It kinda snuck up on me, but I realized last night that today is our 5th Birthday!
First, please don’t feel uncomfortable if you didn’t bring a gift… You have plenty of time to bring one later (SUBTLE HINT). For those of you that haven’t been with us all along this site was originally called Razorback Legacy and I first registered the domain five years ago today.
It may be weird in a “Drawing Hands” sort of way, but I’ll attempt to give a short history of this Razorback history site.
It’s been said before, but I truly mean it when I say “I love that helmet” – that’s where everything started. Back in 2004 I began doing a lot of research on the History of the Razorback Football Helmet and found it very difficult to locate pictures that were labeled with actual dates. My quest eventually inspired me to create a historical Razorback Photo archive – RazorbackLegacy.com was born. What began as 8 or 9 hundred photos that I gathered from around the internet eventually grew to over 5,000 photos. Phil (Route66 – among other names from WooPig and Hogville) and Rex of Oinkville / Woopig fame both deserve a lot of the credit for jump starting the photo archive.
Another big influence on our site was SoonerStats.com which exhaustively covers all aspects of Oklahoma Sooner history – It’s what Hog Database wants to be when it grows up. NOTE: hogdb will be growing quickly over the summer so look for that to happen (watch out for unintentional pun) sooner rather than later. Keep checking back.
Late in 2005 I added a lot of the database information to the site like seasons, coaches, opponents, etc. This is what the version 2 of Razorback Legacy looked like – Fall of 2005.
Another re-design before the 2007 season.
In 2008 I made the tough decision to rename and move my site to Hog Database (www.hogdb.com). A lot of factors went into the decision, but there was a lot of concern at that time about the Athletic Department cracking down on sites that use the “Razorback™ ” name or logo. At the same time I also made the switch to WordPress so I could easily update the front page as improvements are made to the site. Although technically Hog Database is a blog, I definitely don’t consider myself a “Blogger”. Luckily for you though, we have one on staff. When I say “Staff” of course, I mean – an over qualified and unpaid die hard Razorback Fan that loves to write about the Hogs. The best part of it all is that he (SharpTusk) is the best at including the things I love most about football… History and Stats.
The highlight of the fall for me was when Chris Bahn wrote an article about Hog Database on ArkansasSports360.com after the release of the Razorback Research Wizard in November. Give it a read whenever you have a few minutes to kill.
Well, that’s it so far. I have a lot of plans for the upcoming weeks and months and next on my list is posting a complete historical roster going back to 1894 with player stats soon to follow.
If you aren’t already please consider following Hog Database on Twitter and Facebook to keep latest in Razorback history.
Thank you for replying to the job posting Mike,
It’s nice to hear from someone that’s actually in the US… I expected going in that I may have to find an overseas firm to do this project because I’m not sure what kind of cost is going to be involved. I’ll start off by expanding on the post I made on freelance switch…
I’m just a fan of the Razorbacks and do this as a personal project. I’ve been working on the site for – wow… 5 years tomorrow. I work at the University of Arkansas as an Administrative Assistant so needless to say I don’t bring in a lot of money. But, each year about this time I try to do a project on the site with the money I get back from our tax return and this year I really hope to take the site to the next level.
Right now the site runs on wordpress for the blog and then individually coded pages for the seasons, coaches, opponents, games, etc which pulls information from a mysql database that I input data using phpmyadmin (and It’s a big pain).
I would like to add a roster system to the site that would be similar to the one on soonerstats.com (http://soonerstats.com/football/players/roster.cfm) or nyjets.com (http://www.newyorkjets.com/team/all_time)
I would also love to have an easier way to add information to my database. The tables I use are huge and honestly could be a lot bigger. They are all tied to other tables so for example when I want to say Arkansas played Texas A&M I have to put in a 121 for AR and a 100 for A&M. Same goes for cities, stadiums, etc, etc. I really need all this simplified with drop down menus and if it could be integrated into the admin panel of WordPress it would be a big plus.
My biggest worry is working with the Taxonomy system.
In a perfect world I would want my site to work like a combination of
whats described in these two links:
http://justintadlock.com/archives/2009/06/04/using-custom-taxonomies-to-create-a-movie-database
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/329967?replies=7
From the movie database in the first link you can click on Tom Hanks and it will show all the posts relating to him just as if he were a regular tag within wordpress. I want the players, coaches, opponents, seasons, to all work the same way on my site. That looks pretty straight forward… I think I could do the stuff described in that article to get it ready, but I have no idea how to get the stuff from the database to display there as well.
I looked at the screenshot from the other site and that looks like it would be perfect for what I need. Does that make sense?
The stats part of my site (http://www.hogdb.com/db/records/) is 100% html. After a roster is in place it only makes sense for a player’s stats to be shown on his profile page as well as the game page. A quick example…
The passing yards record for game page:
http://www.hogdb.com/db/records/offense/passing/yards/game/
Ryan Mallett would be selectable, but I’m not sure the best way to do this as I already have a database with over 2,000 players in it going back to 1894. Then probably pick a season which would show the games played so it can connect it to a game. I could then just input in the rest of the stats into text fields. This probably sounds like a much bigger task that it will probably end up being. All stats could be put into a single table for offense and defense.
Here is an example of a single game stat sheet.
http://web1.ncaa.org/mfb/2009/Internet/recaps/2009000000559.HTML
From there each stat page would just be slightly tweaked to show, for example: One page would show players that threw more than 250 yards in a game in order by yards while another would only show players with more than 3 touchdown passes and so on.
I would rather pay based on project – hourly rates scare me because I just don’t know how much time is required to work on this type of project and I would be afraid I would have to stop before you could complete it.
If this is something you think you could do and are interested I would love to hear back with a general estimate on what you think everything could cost. If necessary I may have to cut certain parts of the project out to bring allow it to fit my budget.
Thanks, Jacob
