Hey all you stats designers...

[CSMan]

I wanted to do some little personal stats for myself, so I set up an Excel (actually Quattro Pro 9, I got it for free :D) spreadsheet. It's all fine and dandy, except I have to manually update it everyday which gets tedious, not to mention I sometimes miss a day or three.

I was just curious what kind of things you need to know to do the stats you guys do, automatically updating itself and stuff.

[Dyyryath]

My stats stuff is always run from Linux or Solaris and is run by a scheduler called cron. Cron is found in most Unix operating systems and it launches commands at specific times.

Essentially, my software is composed of two pieces. First is a data spider that is run at set intervals (usually every three hours). This piece connects to the project's website and downloads the raw statistics. It then parses them, pulling out the necessary data and inserts that data into a database (I use MySQL). While it's putting the new data in, it also looks at previous data to make some calculations about how much work was done since the last update, in the last 24 hours, and so on. It puts this data in as well.

The second piece is the renderer. This program actually builds the pages that you see on the web. It is scheduled to run (again with cron) sometime after the spider and takes the latest data from the database and formats it according to theme files. It generates HTML pages, and then puts them up on the web server for people to view.

The part that makes this automatic is cron. If you are operating under Windows, you'd use the system scheduler. Unfortunately, I don't have enough experience with the Windows scheduler to give you any tips on it's use. Undoubtedly someone else here can cover that...

[CSMan]

Thanks Dyy, that answers a lot. Although I know absolutely nothing about databases and programming languages and stuff...
What programs and things do you use? Are there websites and FAQs where I could learn how to do stuff like that?

[JDAW]

I use Task Scheduler to run a excel sheet forTCP (http://www.jdaw.cjb.net:81/TCP/Monthly.htm) currently Ubero has changed the layout and since I don't know anything about the excel sheetthat zAmboni wrote for me I have to wait until he updates it for me. :)