The new Attackpoint format looks really great Ken. I especially like the log search function and the injury tracking should prove very useful. I'm sure there are many other new features hidden in the new format as well.
Now we know what you've been doing with all those sleepless nights.. :-)
Bravo !! This site is the best. Your attention to detail seems to know no end. Thank you Ken.
Wow, looks awesome! Good work, dude.
Holy crap Ken this is frickin awesome! Now my new shirt will match! I really like all the stuff on the homepage, it's nice to have all those handy tools in one place.
Somebody give this kid a raise!
Wow, my system wasn't up for so much goodness before I'd finished my morning banana. Nice work, Ken!
Damn! This is unbelieveable. Everything I need can be accessed right from the front page. Keeny, you rock!
Agreed, the format is much improved (not that the old one was bad). I'll have to think how I record multi-day entries given that logs now display reverse-chonological.
Good, very good job Ken. Looks great ...
I love the diagram orienteer 1 and 2 , review motivate etc. and the whole tone of the new web site.This is what AP is all about . Keep up the good work!
Eric, looks like you can choose to use the old style (regular chrono) for your log by changing the preference in your settings. Yet another unmissed detail.
And what about the supremely bodacious auto-train feature--WOW!!! You sure can't beat that with an old rattlesnake! This is going to revolutionize attack badger attacks!
Auto-Train?? Where's that feature, I don't see it...
Ooh, Cristina, thanks for the tip about old style training log view!
John F. wrote "Somebody give this kid a raise!".
I found the button to do just that is now located under the Community tab... ;) Remember, every donation will make his wife more forgiving of the time he spends updating this site!
And it's now 2006, so he doesn't have to pay tax on it until April 2007! :)
Ken, thank you so much for creating the tool that brings orienteering community together and motivates athletes to train harder and longer!
thanks everybody. glad you're enjoying it.
thank yourselves too. this wouldn't be much fun if it was just me posting my training (stretching?)!
Haha, i read that as "scratching". I think if we posted that, I'd be in the lead.
New site, old site? It's ALL great!
The general ease of using this site for logging training of multiple sports is fantastic.
Hat's off to Ken. Thanks.
Boris, you do more than 4 hours of scratching a day? (or rather, 4 hours more than Swampfox?). wow!
Kenny, one thing you have to do is give yourself a deserved bump in the rankings. You should get to count site maintenance as training, or something!
Thank you, Ken. Looks very good!
Ah yes! I like it. Thanks!
Change is always difficult, but I seem to be easing in to the awesome new site without a problem. Thanks, Ken!
Very impressive! Great design and implementation.
Hey Ken, can we get the "log comments" order sorted by most recent rather than 7-day total, or make that sorting a "user preference"? I realize that the noisiest log is the one with the most comments in it in the past week, but some of us spend *so much* time looking at comments that anything more than an hour old is old news. :) Its harder to find new stuff to read with it sorted by total rather than by most recent.
Ken - do the ads pay for the hosting costs? If not, then I'd be happy to offer a donation.
They are sorted by N on that page, not by "latest", which is what I'm requesting.
Eddie -- you read my mind.
and I have read your minds...sortof:
http://www.attackpoint.org/discussion.jsp?section=...
there are still some issues with this view, so I hadn't made it available yet, but it should keep you busy for now.
it also appears that logs you have marked as favorites, will reappear on your homepage if new comments are added. A couple of times I have looked at favorite logs, after which they disappear from my home page until some new content comes along, but I don't see any new 'log' content, only new comments on the log.
So it appears (and I could have this wrong) that Kenny is monitoring both the log itself and the comments for flagging it on your homepage, but only if its one of your favorites.
right, you'll notice that on your homepage favorites list, an asterisk (*) means new content, and "c" means new comments. you may see both.
On the Home page the "Today" part of the comments area shows changes in the N comments area, with the top few N's shown, but new comments can come in from people with low N which then don't show up on the Home page "Today" box. So you still have to go to the "more noisy logs" link to find them (which is ok), but then you still have to look through all of today's comments by time to find ones that are new.
That new block-view that shows comments "discussion-style" addresses the newness issue nicely, and collects them all in one spot. The link at the top back to the referring log allows for context once you are in a thread...It would be nice to have the user's name prominently next to the thread title so you can see who each of the threads referrs to up-front.
