A new way to browse the FIRST website

[Pat Fairbank]

One new link I just added, prompted by The Blue Alliance's migration to cleaner URLs:

/e/tba/[event id](/[optional year])
/event/tba/[event id](/[optional year])
Go to the The Blue Alliance page for the given event ID.

Just a reminder that you can always see the full list of options by going to plain ol' frclinks.com.

[MikePres]

BLESS YOU

[Pat Fairbank]

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

arc - FIRST Championship - Archimedes Division
cur - FIRST Championship - Curie Division
gal - FIRST Championship - Galileo Division
new - FIRST Championship - Newton Division
ein - FIRST Championship - Einstein Field

[TKM.368]

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

Mahalo!

Originally Posted by Pat Fairbank

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

[Pat Fairbank]

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.

[Ed Law]

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

[Pat Fairbank]

Originally Posted by Ed Law

Is there a way to query to get all the team nicknames?

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.

[Ed Law]

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

[Pat Fairbank]

Originally Posted by Ed Law

Are there hidden special characters in between?

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...").

[Ed Law]

Originally Posted by Pat Fairbank

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...").

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

[Pat Fairbank]

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.

/n
/news
Go to the FRC news page.

As always, the full list of links and event codes can be seen at http://frclinks.com.

[Ted Weisse]

Originally Posted by Pat Fairbank

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.

Thank You.

[Pat Fairbank]

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:

/d/a
/d/g
/d/r
/d/t
Go to the Arena, Game, Robot or Tournament section of the Competition Manual.

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.

[plnyyanks]

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

[Tristan Lall]

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