FIRST contact database
 

Prompted by the Networking idea for FIRST teams through Gmail, I made a quick little database for contact information. Right now it's not very pretty and lacks some functionallity, but if we get enough teams in it, I'll work on that. :) At this point I've wasted 15 minutes of my life working on it; if I make it pretty, I may waste 30. :rolleyes:

Anyways, if you can (make sure to check with parents or mentors or whomever), please put your team in the FIRST contact database.

Re: FIRST contact database
 

Just in case it's interesting, there are currently 6 teams in the database. I'm going to say 20 teams and I'll clean it up some. :)

And the real reason for the post is the say: You can view a list of the teams in the database at http://traherom.homeunix.net/contacts/list.php.

Re: FIRST contact database
 

If we can get more teams to sign up, this is pretty cool. Great Job.

Re: FIRST contact database
 

This is cool, I'll check with our head mentor and add us later if he ok's it.

Re: FIRST contact database
 

Well, I had nothing better to do today because my current project (JFY) is in a state of possible desctruction because of competition, so I started working on the nicer version of the frontend which is up at http://traherom.homeunix.net/contacts2. Looks fairly nice, I guess, except for the corner rounding things in IE.

If you go there in IE, you'll see that the corners don't exactly position themselves correctly...

The divs which contain the corner image have a green border around them and the image itself has a red border. I gave the div which contains the rounder divs a black border, and as you can see it doesn't extend down to the images. The out divs are used to clip the corner image, which is just a circle:


Do you have any idea what's going on there? I would think IE just doesn't support multiple classes, but I've done it before...

--EDIT--
Oh, yeah, the borders are just for debugging. They're going away, don't worry. :D

Re: FIRST contact database
 

It appears that there are issues with the edit page.

Re: FIRST contact database
 

Yep... I haven't done that yet. :)

Re: FIRST contact database
 

So, I worked some on it and, ignoring the IE problem, I'd recommend that you use the new version. It's pretty and has several new features, including editing!

Yep, go it working. If you had to enter a password when you added your team, then you can go to the "edit" page and change your teams information. If you're one of the 6 who didn't have to do that, PM me and I'll set you put a password. And no, the teams which don't have passwords can't be edited by anyone.

Re: FIRST contact database
 

while trying to access http://traherom.homeunix.net/contacts2/add.php

Re: FIRST contact database
 

Oops.. :o

All better now. Thanks.

Re: FIRST contact database
 

awsome! i just added my team 447

Re: FIRST contact database
 

What about instead just providing teams with other teams emails, why not have a PM kinda system set up. You could send another team a message, and when they logged into their account they could check their messages. Maybe email alerts for when teams get messages?

Re: FIRST contact database
 

Why make the system more complex than it needs to be? An e-mail alert to check what's basically an e-mail?

Re: FIRST contact database
 

Hm... interesting. I might work on that sometime! (or in a little bit, whichever.)

Or maybe he's right. :)

Re: FIRST contact database
 

The FIRST Contact Database is now up to 31 teams (number updated)! What?!? You've never heard of the contact database? Well, check to see if your team is already in it and, if it isn't, add it (with a mentor/parent's permission)!)

Because of its huge (;)) size, I'm willing to put in some more time on it. Anyone have any suggestions? The current list of suggestions/bug fixes I may do:

• Add PM type functionality
• Every single *nix browser I've viewed it on (even FF, which works fine on IE), displays the wrong quarter of the rounding circle on the right side, as well as pushing it some distance left... (Boy, that's a bad sentence.)

Re: FIRST contact database
 

It might be cool to tie this into FIRST Blogs such that searching for a team would also reveal who on (or previously on) that team has a blog (and where said blog is). At the moment we haven't been tracking team number information there (but I could get it, I'm sure); and could perhaps provide you with some form of XML feed, web service API, or similar if you're interested.

P.S.

Yes, that is a really bad sentence; you're referring to how there's no left margin/padding/what not in FF causing the T as in "The" to be cut off?

Re: FIRST contact database
 

That would be cool. If you obtain the team numbers and setup an xml feed, I'd definetely add it. Maybe I could also look into providing links to the profile of team members on CD. Probably have a cron job copy team member data into database at 3am when there isn't much activity.

It cuts off the T? :eek: Which browser and OS are you on? Could I get a screenshot?

I was actually talking about the black (don't know how that happens; there's no black in the image) quarter circles on the right side.

Re: FIRST contact database
 

If you were to (with Brandon Martus' permission of course) get the team member data into your database (and keep it regularly up to date; I'd imagine that data updated weekly would be just fine for both your site and my intended use) I would be most interested in obtaining an XML feed of some sort of that, too (I figure it could be a very effective way of detecting new/existing blogs since that's likely to be what at least some people set their profile's website to, or mention in their sig, or some other place in their profile).

As for the browser thing; FF on Mac (I don't get black circles).

Re: FIRST contact database
 

Cool site, nice job Ryan!

I must have missed this thread when it went through before, but I added our team, and you are up to 31 teams now!

I was wondering if there is an easy way to download the information, or if you have thought of it, so that we dont have to individually click on each team to get the info they typed in. Ideally I think it would be nice to have it output an excel (or even .csv) file that has "Team #" and "main email", so that it would be easy to develop contact lists. I dont know how your site is set up, but it would be neat to do that if you have time.

Re: FIRST contact database
 

Really awesome job. This will certainly useful. I should be getting official heatwave contact info up on there shortly (within the next three weeks), pending approval from our team mentor after we return to school.

Hopefully most teams will see this and put their info up as well to make it effective.

Re: FIRST contact database
 

Cool idea. One suggestion:

Tell people the cutoff limit for the contact info, or stop the text-box from accepting too much text. I typed the following for team 948:
But it gave me:

Re: FIRST contact database
 

Hm... I don't remember building a limit in. :) Maybe a wrong MySQL type.

I'll check on it. Thanks for the heads up. I'll add the extra info once I figure out the problem.

--EDIT--
I fixed it and added a counter to show your remaining characters.

For the interested, the problem was that the MySQL type is actually essentially the same as varchar(255). I bumped it up to text, so you can now store up to 65,536 characters.

Re: FIRST contact database
 

Now that the season has started and this place will be busy, it would be great if we could get as many teams as possible in the FIRST contact database.

That's all I'll say. See rest of this thread for more info.

(P.S. Sorry that it was down yesterday, if anyone tried it. The laptop it runs on was at kickoff. ;))

Re: FIRST contact database
 

The FIRST Contact Database is up again! Due to a move, I was unable to host it any more, but Tim Ginn has graciously offered to host in on the OpenFIRST servers.

Please visit at its new home at http://contacts.openfirst.org and add to its usefullness. :)