luchadb additions and assorted site notes

Instead of working on the May Week 1 recaps, I thought I would use this posting slot to cover some odds and ends, mostly relating to the luchaDB. If you’re not interested in that, maybe this isn’t for you.

* Going forward, current champions will be listed with the © symbol in the event results. It’s a bit that could’ve been added a long time ago, was actually requested in the YouTube comments, and only took a few hours to implement once I thought it thru. I’ve got a plan to go add that data to past championship matches, but it won’t be done immediately. This is a remainder that I occasionally do listen to suggestions.* I’ve also added posters to the archive going back a few months. They’re always displayed on the Today’s Events and This Week’s Events pages. You will also see them when I’ve got to on the event detail pages, found by clicking the blue date link on any event. The posters are displayed as a 200px tall thumbnail. Clicking on the image will give you the full size version.The large influx of posters, and the corresponding swelled amount of lineups the last couple months, are due to efforts of Kris, Fredo and Terry in tracking down a lot more indy lineups than I was finding on my own. It’s a bit of extra work to transcribe them into the database, but hopefully we’ll be able to mine some interesting trends from them down the road.

I do plan on adding some sort of sourcing to the poster display. I am logging the source URL right now, it’s just a matter of adding a caption below the picture.

I don’t really have a plan to go back and add any previous posters, though I guess it wouldn’t be the hardest thing. And a full page of all the CMLL or AAA posters for the year would be kind of cool. It’s mostly a time issue. Figuring out past champions is a snap and only involves checking boxes ones I’ve got it set up, old posters is a lot of tracking down stuff.

* even before that, I did a redesign to cache matches and events in the database. This means the site works a faster, spends less time repeating itself, and the matchfinder should fail a lot less. It seems to be working so far, but I think I’ve mentioned all of this before.

* I’m playing with the idea of adding individual fall results to the ‘box score’

current: Amapola, Dalys, La Comandante b La Vaquerita, Lluvia, Marcela
future?: Amapola, Dalys, La Comandante b23 La Vaquerita, Lluvia, Marcela

My biggest concern is this information is already hard to decipher and adding more information does not always make it clearer. As strange as it seems, given the rest of the site and the blog updates and everything else, readability is occasionally a concern. I do like the idea of integrating that date right into the result rather than writing “X won falls 2/3” in the notes every time. Adding the champion indicator cuts out part of that repeat, it couldn’t hurt to cut out more.

* The length and voluminous project of the last few months has been cleaning up the location data for the events. It’s a long way around to handling the intense amount of repeated names in lucha libre.

long explanation: I’m using date ranges, promotion affiliations and the major arena they’re working in to separate between people using the same names,. I’ve still been left with situations where a Simbolo is working a small arena, and the existing criteria can’t tell if it’s the Monterrey Noches de Futbol reoccurring character or the one from Illinois or another one entirely. I could get around that by declaring him “Simbolo (Monterrey)”, but that’s both ugly and requires me to remember to add the suffix every time. I can safely assume it’s the Monterrey based guy if I know the arena is in Nuevo Leon, but I need to have the state name linked to the show to figure that out. It wasn’t there in a lot of places, because I didn’t know the state when I was entering the show, or because I was just saving that time. I’ve spent the last few months unsaving that time basically.

(I’m now messing around with pulling out cities and standardizing arena names, though that ultimately would require me completely rewritting how I handle locations and putting together a big list of valid city locations, both of require a lot of time for not a lot of benefit.)

If you’ve seen the arena names get a lot wordier, that’s what’s going on. I can’t bring myself to make the change to “Arena Mexico, Ciudad de Mexico, Distrito Federal” at this point, but maybe should do it already. My next step is going thru every name in the database, creating profiles for luchadors who have a significant amount of matches and/or confusing name matches. There’s also a few typos fixed, though a lot more I’m missing.

All these fixes probably elevate the luchadb to the level of a third rate wrestlingdata.com . Maybe a second rate, but I don’t want to push it. Honestly, I do wonder if this duplication of what those fine people do and the people at cagematch do is kind of wasted effort. There’s a depth to the lucha lineups I have on here those sites won’t prioritize to include, there’s stuff like the video linking that they don’t/can’t have, and it’s reasonable smart to have duplication just in case one of us vanishes off the face of the Earth. At the same time, there’s a lot of stuff they have figured out that’s done so much better than I do here, and stuff they have either the man power or the computer power or the smarter programming skill power to accomplish which I can not.

* speaking of – once I get the names cleaned up and matched up better, I plan on putting the 2013 stats on the all the wrestler profile pages (those you see when you click on their names.) Those are kind of ugly and need a redesign with some more breakdowns, but they take an immense amount of processing time to recreate. I’d like to redo entirely how the stats are put together, but that requires some thinking and a significant rewrite.

