Tag: todd boss

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PRS incorporates short URL service for its posts.

Quick post to talk about some of the “sausage making” behind Pro Racquetball Stats. The site generates very long URLs to call reports, which is good and bad. Its good in that I can cut and paste URLs directly to data, which I couldn’t do for years, and you can “edit” the URLs to quickly pull up a different report without going back to the selection page, but bad in that the URLs are long, complicated and often get truncated or cut off when cutting and pasting in posts.

Earlier this year, Wayne Saucier (who designed the UI/UX updates to the site and who figured out we could even do the URL posting in the first place) had a great suggestion; register a “short URL” service and utilize it for these direct links into the system instead of the longer URLs i’ve been using. As it turned out, “rball.pro” was available so we grabbed it. Wayne then built a short-URL generation service for the rball.pro domain.

I’d like to announce the first implementation release of this service officially. Now, instead of using a URL like this:

http://www.proracquetballstats.com/cgi-bin/print_results_new.pl?tour=IRT&event=2018+IRT+Pelham+Memorial+Tournament+of+Champions~12%2F2%2F2018&query=all_matches_per_event&season=0&player=0&player2=0

…. we can shorten it to just this:

http://rball.pro/4E4DA1

And both URLs take you to the same report.

I’ve been incorporating these short URLs into posts for a few weeks now; i just wanted to make an official announcement and recognize Wayne’s efforts.

Furthermore, we could eventually use rball.pro for non ProRacquetballStats.com URLs too; for example, here’s a rball.pro link that goes to the very long r2sports.com URL for the Lewis Drug singles pro bracket: http://rball.pro/D344CC . Just like other “short URL” services (bit.lybeing the most popular), anything can be shortened through Wayne’s code.

In fact, we hope other Rball associations may like this service and make use of it themselves in the future.

We hope this makes reading PRS posts and navigating our content a little easier going forward. Eventually we will incorporate rball.pro throughout the site more completely as a service.

Thanks to Wayne for the idea and the work on this!

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ProRacquetballStats Usage Summary for 2018

At the turn of the New Year, I thought it’d be interesting to list out some of the Usage stats of the site in general. I started hyper-tracking the Reports being run in January of 2018, so this is basically a year’s worth of results. I’ve also got the site hooked into Google Analytics, so i’ve pulled some fun data from there as well.

Here’s a Usage summary for the site in 2018.

– 33,357: the number of unique Reports executed in 2018. That’s an average of about 2,800 per month.

– 5,728: highest number of reports run in a month, back in April of 2018. Probably b/c that was the end of the IRT season and we thought Kane Waselenchuk was retiring.

– Users: Google says we had about 4,300 distinct users throughout the year. A peak was seen in Early Sept, just ahead of the first IRT event of the season, when we had more than 150 concurrent users at one time in the site.

– Acquisition: the site pretty evenly gets its visitors via three methods: direct linking (where people type the URL right into the browser), through Organic Search (googling) or handoffs from Social Media (facebook mostly, but also some twitter).

– Top 5 countries: USA (80% of the traffic), then Canada, France (?), Mexico and Bolivia. France is the weird outlier there. Within USA, top states: California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Virginia (where I live, and run up traffic as I develop and write). Top cities within Mexico are Chichuahua, Nuevo Leon, San Luis Potosi, Mexico City and Baja. Top provinces within Canada: Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba. Top areas from Bolivia: Santa Cruz, Cochabamba, La Paz.

– Platform Usage: About 52% of calls come from desktops, 43% from Phones and the rest from Tablets. This makes sense to me; i’m old school and use a desktop to develop, and the reports are often very data rich and don’t render well on phones.

– Report most often run: the “all_matches_per_event” report, which lists all the matches for an individual event. That report accounts for 15,000 of the 33,000 total executions. I generally put this link into every event wrap-up post I do, so it makes for easy click bait.

– Most infrequent Reports run: there’s a few reports, believe it or not, that have never been run. Some of the IRF reports are pretty infrequently run, probably b/c there’s only a couple of IRF events per year. Not too many people run OT Games, or All Forfeits, or the various “Highest Seeds to make a ..” type queries. That’s ok; they’re not going away 🙂

– What players are queried the most? Here’s the top 5 names that are queried right now in the database: Kane Waselenchuk, Paola Longoria, Rocky Carson, Alejandro Alex Landa and Jake Bredenbeck. I suppose none of these are really a surprise in that they’re the top players on all the pro tours.

– Most and least by “tour?” No surprise here: IRT is the most queried report, followed by LPRT and WRT. The 4th most queried tour is the IRF Match database, followed by Juniors and Amateur events. The least queried? WRT Doubles, with just 86 reports called out of the 33k total executions.

– 1,450: the number of Players in the Player Profile table. This is well below the total number of distinct players in the database; there’s more than 1,700 men in the IRT database, 630 in the women’s database, but its the Amateur, IRF and Junior databases that really explode out the profile data and where more work is needed.

Anyway, hope you found this interesting. I’ll revisit this data in a year’s time to see how things have evolved.