Re: A new way to browse the FIRST website
 

One new link I just added, prompted by The Blue Alliance's migration to cleaner URLs:
Just a reminder that you can always see the full list of options by going to plain ol' frclinks.com.

Re: A new way to browse the FIRST website
 

BLESS YOU

Re: A new way to browse the FIRST website
 

Just added event codes for the Championship divisions (thanks to Travis Hoffman for alerting me to this omission).

Re: A new way to browse the FIRST website
 

Found it exceedingly useful all season long, and now it's even better...

Mahalo!

Re: A new way to browse the FIRST website
 

I wanted to call attention to this thread again as registration season is underway, since I'm sure many people haven't heard of FRCLinks yet or have forgotten about it.

Also, I wanted to announce that you can now once again see FIRST's information on all current and past teams using http://frclinks.com/t/[team number].

For those interested in the details, when FIRST updated their website this past fall, it totally broke this functionality due to a new URL scheme (using a strange "tpid" number to specify the team instead of the team number directly) and the requiring of "session tokens" (couldn't view a team from a past season, even if you knew the tpid, unless you had a valid token in the URL). The tpid problem I got around a few weeks ago by writing a script that parses the FIRST team list and caches a database of team->tpid relationships, but that only worked for 2010, for whatever reason. I just spent a few hours today devising an even more convoluted workaround for past seasons, but it works now.

Re: A new way to browse the FIRST website
 

Hi Pat,

I just want to tell you how valuable the frclinks are, and I am amazed how you can get around the problems with the new changes at the FIRST.org website.

I have a question. Is there a way to query to get all the team nicknames? I see it when I bring up each team's information but I need to do it one team at a time which is not feasible. I have a scouting database that I publish to share with all other FRC teams on CD but the list of nicknames is incomplete. Any suggestions?

Thank you for creating the frclnks website.

Regards,

Ed

Re: A new way to browse the FIRST website
 

If you don't mind parsing through a whole lot of text, there is https://my.usfirst.org/frc/scoring/i...?page=teamlist, which is a feed used by the field scoring software to download team information.

Right now it seems as if it is still only outputting 2009's data, but I imagine it will be updated closer to the competition season.

Re: A new way to browse the FIRST website
 

There are no delimiters. How do you know when one field ends and another field starts? I only see spaces. Are there hidden special characters in between?

Ed

Re: A new way to browse the FIRST website
 

Looks like it's delimited with tab (\t) characters. I've been able to import directly into Excel in the past (copy-paste, and then in the paste popup, "Create Refreshable Web Query...").

Re: A new way to browse the FIRST website
 

Yes, I just realized it. I paste it to Notepad with unicode and then realized it is a Tab delimiter. I got it into Excel now. Wish I knew this last year. Thanks.

Ed

Re: A new way to browse the FIRST website
 

Prompted by FIRST's repeated reminders that the FRC news page will be an important channel of information during the 2010 season, I've created a link for it.
As always, the full list of links and event codes can be seen at http://frclinks.com.

Re: A new way to browse the FIRST website
 

Thank You.

Re: A new way to browse the FIRST website
 

In the interest of saving an extra click when you want to look up something in the competition manual, I've added a few more shortcuts:
For example, if I wanted to look up a particular rule in the Robot section, I'd type frclinks.com/d/r into my address bar.

These shortcuts will keep working even if the filenames change as revisions are made.

For those not aware, there's a complete list of shortcuts at the frclinks.com homepage, and suggestions for new ones are always welcome.

Re: A new way to browse the FIRST website
 

this is great. navigating FIRST's website has been driving me slowly insane for a long time

Re: A new way to browse the FIRST website
 

Another feature request: /u/#, where # is the team update number from the current year.