* I stumbled upon the El Siglo de Torreon historical archive of all their newspapers going back to 1922. It’s got text search of scanned articles, so I can just type “lucha libre” and get back roughly a million results. There’s a lot of good info buried in there, but it’s so massive that I have no idea how to start or even to keep track of what I’ve done. I need to find a way to cut it down to manageable milestones and haven’t quite worked out how to do that.

I’d really love to find something similar for Mexico City – I think pulling out missing and overlooked important lineups and results from a couple decades I can do is generally more helpful to the wrestling world at large than my opinions on the Guerreros del Ring opener – but I have no idea where to look. Maybe I need to find a library and microfiche if I ever return to Mexico? Is there still microfiche?

(again, wrestlingdata or someone may already have this info and I’m wasting my time here. Maybe the better plan is to figure out what people have and work at what people did.)

* I’ve started the 2014 MOTYC list. I felt like I must’ve been being harsh grading this year after I put that together, but I think Rob’s right when he pointed out it’s been really quiet in CMLL beyond En Busca de un Idolo (and I generally don’t give sub 10 minute matches enough credit to make the list.) There’s a bunch of IWRG on the Watch List, but they haven’t been putting super attractive cards, and AAA’s not running a ton of TV. (I think I probably underrate tho’ Jack/Angelico team, maybe not as much as the non-lucha libre world.)

* I think I mentioned this previously, but I think I have a way to get around the Terra ban on YouTube. I’m leaning towards trying it out for the En Busca de un Idolo videos, just because Daily Motion doesn’t get the 1/10th the views YouTube gets. (Some) people will go to DailyMotion for a specific video, but people don’t browse videos on DailyMotion like they do on YouTube and most of my YouTube views come from people just browsing related videos. I think those browsers might like this tournament.

It costs me a significant amount of processing time and It’d only go up on a separate account just to protect the other videos in case I’m wrong. It also means I have to use a different logo to replace the Terra one. We’ll see if I get around to this.

* The place where I actually get the most interaction from people is the tumblr blog, of all places. It’s not always thing, but an occasionally gif will get a bunch of reblogging because it’s really easy to do that sort of thing there. (Expect more collages of gifs like the recent posts, because it’s easier to do and I don’t have to rethink of a caption for every picture there.)

The important thing for me is I’ve found a way to use tumblr (gifs) by mostly using existing content. We just covered YouTube. I use Twitter plenty (and occasionally well). Instagram doesn’t really make sense for the kind of content I’m providing, but my public imgur account has all the pictures I use for here (and a few I don’t) if you’re looking for images.

And…I’m still struggling to find a way to get something useful on Facebook. It’s only reposting a link to these news updated right now, which is maybe useful for people who follow that account and don’t otherwise visit the site, but the stats indicate that’s maybe 4 people. I feel like I probably should be doing better than that, but I’m just out of idea of what I should be doing there. Maybe putting up the news posts in entirely? Maybe some imaginary medium size post between 140 characters and the longer form stuff here? Those kind of just turn into streams of (annoying) Tweets nowadays. Maybe some other idea that someone already has figured out that I can just easily steal here?

What I’ve gotten out of Facebook lately is pulling info out – CMLL notes in comments, other posts which are “public” only if you’re logged in – but I feel like I probably should be putting stuff in. Just haven’t decided what.

* at some point, I probably should go to a lucha libre show. I think I must’ve gone to a show since September, but I’m not sure. I’m a bit busy with other activities, and concerned about not missing Terra – both being there and making sure the recording actually works. (I would’ve missed last week’s recording if I hadn’t been around to fix it.) I’m going to both CHIKARA shows in June, which should be fun, but probably should get to more than that.

(I actually have an extra ticket to the early CHIKARA show if someone needs it. I bought one, forgot, bought it again, and was amused/embarrassed to get two tickets in separate envelopes on the same day.)

Still, as much as this long piece might indicate otherwise, the point is to have fun watching lucha libre and you can usually do if you go live. People in Chicago are nice enough to keep me updated on stuff I don’t pay enough attention to, and maybe I’ll use that info to actually go to a show soon.

One thought to “luchadb additions and assorted site notes”

  1. I know I’ve said this before but thank you SO VERY MUCH for everything you do for us Cubs. I really can’t express to you enough the level of gratitude. This is the first site that comes up when I go into my browser. Your site and Stuart’s over at Strong Style Spirit are all I use to follow wrestling. If it weren’t for you two I would have stopped following the styles I love altogether. You are very much a big part of my life and I thank you for that :)

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