Golden Skate Lessons

[CaroLiza_fan]

It's not exactly hidden to me, and highlighting that obvious text makes it more visible:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8FhmS7SlrItd3p2OWdCMDZXNm8/view?usp=sharing

Oh drat! You mean that people may actually have seen my other comment without much bother...

(I'll send you a PM with the link. You'll understand why I'm being so cryptic when you read it).

CaroLiza_fan

 

[sabinfire]

Oh drat! You mean that people may actually have seen my other comment without much bother...

Maybe only if they have a large high-quality monitor. When I move this to my smaller, lesser monitors... it's a bit more difficult to read. But you can still highlight/quote it to make the text clear if you know it's there...

 

[CaroLiza_fan]

Maybe only if they have a large high-quality monitor. When I move this to my smaller, lesser monitors... it's a bit more difficult to read. But you can still highlight/quote it to make the text clear if you know it's there...

Yeah, I realise about the highlighting. But, most people wouldn't think of highlighting a comment. Unless they had an idea that there was something there!

Mmmm. So. whether you see something or not is all down to how good your monitor is.

Right, that's it settled. I'm not posting secret messages again! It's too big a risk to take.

CaroLiza_fan

 

[sabinfire]

Right, that's it settled. I'm not posting secret messages again! It's too big a risk to take.

I wouldn't, though I'm not sure many folks here invest at least $400+ USD in their desktop monitor(s).

 

[dorispulaski]

I intended the single box table with white text inside trick for spoilers and guessing games. My idea was to be obvious that the answer was there, but not easy to read. There is a spoiler hack for vbulletin, but GS has never installed it.

I first ran into it with a spammer who was trying to post a spam link. Apparently, they get credit for the ilnk even if no one can read it.

It was also a spammer that introduced me to links behind emoticons!

If the white box spoiler is too easy to read, that won't do it.( It is not easy on my dumbphone, but that is not a high res monitor)

Can you read this spoiler without selecting the box?

Welcome to Hidden Valley Ranch!

 

[sabinfire]

Nope. All modifications to contrast and brightness still show that as pure black to me.

 

[dorispulaski]

Can you read this spoiler without selecting the box?
in this revised version of the white box?

Welcome to White Flower Farm!

 

[sabinfire]

Nope. Just pure white with no trace of text, no matter my display configuration.

 

[CaroLiza_fan]

I intended the single box table with white text inside trick for spoilers and guessing games. My idea was to be obvious that the answer was there, but not easy to read. There is a spoiler hack for vbulletin, but GS has never installed it.

I first ran into it with a spammer who was trying to post a spam link. Apparently, they get credit for the ink even if no one can read it.

It was also a spammer that introduced me to links behind emoticons!

If the white box spoiler is too easy to read, that won't do it.( It is not easy on my dumbphone, but that is not a high res monitor)

Can you read this spoiler without selecting the box?

Welcome to Hidden Valley!

I couldn't, anyway.

But, it reminded me of something I have been wondering.

About a year ago, I started a thread about Junior competitions, which included a table outlining my ideas on age eligibility.

When I had originally compiled the table in Word, I had the cells showing the eligibility for each age group coloured in red, so that it was easy to see. But, when I copied the table over to GS using the WYSIWYG mode, the background colour did not copy over, and I was left with a blank table! In the end, I had to put ticks in the boxes, which was not as visually effective.

I thought nothing more of it until a few months ago, when you and Mrs. P started posting entry lists in the competition threads which included the category colour coding.

So, how do you get the background colour in tables?

I can see the coding in the quote, but am curious as to how to do it without actually making out the codes yourself.

Also, your table above is only a single cell. If you have a multiple cell table, how to you colour in individual cells within it? Or colour in cells that are adjacent to each other?

CaroLiza_fan

 

[dorispulaski]

If you look at the editor tool bar, there is a letter A with a drop down button. Hit the drop down. Click on a color. The editor will give you the following when you click on blue:
COLOR="#0000FF"][/COLOR

I have removed the end square brackets so you can see the code.

If you click on red you get:
COLOR="#FF0000"][/COLOR

So to get a two square table,

Welcome to Red Flower Farm!

Welcome to Blue Flower Farm!

 

[CaroLiza_fan]

If you look at the editor tool bar, there is a letter A with a drop down button. Hit the drop down. Click on a color. The editor will give you the following when you click on blue:
COLOR="#0000FF"][/COLOR

I have removed the end square brackets so you can see the code.

If you click on red you get:
COLOR="#FF0000"][/COLOR

So to get a two square table,

Welcome to Red Flower Farm!

Welcome to Blue Flower Farm!

OK. I have just been trying that method, and all I am succeeding in doing is changing the font colour.

Is this the real life?	Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide	No escape from reality
Open your eyes	Look up to the skies and see
I'm just a poor boy	I need no sympathy
Cause I'm easy come	Easy go
Little high	Little low
Any way the wind blows	Doesn't really matter to me
To me...

Is it because I am attempting to do it in WYSIWYG mode?

