statpack - new statistics data

Damo. · Post by **Damo.** » 05 September 05 10:20 pm

Great work! Funny to see a few of the 'unloved' caches listed which I have found. Some are remote but many are not. Makes you wonder why more people haven't found them. Couple on the list in the Barrington Tops last found by me in April '04 still waiting for the next finder.
Guess we are spoilt for choice in the capital cities!

Any way to highlight caches which have been recommended by people in those lists?

Post by **caughtatwork** » 06 September 05 10:09 am

i!, can you get the "Recommended" flag into the caches.csv output?

Damo. I'll have a look at what can be done. I'll need to change the graphing software to accept a z_value which will contain the Recommended flag, so this might be a little while.

I'll get back here when I'm ready to Beta.

ideology · Post by **ideology** » 07 September 05 9:11 am

okay, we've added the number of cachers who are recommending, planning and watching each cache

Post by **caughtatwork** » 07 September 05 10:31 am

Thanks i!, much appreciated.
I'll have a look at some stuff over the next couple of days.

Post by **caughtatwork** » 08 September 05 11:29 pm

It would be interesting to know from i! what the % of cachers vs cachers who have completed their 'state' in the profile.

Ideology. Can you give an indication of whether this is useable enough to warrant an added statspack file for cacher and state?

ideology · Post by **ideology** » 10 September 05 8:28 am

happily the majority of people who have set up cacher names have also set up the state
we have developed another file for you: cachers.csv which lists a few bits and bobs.

we didn't include lats and lons because we think that it would be a bit rude from a privacy perspective. even though we tell people that lats and lons will be displayed on maps, we think another step again to allow them to be downloaded as waypoints and we don't want to freak anyone out.

please let us know if there's any other variables of statistical interest that we could include

Post by **caughtatwork** » 20 September 05 8:31 pm

I have one request.

In order to grab the stats pack files I need to visit the page and click on the link. This would be to ensure that the data you grab is the latest data. ie. The file is generated in real time rather than a static copy.

This prevents me from automating the process to export the data to my site for the graphs. Possibly this has been done that way on purpose.

So at the moment I grab the files, download them to me PC and then upload them to my server. This is a pain and not sustainable so the graphs get out of date each day I don't do it.

What I would like is a permanent copy of the files, generated at a particular time of day or overnight. I could then set my own cron job to run a few hours later, grab the files and copy them over to my own system for graphing.

I know this will mean the data will be slightly out of date, but I'm willing to live with that.

Any possibility of having the two stats packs? One static and one real time?

Post by **caughtatwork** » 20 September 05 9:17 pm

Ignore me. I was being a doink. I can get what I want without anything new.

ideology · Post by **ideology** » 20 September 05 9:49 pm

we'll ignore your request for us to ignore you

the statpack is designed to be automatically downloaded and always up to date

automatic download:
in your cron job, just do a 'wget' command to grab the data
alternatively, if you are already running a php script in the cron job, just open the statpack url as if it were a normal filename and it should open

up-to-date:
the statpack files are dynamically generated, so you are always assured of up-to-date data no matter what time of the day you grab the data

Post by **caughtatwork** » 20 September 05 11:34 pm

Thanks guys.
Yep, I realised that after I'd done some exhaustive testing and then found out I had a typo

You may have noticed a large(ish) spike in your bandwidth around 10:20 tonight. That was me getting the cron job set up and tested. I should have only tested it on the smaller files but I didn't think I would have so many problems.

Seems that on my shared hosting I don't have permission to wget so I had to create a php file that does a copy from your server to mine, then load the data into the database. Then I had to call it via the PHP interpreter rather than wget

Sheesh, you think life would be easier than this. Right now it's all working and it set to run once at midnight. I'm sure you wouldn't appreciate it running every time someone came in to look at the graphs

Thanks for providing the data, it's very generous of you.

ideology · Post by **ideology** » 21 September 05 7:55 am

glad to hear that it's all working! no worries about development spikes - we understand completely!

if you are super clever, you can avoid the intermediate step of copying the data before loading it into the database: just use the fopen command (http://au.php.net/fopen) and give it http://geocaching.com.au/blah/blah/caches.csv" and it should open it, then use fgets to rattle through the file and do your importing magic!

then again, it's working, don't touch it!

now when are you going to create a url that we can link to from various cacher and cache pages?

Post by **caughtatwork** » 21 September 05 5:08 pm

Here you go i!.

http://www.caughtatwork.net/geocaching/ ... xplain.php

I'm a little nervous about this as I don't know what sort of performance and bandwidth is going to go along with making this available, but I suppose I'll never know until we try it out.

For the time being I would appreciate it if we could just restrict the useage of the graphs to the GCA site.

If they stand the test, then I might create a new website, dedicated to the graphs and then y'all can use them on your own site.

For now, please avoid this as there may be furtehr development needed.

Choose a couple of the more meaningful graphs, populate the stats pages and let's see what happens. Don't go overboard just yet, just in case something goes astray.

Where's the fingers crossed smiley?

roostaman · Post by **roostaman** » 28 September 05 9:29 pm

Hey C@W we are really enjoying your (&!i's) great work. THANX.

Here's one you can think about, although you may have already & it did not show up much. How about the No. of Hides on a certain date & the highest no. of hides by a player on a day.

Although it may mainly only show a lot of low numbers, I happen to know on very good authority that 1 certain Team has just laid out over 20 caches on 1 day. (Their name will show up if you do a test run)

I bet that would stand out like the absolute proverbial, and be a temptation for others to try to beat.

Just thought i'd see if you needed a new project....

Roosta

Post by **caughtatwork** » 28 September 05 10:03 pm

Hi ho roostaman.

Done.

http://www.caughtatwork.net/geocaching/graphs/

Specifically this graph:
http://www.caughtatwork.net/geocaching/ ... le_day.php

Have a look at the All States and Islands page (or the first page) and you'll see the graph for Top 50 Days by Hides and the Top 50 Hides by a Cacher on a Single Day.

You'll also find the Top 50 Days by Hides on the cacher pages.

The best I can spot is three cachers with 16 hides. xf king, Dak's Emu Mob and Crew 153.

Enjoy.

maccamob · Post by **maccamob** » 28 September 05 11:34 pm

Great work and some fascinating stats. You can see how the poms approach their stats by following a few links from their top-50 cachers page http://stats.guk2.com/cachers/view_topc ... type=found