New Website

ok Bicks - just drop me an email when you have some time to meet up

Hi Andy.

Definitely worth looking at. Let's meet up. I'm busy next week or so but game after that. And yes, will happily work with the 'proper' protocols - may just need a helping hand from your expertise.

Cheer, Bicks.

We would need the boxes real time so not sure a CSV file would work very well.  you would have to publish this csv and then we would have to schedule a task to pick it up, import, and display the results.  Using XML to produce a real-time webservice will enable us to call that and display the results immediately.  i.e on our website when someone clicks boxes we can call your webservice, pass in the parameters you require, (club identifier and authentication credentials) and then you pass back the data in the XML response.  I see you have built your website in PHP - there are plenty of libraries you can use to assist with this.  I can get one of our PHP dev's to talk to you if that would help?

The other method you suggest about pulling in your page into our site would be to use something like an iFrame which again is not ideal.  You end up getting scroll bars within the site which looks a bit rubbish.  

As an aside it's worth mentioning that this whole system we've built (and are continuing to develop) is white labelled and offered as software as a service.  In other words we are going to other clubs and offering this is a one stop shop for managing their membership and facilities.  It willnot only allow them to manage the booking of their facilities, whatever they might be, but also allow them to manage their membership, how they communicate and market to them, and hold a full history of communication, documents, subscription etc.  This, we think, will prove to be a very cost-effective, attractive proposition at club level as there will be no up-front outlay and ongoing exepnse to run this in-house and no expensive  costs (as Lansdown are finiding) to support ageing it infrustructure and sstems in house.

Probably worth us meeting up for a chat and to chew over ideas.  If you fancy it drop me an email on [email protected] and we can arrange something

Andy

Another thought - apart from the home page, there's very little branding on this site anyway. We can remove the header with a parameter and that would allow you to show our pages within your pages. Changing colour scheme could also be done but that's more work.

It should be fairly straight forward to return the boxes page as CSV text which you can display as you like. Match entry would be the same for both league and box results. I could just add a parameter such as csv=1, say.

I'm not 'up' on webservices in general but these things usually turn out to be OK. What specific protocol did you have in mind?

Bicks.

We don't need to reinvent the boxes but the important thing is that it's within our website and brand so if we can call webservices to get the current box names and scores and display them how we want within our site then that wold be ideal. 

Quite possibly, yes. I'm working with other counties and Ian McKenzie from the Squash player to turn our ranking system into a national service of some sort and it does involve sending results in and getting display data back. Experimental system behind the 'D' in the [ABCD] at the bottom of the page.

Sounds like it would be worth a discussion over beer. I'm also interested in interfacing with a mobile app in some way so some sort of coming together could work well.

Do you need to re-invent the boxes? Is that worth another interface?

Bicks.

Hi Bicks

Thanks for this.  We are down to develop our own boxes and ranking system shortly along with a mobile app for IOS and Android to allow for court booking, score entry etc.  The important thing is that it's kept all within the Lansdown branding.  It would be good if we could tap into the BAD squash ranking algorithm to enter results and alter rankings etc.  Do you have an XML web service available that will allow us to submit individual results and pull back data for display?

Andy

I see you run boxes. Feel free to use the boxes on this website (under Home). Results are included in the rankings automatically which allows non-league players to get a their own player level. Let me know if you want any help. I see you've set some junior boxes up but not really used. Is it missing something? Richard.