(I really don't like working with tables in Source Mode because, with having so many lines of code, it is very confusing working out whereabouts in the table you are).

I'm never going to make a computer programmer...

CaroLiza_fan

 

[dorispulaski]

I switch back and forth between the two modes.

There is AFAIK, no way to select the background to give it a color. Either td or tr can carry a background color

TD="bgcolor: "

Copy the color code before the closing parentheses.

 

[CaroLiza_fan]

Thank you. Just been studying the code in your 2 cell table, and have been comparing it to my multi-cell table, and I think I've cracked it!

So, basically, to set the colour of a row, you go into Source Mode and when you see [TR] before the writing for the row you want, you change it to [TR="bgcolor: #FF0000"] to get a red row, or [TR="bgcolor: #0000ff"] to get blue, and so on.

And some subsequent experimenting made me work out that to change the colour of a single cell, you do the same when you see [TD] before the writing for the cell you want.

So, here is the resultant table (I have changed the font colour of the cells with coloured backgrounds to white as black isn't very clear against the red or blue. This is easier to do in WYSIWYG Mode)

Is this the real life?	Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide	No escape from reality
Open your eyes	Look up to the skies and see
I'm just a poor boy	I need no sympathy
Cause I'm easy come	Easy go
Little high	Little low
Any way the wind blows	Doesn't really matter to me
To me...

Oops! Never noticed until there now that I had picked the wrong shade of blue for the final cell I coloured in! :

Somehow, I don't think I'll be colouring in cells too often! That is complicated for somebody like me who is not very computer minded!

CaroLiza_fan

 

[dorispulaski]

I posted the following originally in the Sonia Lafuente thread, but the existence of the Way Back Machine and the full usefulness of Tracings.net have become very evident to me this season in my quest to get as many fan fests as possible updated. It has often been the case that program info and competitive results are not available for some skaters at some times. Sonia has instances of that.

She has been around so long that thrifty federations have deleted the competition data from their servers. In which case, one can always find some info at

Her Tracings.net entry:
http://tracings.net/lafu-soni.html

This is particularly useful in the case of federations that keep the front page up for some time, but which delete all the files that the front page links to, so that the data is not even on the
Way Back Machine. https://archive.org/web/

Croatia does this, so that Golden Spin data is better referenced from Tracings. Sonia competed at Golden Spin 2010.

Here is the Golden Spin 2010 link.
http://www.croskate.hr/media/cms/GSp10A/index.htm

And when you try to go there, no data comes up. So I went to the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http:/...p10A/index.htm

and there are 13 copies. Unfortunately, the actual data pages have not been archived.

In which case, I am happy to find that Melanie Hoyt at Tracings has the Golden Spin 2010 data here:

http://tracings.net/2010gspin.html

Plus Tracings has pages for competitions which has scores and placings for both SP and LP as well as the Final score. And she includes many national competitions that are rather small, like the Spanish Junior Championships of 2008 at which Sonia competed.
http://tracings.net/2008espn.html

I am sad to report that Melanie has not been updating her files sinces the 2014 Olympics due to grad school commitments, but elated that now that the semester has ended, she is trying to catch up!

http://tracings.net/

 

[CaroLiza_fan]

Since Doris has copied her post from the Sonia Lafuente Fan Fest over to this thread, I thought I should follow suit and copy my reply over as well.

CaroLiza_fan

She has been around so long that thrifty federations have deleted the competition data from their servers. In which case, one can always find some info at

Her Tracings.net entry:
http://tracings.net/lafu-soni.html

This is particularly useful in the case of federations that keep the front page up for some time, but which delete all the files that the front page links to, so that the data is not even on the Way Back Machine. Croatia does this, so that Golden Spin data is better referenced from Tracings.

Here is the Golden Spin 2010 link.
http://www.croskate.hr/media/cms/GSp10A/index.htm

And when you try to go there, no data comes up. So I went to the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.croskate.hr/media/cms/GSp10A/index.htm

and there are 13 copies. Unfortunately, the actual data pages have not been archived.

In which case, I am happy to find that Melanie Hoyt has the Golden Spin 2010 data here:

http://tracings.net/2010gspin.html

Oops! I hadn't checked all the links to see if any were dead! : Thank you for pointing that out that some were. I will be more careful in future.

I have now updated the 4 links that were not working:

2011 Spanish Championships (erm, this one was due to a typing error on the link on Tracings.net ...)
2011 and 2010 Golden Spin
2008 Coupe de Nice

Where I can't find the original results pages, the order of preference I am tending to use for the links is:

1. the Web Archive of the original page
   
   
2. Tracings.net
   
   
3. Wikipedia
   
   
4. Eiskunstlauf Ecke (a German forum which has a great results archive)

Plus Tracings has pages for competitions which has scores and placings for both SP and LP as well as the Final score. And she includes many national competitions that are rather small, like the Spanish Junior Championships of 2008 at which Sonia competed.
http://tracings.net/2008espn.html

I am sad to report that Melanie has not been updating her files sinces the 2014 Olympics due to grad school commitments, but elated that now that the semester has ended, she is trying to catch up!

http://tracings.net/

Yeah, Tacings.net is brilliant. It has got to the stage that it is my first stop when looking for results (even before Wikipedia!)

