theme.  This preview problem doesn’t affect the functionality of the site but it is confusing if you don’t know what is going on.

I expect to have the soccer theme updated in the next week or so and probably offer a few more color schemes.  But first I am working on a Sandbox based LEGO theme which I’ll finish first because the NCLUG and NCLTC web sites sorely need an updated theme as the one they have now are old and don’t support widgets.  This LEGO theme is a good exercise in setting theme options, particularly the header area as I expect I will need it to make a generic version of the MacDolphins theme for any swim team to use.

08.27.09
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Is Sandbox dead?

I had really hoped that Sandbox would see new life when ownership of the domain and it’s assets changed hands (see Scott Wallick’s post on offering plaintxt.org for sale).  The link to the posting on plaintxt.org no longer exists, apparently the new owner deleted the original post.

There hadn’t been any posts on plaintxt.org or sndbx.org in a long time.  There was a small amount of traffic in the Sandbox Forum but nothing substantial.  I really like the simplicity of the Sandbox theme and gone ahead and used it on a couple projects even though it hadn’t been updated in a while.  I figured with new ownership, it was bound to start again at some point.

Maybe I was wrong?  I don’t know.  I have been thinking of revisiting my Soccer theme since after using it for the CASL Ambassadors over the summer, I found a few minor issues with it.  As I thought about updating it I kept thinking I should switch to a framework actively being worked (e.g. the Carrington theme?).  So I went back and took a look at the PlainTxt blog and what do you know?  A post!  A minor security update was added to the Sandbox theme back in July.  Was development active again?  Poking around it appears that no, not really.  Scott Wallick had made the change not the new owner who ever that is.  Other than a couple comments asking the same questions I was pondering (has development started again?)( there wasn’t anything else.  Bummer.

Now what to do?  Continue?  Fork?  Pack up and move on?   Decisions, decisions …

08.27.09
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Playing with wp LifeStream

I’ve got stuff spread all over the place and don’t have any one single location where I have everything collected in one spot.  Pictures on Flickr, nonsense on Facebook, posts on NCLTC or NCLUG, my Swim Team Plugin project … lots of stuff.

Recently I was listening to a WordPress podcast and heard a mention of a WordPress LifeStream plugin which sounded interesting.  Today I downloaded it and checked it out.  If does seem to allow setting up a whole slew of feeds into WordPress which is pretty much what I was looking for.  We’ll see how it goes.

Right now I have sticky post pinned to the top of this site – I suspect anything below it will be overshadowed although I don’t expect to post a lot to this site directly.  It is more of an attempt to aggregate all of the other stuff I do in one place.

08.27.09
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New functionality in the works

I haven’t posted much but I have been working on wp-SwimTeam off and on now that the MacDolphins summer season is over.  I haven’t released anything yet but I’ve made some significant improvements. 

Opt-In/Opt-Out

Improvements have been made to the Opt-In/Opt-Out process to make it much less confusing.  The Opt-In/Opt-Out form is now smarter, only presenting the list of strokes to the user when a Partial Opt-In/Opt-Out is selected.  The ability to Opt-In/Opt-Out has also been added to the “My Swimmers” tab to make it easier to find.

Login Redirect

I’ve also added a new option to control what happens when end users login to a site running wp-SwimTeam.  For most users, landing on the WordPress Dashboard page is confusing.  They don’t care about 99% of the stuff presented to them nor should they.  The plugin now allows definition of a login redirect so the user can be sent to either the home page or the Swim Team Overview (which is what I expect to use most of the time) page.  Landing on the Swim Team Overview page makes the most sense for most users since when they login, they are most likely doing some level of interaction with the swim team functionality.

Results Import

Results import is still  in progress, the other two areas mentioned above are complete.  At this point importing results does little more than perform a first pass validation that the supplied file is indeed a SDIF results file.  Now that I have the uploading and validation complete, I need to work on the data model to store results.  Results will be connected to swimmers and meets and events.  Since a new table will be created, results will change the database version when it is released.

Initially I expect to simply report results from a meet and be able to look at results for any given swimmer.  Longer term I want to use Open Flash Chart to plot results on a per swimmer basis over the course of a season or possibly several seasons.  I don’t expect to get to this until much later this year though.

WordPress 2.8.x

I am still working with WordPress 2.7.1 in my development environment.  I haven’t even tried 2.8.4 yet so I have no idea what the impact is.  I will likely do so once I am done with the results.

07.06.09
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Heat Sheet Builder Excel Workbook v1.1

When our coaching staff constructed their heat sheet by hand they always wrote it up as a matrix with the heats on the vertical axis and the lanes on the horizontal axis.  This style of heat sheet matches the layout of the pool and the way the kids line up as they get ready to swim.

Now that we are doing all of our seeding using WinSwim, we no longer have the matrix style heat sheet and many of our parents have asked if we can get the heat sheet in that format.

After playing around with Crystal Reports for a while I concluded that it would easier to develop an Excel workbook to construct the heat sheet than it would be to get Crystal Reports to do it.  I am sure CR can do it but I don’t know how and I needed something this season!

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The Excel workbook I developed consumes the output of the Custom Report Meet Heat Sheet by Event (CSV) that I developed and posted previously (make sure you download the update as I changed the report recently).

The workbook requires Excel 2007 to run.  It will actually run in Excel 2003 if you load the Office 2007 compatibility pack for Office 2003 however the sorting functions are disabled so you’ll have to do your own sorting.

There are some controls over the width and height of the cells that comprise the heat sheet and page breaks will be inserted after every three events.  They can be adjusted using Excel’s standard page break functionality.

Heat Sheet Builder – vv1.1, last updated on 2009-07-06

Download a sample heat sheet which was generated with Heat Sheet Builder.

Heat Sheet Builder Sample – v07-05, last updated on 2009-07-06

Download the collection of Custom Reports for WinSwim.

WinSwim Custom Reports – v07-05, last updated on 2009-07-06

This Excel workbook is free to download – there is sample data included in it, before using it I would suggest looking at the Heat Sheet CSV tab to see the format of the data once it is imported from the CSV file.

07.05.09
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wp-SwimTeam v0.1.417 – Meet Report Shortcode

I posted wp-SwimTeam v0.1.417 this afternoon to the download page.  This update adds new functionality and fixes a few minor things which have bothered me as I found them during the season.

The big new feature is a new shortcode – wpst_meet_report.  This shortcode allows a the contents of a meet report to appear in a post or a page like this example on the wp-SwimTeam demo site.

The reports also now support hiding first and last names by only showing the initial as well as the ability to override the first name with a nickname if the swimmer’s profile has one.  The missing ability to display a map on the swim meet report has been added so the checkbox on the form is now enabled.  The reports can now display opt-in and opt-out information chronologically in the order they were added to the system as well as the previously available by name and by swimmer label.