A new way to browse the FIRST website

[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.