During the weekend of May 17th and 18th, I will be rolling out a few updates to the Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Stats Page, on the heels of coming back from Carl Kasell’s scorekeeper finale in Washington DC.
The updates to the site will include adding a new graph for each of the panelists. I won’t spill all of the details, but below is a sneak peek at what the graph would look like, without obfuscations of course.
Just a quick blog post… I am very excited, and a wee bit sad, that I will be going to Carl Kasell’s last taping of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! in Washington DC on May 15th. The live taping will be held at the Warner Theatre at 7:30 PM Eastern Time.
If any of you guys will be at the live taping and want to meet up before the show, just send a tweet to @questionlp or contact me using the site’s Contact Me form.
While listening to the last Thursday’s edition of Too Beautiful To Live, Luke Burbank made a snarky remark that he hasn’t won on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! for something like 35 shows. Even though that comment was not intended to be a factual statement, it did make a light bulb flicker in my head. The panelist statistics box includes the last time that he or she last won or was tied for first place and it would take a bit of time to go through the full appearances list to count the number of shows since the panelist has won or tied for first.
That afternoon, I started playing around with a couple of SQL queries to pull that information and filter out things like Best Of and repeat show appearances and got something that gave me a proper result. That night, I rolled out an update to the Stats Page with said information.
The updated panelist statistics box now adds “(X show(s) since last appearance)” after each of the dates listed for the last time that a panelist has won or tied for first.
The other updates to the Stats Page are all behind the scenes updates to make rendering of the Stats Page a bit more consistent on the version of Safari included with OS X Mountain Lion (10.8) and Google Chrome for iOS. I have also tweaked the schedule in which the graphs depicting each panelist’s point distribution to run each day early in the afternoon.
For this Throwback Thursday, I decided to have a bit of fun with the Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Stats Page and decided to try viewing the current and old versions of the Stats Page from a view vantage points.
When I was developing the three versions of the Stats Page, I never really targeted and tested it against text-based web browsers, including Lynx and W3M. Sure, I viewed the page for kicks here and there, but never took it to be a key demographic. With that said, I decided to see how the current version of the Stats Page looks like when viewed on the aforementioned text-based web browsers.
I’ve been waiting quite a while to say this: Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Stats Page Version 3.0 is now live and ready to use!
First and foremost, one thing that you’ll notice is that the Stats Page’s address is now just http://wwdt.me. After reviewing the structure of the new Stats Page, I wanted the URL to reflect both the site design’s and the site structure’s simplicity. I have set up redirects for the old address, http://wwdt.me/stats, to point to the new address. That way, if you have any bookmarks or links to the site, the links will continue to work. Also, the Stats Page’s name has been simplified to just be, “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Stats and Show Details.”
If you read the sneak peek of the new Stats Page, you will notice a few cosmetic changes that have been made. First, the navigation menu no longer has a blue background. The background was used to verify the rendering of the page and make sure that there wasn’t any instances of items overlapping when viewed on mobile devices.