by Iain Wilson
We're believers that web technology should make a practical difference in saving time and/or money and here's an example that hits right at that premise.
Our clients, Boroughmuir Rugby and Community Sports Club, make extensive use of the Blot Content Management System (CMS) to keep their site up to date with news, events, match reports, fixtures and league tables.
Great though the Blot CMS is, there is still a lot of manual work required to input and amend text and pictures on the site. Justin Tito, the BRCSC Communications Manager, and his helpers do a great job in doing this, but one area that was really hard for them was keeping the league tables up to date.
The league tables are held in HTML tables, similar to a word processor tables, and as you can imagine, moving teams up and down and changing each table cell for matches played, won, lost, drawn, points etc, took quite a bit of time.
All the league data came from the SRU site and after each weekend, the information had to be laboriously copied over. "Wouldn't it be great", said Justin, "if we could automatically get the SRU information into our site tables".
Well, we had a look at the SRU table pages and found that the information was held in a consistent, structured way that would allow us to identify all the numbers and text we needed to use.
We then developed some (admittedly brilliant) software that would automatically go to the SRU site, pick up the latest league table information and then store it in the tables used by the BRCSC site.
So now, all the league tables on the site are automatically up to date - no manual editing required at all. And there is no delay - at the end of each day the tables on the SRU site are synchronised with those on the BRCSC site.
For the 3 tables that BRCSC show, over the course of a season it probably saves them around 4-5 man days work - a great idea by Justin and a good example of using technology to save time and money.
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