After spending a few hours listening to the Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! audio archive that I have found ways to download from the NPR site over the years, I have gone through and updated the show location for all shows in the Stats Page database.
*: Of course, there are a few shows where Carl Kasell didn’t say which location a Best Of show was recorded or the venue in which a show was taped from (be it at a public radio station or a location with a live audience).
Ever since I started working on version 3.0 of the Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Stats Page, one of the design decisions that I made when it came to the individual host, scorekeeper, panelist and guest pages was to use the specially encoded names in the URL. The encoding process would convert certain characters, such as a space, into their URL-encoded version, or “%20” in the case of a space. Well, looking back, that was not really the smartest way of doing it; and, ever since version 3.0 was published back in 2014, I was afraid of breaking any links that may have been created with that URL format and did not have a lot of spare time to re-design the whole thing. As months and years went by, that problem lingered in the back of my head. Fast forward to this month, where …
Over the past couple of days, I have been working on completing all of the PHP code required to query the WWDTM Stats Page database. Tonight, at the end of my two week sprint, I have reached that all important milestone and have successfully written a test to make sure it works. Warning: this following contains a fair amount of programming talk. If you are not a programmer, please ignore the rest of this post ;) The current version of the WWDTM Stats Page code has grown into a real mess and has become more and more difficult to add new features. The primary goal with version 2.0 is to write almost everything from scratch using proper class objects and breaking up code into manageable modules. First, I also decided to move to the newer PEAR::MDB2 database access API from the older PEAR::DB package. …
For all of the Wait Wait fans out there that also are into database designs, you are in for a small treat. Below is an EER diagram of the recently updated database used to house the statistics and other information for the Stats Page. You can view the diagram in its full-sized glory by clicking on this link. My goal is to get the database data and tables as normalized as possible by way of mapping tables. As you can see from the “ww_showpnlmap” table that I have fields for recording: how many points each panelist had, how many points each panelist had before and how many questions the panelists answered correctly during the Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank round. I don’t have data for every single show or panelist at this point. Right now, there is one additional mapping table that I will need to create …