This past week I've had a little extra time on my hands. The result is here. There are a few things I still want to do:
- PPR! As you can see from the table, there's a spot for the possible points remaining. The scheme for awarding points makes calculating PPR somewhat more complicated than it might seem at first glance. A correct pick gets 2, 4, 8 or 14 points depending on the round plus 4, 2, 1 or 0 points depending on how closely the series length is predicted plus an upset bonus if applicable. The upset bonus is awarded when there is an upset, i.e. a lower seeded team wins. The upset bonus is the difference of the seeds. This is what makes it tricky! It's entirely possible that someone can maximize his points by losing a series one round, in order to get the upset bonus in the next. One has to take this into account to faithfully calculate PPR.
- Automatic updates! The whole point of this thing was to make both Rob's life and my life easier (in the long run). I haven't yet written the script that will update the database. This is actually a pretty simple step thanks to AJAX. I remember back in the day when I might have to screenscrape to do this. But now every website has a nice XML feed so AJAX can automatically and asynchronously refresh its webpages.
- Game progress! When I write that background script, I can get more information than the series tallies the database currently holds. I can follow individual games (scores and the like) and display these on the page. Of course, this means I should also use an AJAX-style refresh, to keep those updates coming. (Knowing the upcoming schedule will also allow for better caching!)
- Clean code! I did this rather quickly, so it's a little messier than it has to be. It'd be nice if it were a bit more intelligible. The files so far total over 800 lines. Isn't that a kick?
I can now run a pool every year! Hah.
