Something that has been missing through the ages (annoyingly so) is a go-to list of every Advent Calendar Challenge champion, so my task for the past couple of days has been to make one. I am pleased to announce it has now been launched and can be found here.
When I set out to make it I envisaged something akin to an honours board in a sports club – a list of years and winners. I was going to expand that to have winning team and best “rookie” alongside it too, so it would have been a simple row-with-three-names structure – but along the way things changed a bit. First off I decided it would be nice to make use of the profile pictures I hold for some players (click a player’s name to see them for anyone. If you want yours added, removed or updated then let me know!) so I decided to work those in. This immediately caused a more 2D approach to be taken, with the huge year number you see on the final version and names listed vertically within each year.
Secondly there has been one year where there was a three-way tie for the win as all three leading points scorers had exactly the same scoring days throughout so there was no way to separate them. I needed a way to be able to list multiple winners in this case so the ability to stretch vertically was necessary for this too. In the end I settled on the top three for each year, as top threes are often acknowledged in competition anyway.
(As an aside, I’ve always been annoyed that unbreakable ties are possible but at work today I came up with a way to finally break them that isn’t arbitrary. I’ll be making use of Article 2b of the official regulations and going back to do just that in due course…)
The other hurdle I encountered was that whilst players have a unique ID number that the website uses to track and reference them throughout, the teams championship system was a bit more rough and ready so I had to build and implement that almost in full for the “Honours Board” script to work properly. This was complicated only slightly more by the fact that the teams championship basis has changed a few times since its inception and I don’t hold data in the back-end of the website for who was in what team for the older iterations of it. It’s easily reconstructed from the static html tables on the history pages, however, should I desire to do that for the future (I could, however, retrospectively work out who’d win the starsign championship all the way back to the start, if I wanted…). The honours board script in any event doesn’t add up the scores for every year manually every time, there’s a separate database table with final points and finishing positions stored in it so a simple lookup rather than lots of maths is all that is required.
So in the end after a few niggly bits of coding we end up with rather a simple page – huge year number, and a picture of the individual winner (or, for now, one of them at random where there was a tie) and the year’s top three, best rookie and winning team. Where the individual, team or debutante score record was broken that year, that is shown too (WR, TR or RB) along with a small label if that person or team was winning for more than the first time.