Tag: Web Development

Blog Posts

That’s So… Randomizer

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One feature for the Stats Page that had been floating around in my mind since I started developing Version 4 was a way to get a random show that I could just queue up and listen. I finally had a couple of hours to build out the logic to add not only a randomizer for shows, but also for guests, hosts, locations and panelists. What made easy to implement across the board was being able to use MySQL/MariaDB’s RAND() function in queries. Otherwise, I would have needed to pull down a list of valid IDs for each respective table and use Python’s RNG to pick one at random. While that result in better randomization over the long run, but it would add to the processing time. I wanted it to be as quick and efficient as possible from the application point of view. The …

Blog Posts

Retrospective: What 2020 Meant For Wait Wait Stats (and More)

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2020 has been a very challenging year for everyone and it has required things to adapt and change as the ongoing human malware event continues to have an impact on us. I have been fortunately enough to continue working from home and have been able to further improve and expand on the Stats Page, Reports and Graphs sites. Some of the changes are behind the scenes updates and others are more visible. Wait Wait in 2020 Due to the requirements of social distancing and limiting travel, Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! canceled live tapings of their show and went back to their roots of recording the show from remote (home) studios. Before the human malware event, I had actually planned to travel to Chicago to attend a live taping on my 40th birthday in April. Part of the plan also included giving me the …

Blog Posts

Wait Wait Stats Page Version 4 Released!

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This year has been full of new projects surrounding the Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Stats Page, including the development and release of a data access layer library, libwwdtm, developed in Python, the Wait Wait Stats API, and the Wait Wait Reports site. All three of those projects were done as a building blocks for the next big thing: version 4 of the Wait Wait Stats Page! Back in 2018, I made the decision to step away from the codebase for version 3.x of the Stats Page; which, was written in PHP and made some use of the Silex micro-framework. While it would have been feasible to continue building on top of that codebase, it would have required a significant re-write in order to meet the requirements that I had for the new version:

Blog Posts

The 1000th* Show Taping and New Wait Wait Stats Reports

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Back in March 2019, I was working with Colin Miller at Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! on a request to pull data regarding the various Wait Wait shows that have aired; especially, getting data on shows that excluded Best Of or Repeat shows. The purpose of the request would later be revealed to be trying to determine when the 1000th* original show would land on the schedule. In July, the date and the location for the taping of the 1000th* show would start to solidify. The show would be taped in Salt Lake City, Utah and on Thursday, October 24th. Why Salt Lake City? The very first time that Wait Wait was taped in front of a live audience was at Jewett Center at Westminster College in Salt Lake City back in January 2000. So, it would be apropos that Wait Wait would also …

Blog Posts

Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Stats API is Live

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For the past few years, people have requested access to the data that I have been collecting for the Wait Wait Stats Page to play around with the data or build a brilliant, interactive infographic. Each of those requests would require that a data export of the requested tables or a MySQL/MariaDB database dump to be created and sent over to the requester. Of course, those exports and database dumps are just snapshots of the data and another request was needed to get update data each time. That got me thinking about what it would take to create an API service that people can use to get data directly from the Stats Page database. At that time, I wasn’t sold on the idea of extending the PHP codebase that is used for the current Stats Page; as, I was looking at doing a completely …

Blog Posts

Stats Page Version 3.4.0: Correcting Some Design Mistakes

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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 …