Five years and one day ago I put up a table on the stats page to show how often and when, on average, items are found in the advent calendars that have been used for the competition. It was rudimentary and I always planned to upgrade it, and I’ve started a few times but always come unstuck in forming the database query that would drive it.
Until today, when I started from scratch, ran into the same problem again, googled it, found that I was on paper doing it right, looked up the syntax for the bit of the query that was clearly not working and tried something didn’t look like it would work but somehow did. So much, if not all, of this website was coded by trial and error!
Anyway, now the table shows not just how often each item has occurred, but how often on each individual day. On top I’ve layered mean and mode because I know how to calculate those. The table is not in the final form I envisaged – for that I’ll either use a scalable font size or a colour gradient on the numbers so higher ones stand out more, but that is for another day.
I also need to scan through the database and rationalise the names I’ve used for items, as, for example, Christmas Pudding appears twice as it must have an errant space or something similar to create a variety of spellings for the same item. I’ll try to get to that tomorrow!