And with all this activity going on, Ken has quietly Fixed the Rankings...
As expected, the top didn't jiggle very much at all, but look further down to where those Canadians used to get 0.xy points or something. They're gone? Nope, they're right up the list a lot closer to where they "should" be. For example, it seems a lot more plausible for MC & Adrian to have 63 points, than 0, or 10 or 20...
Having more splits posted where those folks directly compete against other AP'ers might help even more in terms of getting the data into the system that'll even more strongly justify the position they end up in, but at least the drift-related biases are gone. And having Adrian, MC, Louise etc. post more splits (esp. when they travel) can only help the math do a 'better' job of averaging out the odd result here and there.
Nice. Thanks for the sort option!
Wow, really nice, slick new look! Loving it more and more. Now I just need to get more orienteers in the UK using it for it to really mesh for me. In that vein, I'd love to promote Attackpoint more - are there any badges/icons, I could use? Also, is there a "show last x weeks of my training entries and logs" page?
I was working on a few button/icon images for that purpose, but they weren't ready to come out with the rest of the stuff earlier this week. they should be along shortly.
as for "last x weeks", until I create something to make this easier, you can try messing with the url of the training archive (viewlog) page, e.g.
http://www.attackpoint.org/viewlog.jsp/user_1098/p...
Anyone know where the "find closest training partners" feature is (it used to be under Utilities)?
that was hiding because I'm working on it. since you're the second person to be looking for it, I put the old version back under Community / nearby
Manually adding the "period-x" to the URL is pretty cool.
Truth-be-told, I miss the old, multi-color banner, but I'm quickly getting used to the new site design, and having so much content linked right on the front page is sweet!
For my US Team Training page
http://www.wyattriley.com/Training/UsOTeamTraining...
I was trying to read the html to find the name of the .gif of training volume/intensity that was created for each person in the table in
http://www.attackpoint.org/training.jsp , so I could put those same .gif's on this page:
http://www.wyattriley.com/Training/UsOTeamTraining...
Unfortunately, that didn't work, because the .gif's I was looking for are apparently built-on-the-fly tables with a clear gif coating. Or something like that...
I have a question that I don't think has been asked yet. On the Training home page, some of the overall training times are highlighted by colored boxes (purple, red, etc.). It's not always the same people, and the colors change. Does anyone know what that means?
If it's red, the person is injured. If it's purple, the person is sick.
And I thought it was a game of eleusis ...
(Eleusis is a game where a "god" knows a secret rule, and generates patterns based on that rule, while the audience attempts to deduce the rule by observing the patterns (ok, I'll go back to my geek pit now ...))
I think some of us could have had fun with this. Too bad I screwed that up.
On the subject of geeked out comments/questions - here is one...
Any idea about the mean training volume of AP users over time? With Swampfox in the stratosphere and lots of other ambitious types all around the world, it seems like 11 hours per week is the new 6. I imagine a graph would be kind of interesting...
As an injured person currently, I'd already figured out the eleusis game, as apparently Cristina had too.
As for j-man's average - the average of what? There are ~800 AP users with no recorded training last week... Still I've noticed the same thing about the large increase in volume in general (but not among the DVOAers actually... :)
Not that I'd recommend a rapid jump in volume - that's apparently a little risky, injury-wise.
It is probably a safe simplification to eliminate "dormant" AP users. Granted, the 0 training recorded may be deliberate, but I'm only interested in people who are on the active leaderboard somewhere. It is hard to be sure of people's intentions who haven't recorded training in months.
OK - another idea - to sort and group by club... that would be cool, I think!
I'm not sure the eleusis feature is fully functional yet. I had also interpreted red/purple as injured/sick, but today I suddenly turned red, even though I haven't recorded an injured day for the past 5 days. Meanwhile, Hammer is injured, but is not red. Looking at a few other Red and Purple People, we all had some injured/sick time in the past week, but not in our most recent entries. (In other words, Attackpointers may be healthier than we appear!)
Colors based on injury/illness in last 7-days. I think.
Back to the rankings thing, what I'd love to see is for the USOF rolling rankings to be done by Ken, similary to how the rankings are presented on Attackpoint. There's money involved there! We get a good rankings system, Ken gets paid for his efforts... sounds like a good deal.
