Light the Torch Medal Count Feed
February 11, 2006 by admin
Filed under Sports Rumors
By popular demand, b5media is releasing an RSS feed of an (albeit manually updated) RSS feed of the medal counts. Some of our staffers and volunteers will be ensuring the medal count is no more than a few hours old.
Call it our contribution to you.
We’d love to see our data in use elsewhere so drop a comment in here and let us know how you’re using it!
The RSS feed can be found at http://www.everyjoe.com/olympics.xml
Just to be clear (I am curious) .. will the medal count be posted in Torino-Real-Time or NBC-Prime-Time real time? I ask this, because I noted on the wiki site .. they do put a disclaimer or spoiler notice because some countries do not see the sports “live” and others do. Take care.
Neither real time. :) Whenever anyone of our gardners go in and update it but they’ve been instructed to base off of the medal standings at NBCOlympics.com which should be close to Turino real time.
it’s nothing special but, i’ve got my little medal count tracker up. thanks for the feed guys!
Few things:
There aren’t any country names in the feed. That seems like a bit of a problem.Why are there 3 entries with the same data?It’s not really XML. Once you get the content you still have to parse it with regexp or similar as opposed to the DOM, XSLT, or just good ‘ol CSS. Could that be fixed?
Good idea, but it’d be nice to see this as true XML data (contact me if you need it done, I’d be willing to help).
Gah, WordPress butchered my HTML (it was just an unordered list).
Reformatted:
Few things:
– There aren’t any country names in the feed. That seems like a bit of a problem.
– Why are there 3 entries with the same data?
– It’s not really XML. Once you get the content you still have to parse it with regexp or similar as opposed to the DOM, XSLT, or just good ‘ol CSS. Could that be fixed?
Good idea, but it’d be nice to see this as true XML data (contact me if you need it done, I’d be willing to help).
The XML is still being developed. I made a bunch of changes very late last night but had to put it aside do the sleep requirements. I’m curious why you say it’s not really XML.
In order to use the data in a useful way (ie. integration into one’s own site) one would have to do two steps: 1. Parse the RSS feed to get the first of three identical “description” tags, and 2. Use regexp or the like to actually get the information. It seems as though step two should be eliminated by the whole principal of XML. I’d rather parse a CSV file than regexp.
Nathan, it’s an RSS file, for subscribing to. It’s not really an XML file for parsing out into an app. I’m sure that’s possible as well (to be fair, XSLT could do all of what you’re asking for fairly easily), but it isn’t the purpose of what Aaron did.
To be fair, I was torn in how to do it. I could do pure RSS which would be more useful for blog readers or do XML and make it more useful for consumption by web sites, etc. I chose RSS as this is a blog and that’s what blogs do. I knew and know that decision will be second guessed but when you’re making decisions on the fly in a compressed space of time, it is what it is.
Any eta on when the feed will be functional again?
AND why is there just “Light the Torch” in the html title tag and not the post’s real title???? It should be there if you excpect to get any Google hits.
Jeremy: If you read Aaron’s post about it, though, he clearly says that “[you]‘d love to see [y]our data in use elsewhere”. It seems that if you’re looking for it to be parsed you would be looking for it to be used on other sites. These other sites would presumably want to have a table similar to the one here on lightthetorch.net, not just raw text. And no, XSLT could not be used to parse text into XML (unless you meant it could be done in XML, and then XSLT’ed to RSS, in which case yeah, easily).
Aaron: Why not both? Most (probably all?) RSS readers are going to display HTML. Simple additions of div/span tags with identifiers (which would have no semantic meaning what so ever) would allow RSS readers to show it identically to its current form, and allow parsers to easily get at the data.
You have a point, Nathan, and I’m sorry for not doing it better than I did. It was half-assed, I admit, but I was also trying to manage a huge b5media server migration. I’ll try to get this fixed up better tonight.
In the meantime, if you wanted to help me, please email me the format that you would like the RSS and XML files to take. It would be easier for me to work off a model than to try to invent it on a caffeine and adrenaline-charged buzz, y’know? :-)
aaron@b5media.com
I understand fully, Aaron. I wasn’t really faulting you, I was just commenting on how it could be better. The world is always up for improvement, isn’t it? Im about to send you an e-mail.
Aaron and Nathan, hope you two don’t mind me horning in on your xml/rss conversation. I just sent Aaron an email on the feed and an xml format. Aaron, feel free to forward to Nathan if you see fit or, smack the delete key if that’s a more satisfying reaction. ;)
Is the country thing fixed on the RSS feed yet?
It pretty worthless without it!!
Matt’s medal tracker is working great .. I have it on 4 of my sites now … Curling Blog if you want to see it ..
It was a two part installation directly to my template .. the script and I just added some stylesheet codes to the bottom of my stylesheet for my wordpress template. This would have let me modify it the way I wanted to .. (but the way matt did was fine with me!)
I’ve just updated the RSS feed. I’ll work on plain XML next but if you want to parse the RSS, you’ll have to run an explode() or other similar function to break apart $item->description.
First, thanks “admin”.
Second, here’s a perl regex, /^Gold\-(\d+)\s+Silver\-(\d+)\s+Bronze\-(\d+)/io for anyone that’s interested (hope this comes through in the comment.)
Third, will the feed only have the top five or will it include the full medal rankings?
Sheesh…I fired that off to quickly… Use $1, $2 and $3 after matching the description element for Gold, Silver and Bronze respectively. (sorry for the spamy posts.)
It has always only had the top 5. There’s no plan for more as that would get mildly unweildly to maintain. :)
I put together a quick rss caching image that displays the US medal count for my company’s homepage. http://www.r-world.com/
The image is a bit of PHP that loads the base image, pulls the data out of a local database, and writes the current totals to the image.
If the data in the database is older then 15 minutes, the code then gets an update from the rss feed. I didn’t want to abuse b5media’s generosity, and thought that every 15 minutes isn’t that agressive of a download schedule while still being timely.
Thank you for the feed.
I suggest you take a look at the signup script…