I actually already have the 2008 Spanish Junior Championships in the list – they were held in December 2007, so it's the old mis-nomer story that frequently catches a lot of people (like me!) out.

But, I just spotted that the December 2009 Spanish Championships were missed, so I'll add them in now. (EDIT: done)

And thank you for letting us know why Tracings had not been updated for this season. I had been getting worried that the site had maybe closed down...

I still can't believe that that ultra-detailed site is the work of just one person. I am totally in awe of what she has done!

All the best for the future Melanie!

CaroLiza_fan

 

[dorispulaski]

I have been trying to be sure that some of the scores that I know will disappear are stored by Wayback. 2015 Russian nationals and 2014 Golden Spin are now on Wayback!

Most of Canadian Nationals are stored, but I get a http 302 error with the senior men's FS and the Free Dance. Does anyone knows what this problem is about?

Also, Coupe de Nice does not allow webcrawlers, so when you try to store their data on Wayback, you get a robot error.

Is therean easy way around these problems?

 

[CaroLiza_fan]

I have been trying to be sure that some of the scores that I know will disappear are stored by Wayback. 2015Russian nationals and 2014 Golden Spin are on wayback. Most of Canadian Nationals are stored, but I get a http 302 error with the senior men's FS and the Free Dance. Does anyone knows what this problem is about?

Also, Coupe de Nice does not allow webcrawlwlers, so when you try to store their data on Wayback, you geta robot error.

Is therean easy way around these problems?

Don't know whether it will get around the problems you describe, but when I was doing Jenni Saarinen's Fan Fest, I came across another archiving website.

As I have said already, Tracings.net is now my first stop when looking for results. But, Melanie didn't have a link for the 2012 Ice Star entries / results page. So, I went to the Ice Star Wikipedia page, and they had the following link for the archived 2012 results:

http://webcitation.org/6BSXopmc6

Unfortunately, when I went into it, all that was archived was the front page. The actual results pages were not there.

But, given that you can request pages to be archived before they disappear, WebCite might turn out to be a useful alternative to Web Archive.

Hope this helps

CaroLiza_fan

 

[dorispulaski]

It did help. Webcite is a lot more formal than Wayback, (and therefore not as quick to use), but it is more explanatory when something goes wrong. Despite the fact that I can still download the pdf for the senior men's FS, there is something about the file that yielded the following from the Skate Canada website:

Sorry

When WebCite tried to archive the page, it received a Page Not Found error from the website concerned.

WebCite tried to retrieve the page at: 2015-06-29 06:27:27

I expect that is what the http 302 error that wayback gave me was about.

Webcite successfully archived the Senior FD.

 

[dorispulaski]

Further investigations:

Webcite is not a webcrawler, so it successfully archived the summary pages of 2014 Coupe de Nice for me. It also is mildly annoying to use, as it fills up my reader with email.

I will definitely be using it for sites that prohibit web crawlers, like Coupe de Nice.

First pops up a page like this:

WebCite® archiving request processed


Thank you for your submission. Your request to archive the content of


http://nice-baie-des-anges.fr/images...l/CAT004RS.HTM


has been entered into the archival queue. An archive of this page should shortly be available at


http://www.webcitation.org/6ZdsdKBN6

If the archiving process has been successful, you can cite this work as follows:

Nice-Baie des Anges. 2014 Coupe de Nice Senior Ladies Summary Results. . 2015-06-29. URL:http://nice-baie-des-anges.fr/images...l/CAT004RS.HTM. Accessed: 2015-06-29. (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/6ZdsdKBN6)

Please note that the short ("opaque") form of the WebCite® URL should be used only in addition to citing the original URL in your bibliographic reference.

Alternatively, please use the "transparent" (but very long!) WebCite® URL:

http://www.webcitation.org/query?url...ate=2015-06-29

An e-mail will be sent within the next few minutes to *********** when the archive process is complete, confirming this archive operation.

Thank you for using WebCite

Then it sends an email that says all the same stuff, but tells you the data is successfully stored.

Also the search function is not as useful as Wayback.

Wayback is partically nice for rolling back ISU bios to an earlier season.

This allows me to see personal bests as of the end of a season, and also what music was used for prior seasons very quickly, just by popping through the Wayback captures via their convenient calendars.

Neither site is foolproof with Skate Canada pdf files though. However, success does seem to come eventally if one is persistent.

 

[dorispulaski]

I now understand a bit more about my troubles with list spacings.

While it is true that if you put two blank lines between each bulleted item in a list, vbulletin will yield a list with single spaces, unfortunately, when you go back and edit the entry, your single spaced list is reduced again to a list with no spaces.

So you can either put the extra spaces in every time you edit the post, or you can skip using the list command, or you can use my silly empty table trick.

This was driving me nuts for some time, so thank you all for your help in getting it sorted.