It turns out that the game of eleusis is more sophisticated than we thought. I "turned red" yesterday, but I'm back to normal today. I recorded injured days last Thurs. and Fri. MrPither just turned red, and he recorded injured days last Fri/Sat. Ken is the only other red person, and recorded injured days on Fri. and Sun. Meanwhile, Hammer hasn't turned red yet, but he has been injured every day starting on Sun.
This is really good eleusis. Any bets on the date/time when Hammer will turn red? (Ken, of course, is not eligible to participate, since he is the "god" who knows the secret rules and generates the patterns for us to guess from.)
There is a "request for proposal" that I believe will be going out sometime soon to change the USOF rankings over to a web-based rolling rankings system. An excellent idea, but definitely not a simple one.
The major difference from Attackpoint rankings is the source of the data. With Attackpoint, anybody can add a ranked race, and the results are (with a recent exception) entered by the competitors. If you have a crummy run or a DNF, you can just decide not to put up your splits, and there are many people who never enter their splits. Recently Ken has added a means of getting SI splits in from the official results, so your splits will go up automatically if you have your own dipstick that Attackpoint knows about.
Then there's the Earplugged Chili Tamarind, or whatever Mikell calls it now. That also rolls, but it's only for the elite classes, and it uses a simpler (and arguably inferior) method to assess the gnarliness for each race.
For the USOF rankings, the results come from a specified set of races (same as for the Fandango Olive Squeezer, plus maybe certain Canadian races), and it has to include all classes. And all results have to be in there, which means that they have to be entered by an official (either a meet offical or a Rankings official -- probably the latter if you want it to actually happen), and there has to be a way of matching up the people in the results with the people in the existing list. USOF numbers don't work for that (at least not in their current form), because not everybody has one, and they get wonky with family memberships. This is going to take some thought and work on the part of whoever is bidding on it.
The "request for proposal" went out earlier today on USOF Clubnet.
the "secret rules" of red and purple have changed slightly, so you will need to re-examine your assumptions. there was an odd bug causing unexpected behavior, which is now fixed. you may find that it makes sense now...
Yup, the secret rules are clear now. And Hammer has finally turned red, but not for the reason I'd originally expected.
Was the real reason (for the red) Sudden's pre Eliminator speech from a year ago?
"Today there will be blooood....but we are tough in GHO"
As for the rankings thing, I don't think Ken's job would be that hard. I haven't read the RFP, but I discussed it with Clare before it was written (so maybe it has changed..?), but from what I recall, Ken's job (or Kent Shaw ala DVOA, who may also bid), the idea is for the developer to create the system, but for the USOF rankings coordinator (currently Nik Weber) to control the data entry (as he does today, in one big bulk process once a year...)
"one big bulk process once a year" wouldn't seem consistent with rolling rankings...
Meant to say that Nik _currently_ does one big bulk process of data entry (into his spreadsheet). And for the new rolling rankings he would have to change to smaller updates, albeit more often (into whatever web system is set up.) Still, it would be Nik in charge of the data management so KW (or whoever designs the system) wouldn't have to do that on a continuous basis.
It's late but I'd like to chime in and thank Ken for the fact that the Cyrillic characters in Oleg Blokhin's log now display as Cyrillic characters in my browser (I assume Ken is responsible since I haven't done anything to my browser). At least now I'm trying to make sense of both sides of the conversation when Oleg and Greg exchange comments.
Very nice! Although I can't read Russian worth a damn in cyrillic or its transliterated form, I thought those conversations in Oleg's log were wonderful when they were expressed in some other sort of encoding. I was expecting it was some form of pidgin or even free-form Balter. The truth seems like a bit of a letdown.
Oleg just placed 6-th in Moscow O-Champs and gone to Latvia for World Cup Ski-O and I believe Veteran's WOC in Ski-O
Greg, i am starting to think that Russia is the only country that takes ski-O seriously, as at least almost no one in Uppsala does... We had just one guy from Linne go to the district champs in Ski-O, and i don't think anyone in the club owns a ski-O map holder...
When I went to the Nordic Ski-O champs, there were a ton of Finns there...
easily explained - you guys do not have steady snow cover in the winter anymore, but ski-o is not as nearly competitive as foot-o for sure
Ken didn't answer my question on how costly Attackpoint is to operate, but I donated $20 via PayPal. I looked at the T-shirts, but only 25% of the money would go to Attackpoint.
This discussion thread is closed.