lucha db update for 04/19/09

Lots of stuff to catch up with, and I don’t post anything this time on Sunday anyway. No news, adjust your google pipe feed accordingly.

This week month extended period of time (that continues to extend as I write this) in ideas I have that I wish I didn’t have hours later:

* Rudo/Tecnico and wrestler name recognition has been vastly expanded for CMLL and AAA. I’ve been working on this for a couple months; it was a ton of work, so pretend to care for my benefit. For AAA, this covers just their TV tapings. For CMLL, I’ve set up tecnico/rudo status for Mexico City (Arena Coliseo & Arena Mexico), and there’s also separate rosters and status for both Arena Puebla and for Arena Coliseo Guadalajara. If you see PUEBLA and ACG abbreviations, that’s what’s going on there.

In my database, rudo/tecnico status can be set per wrestler on an individual match status or per wrestler over a range of dates. The latter way is a lot simpler, but the wrestler needs to be in the system as a unique. This meant I’ve increased the number of wrestlers being tracked somewhere around 20%-30%. If someone wrestled 3 matches on TV taping or in the same arena, they probably got a profile (though less so when I got to the early 90s or if they were a foreign wrestler never coming back.) A lot more old gimmicks are correctly being assigned to the correct wrestler, though it did seem like there were times where what we have on the luchawiki and what I found in the match results about when people were doing a character.

Most of my work determining rudo/tecnico status was just working off what I did now – there’s enough guys who never change sides (Octagon) or didn’t change sides for a long stretch of time that I could just cascade statuses out from there. It’s not perfect – rudo vs rudo feuds, and times where people turned yet were still be booked on the wrong side were hard to deal with, and any corrections are appreciated.

The database is not perfect, it never will be, but it’s a lot more accurate than it had been.

* After finishing all of this, I thought about was more vital missing from the database, and came up with Promo Azteca and pre-2002 IWRG results. I actually have a wonderful file of it, but converting into a format I can add to my site is a long, mindnumbing process manually and I never could figure out a way to do it automatically.

And then I got to thinking about programs I’ve written to scrape sites for links, and how that’s not too far away from scraping a file, and somewhere around 2AM, I figured it out. Does that count as obsessive compulsive disorder? I ought to find out someday.

PROMELL/Promo Azteca results are now in the event database and rudo/tecnico stints have been coded for all wrestlers. Arena Naucalapn results, where I have them, now go back as far as 10/1991; IWRG starts around 1996. I’m thinking I’ll add ENSEMA and Ultimo Dragon produced shows and break out those shorter term promotions onto their own pages for easy browsing, but if this sentence is still here, I haven’t gotten to it just yet.

IWRG results need to be cleaned up, but I’m sure it’s going to be such a pain to deal with all the undercards who wrestled for a month and disappeared into the ether (because it was a pain to do the same with AAA) that I’m probably doing other things first unless there’s some sort of demand.

If there’s more places that people need, let me know and I’ll see what I can do. I think I want to add Pista Revolution, because that was a regular DF stop for CMLL when they were running, plus earlier stuff for Puebla and GDL, but not sure what besides that.

– Adding/improving all that data has some ancillary benefits besides just making the events pages look more colorful, though I think I’d be happy with that.

* The wrestler cards have rudo/tecnico and promotion information, as mentioned above. Now that I’ve got them better sorted and identified, I’ve also added win/loss records by major promotion shows (AAA TV/CMLL DF) for each year. (This takes a third of a day to run, so I’m trying to wait to run it again for IWRG, etc. And I still haven’t quite figured out how I’m doing it for 2009 without it taking forever to run each day.)

* Having past rudo/tecnico status for Arena Puebla and Arena Guadalajara doesn’t do you much good if their arena pages don’t automatically update, and they haven’t been the last few months because it’s taken too long to do that each morning. I’ve fixed a couple problems, and also have changed the pages from being 52 shows at a page to the full year’s list at a time. It makes it a lot faster to update – no need to recreate every single page any time any event is added – but it does make some pages enormous. Maybe I’ll change it again, but at least it’s updating now.

I’m also sorting the cards like it’s being done in the match finder (“El” and “La” are being shifted to the end of the word, etc.). I don’t know if anyone uses the index page for that section, but it’s getting long and I may split it up somehow.

* new toy: Historical Rosters. Not especially accurate, but if you need a starting point when trying to figure out who was around when on a certain date, you could do worse. You could do better.

There might be more little things along this line, but I’m trying to figure them out.

I think that’s everything? Still need to fix the stips pages, still have lots of project with the wiki. Plus, the usual stuff I don’t get around to doing because I don’t know that anyone uses.

In case it’s not been clear, this data is free for anyone to use. I’d even hand out a zip of the whole database, if I could figure out how to do it, if someone wanted it, and if they could deal with my awful table structure.