Mahjong,

Thanks for taking the initiative on this. I think this is a great
idea and hope it catches on with the group so that it becomes truly
useful.

One question I have is whether the table is intended to record
individual visits to a letterbox, or the current status for each
box. (i.e. should the Letterbox name be a key for the table?)

With this first use, each new box visitor would locate (or add if not
present) the record for the box they visited and update this record
with the latest status. The advantage would be that there is one
record to find for the most recent status of the box you are
interested in, on the downside we'd lose the history of the comments
section, and people might conflict on concurrent edits to the same
box.

With the second use, any given box could have multiple entries. This
avoids conflicts (entries would rarely be edited by multiple people
at the same time), and keeps the history (which is nice).

My personal opinion is that this latter use is the more interesting
as it will serve to also illustrate how active the boxes.

This use though will place more of an emphasis on the date column.
We're currently using quite a mixture of date formats. I think it
will make the data much more useful if we standardize on a date
format. Unfortunately it looks as though the Yahoo table columns are
just test strings. This doesn't lead to good sorting behavior for
dates. Here are a couple of ideas:

o Standardize on a date format like: YYYY-MM-DD

+ This will sort the dates in a reasonable fashion in Yahoo.
- In practice though it will be nearly impossible to keep all the
records consist.

o Periodically download the data, scrub it, then upload the scrubbed
data.

+ This approach could be used to enforce consistency in other
columns as well. For example, the Status column you mentioned.
o I'm not sure whether Yahoo will support this or not.
- Updates made while the data is being scrubbed might be lost
if one isn't careful.
- It's a periodic maintenance task to make this happen.

Thoughts? BTW, I'd be happy to help with the maintenance.

Cheers,

-Brad (Seekyr).


--- In letterbox-usa@yahoogroups.com, "abacus00"
wrote:
> Now that I've done the first extract from the database I have
> a couple easy requests to assist that process.
>
> * Please avoid using commas. This goes for both dates and the
> text fields. Substitute "." "-" ";" "/" as appropriate. The
> extract process employs commas as field separators so Excel
> interprets any commas you use as a new field when parsing the
> data (separating it back into fields).
>
> * Substitute single quotes for double quotes if you want them
> to appear in the extract file. The extract process inserts
> quotes around each text field so I strip out all the double
> quotes.
>
> * Keep the Status to one or two words -- Good, Damp, etc. Expand
> with specifics in the Comments area.

A quick question, should we also keep our words to a minimum when
making entries in the "comments" field on the new Database? One of my
entries is lengthy and mentions how beautiful the walk was, and I am
wondering if I took up too much space, and should I restrict myself in
the future. Thanks.
:-)
catbead

Comments should include an elaboration of the one or two word
status (if necessary) and any other information that might be
useful to someone planning a letterboxing trip. Was the trail
longer or harder than expected, more beautiful, heavily traveled,
easy or hard for young children. Were the clues clear or hard to
follow. Is the stamp exceptional. Those wonderful boxing stories
should be saved for the talk list. For the database, it's "just
the facts."

Please do not include hints (or spoilers) to clues that the
placer has made intentionally vague. If you visit a mystery box
in conjunction with other boxes you should probably just list
the year and month and not the date for the mystery box.

--Mahjong

--- In letterbox-usa@yahoogroups.com, "ehughes52" wrote:
> A quick question, should we also keep our words to a minimum when
> making entries in the "comments" field on the new Database? One
of my
> entries is lengthy and mentions how beautiful the walk was, and I
am
> wondering if I took up too much space, and should I restrict
myself in
> the future. Thanks.
> :-)
> catbead

Great work on the Database! One quick question. Since it posts alphabetically, should there be a note to drop 'The' so, for instance, 'The Bassackwards Letterbox' would post under 'B' and not 'T'? Or am I getting too picky? :)

Debean

abacus00 wrote:
Now that I've done the first extract from the database I have
a couple easy requests to assist that process.

* Please avoid using commas. This goes for both dates and the
text fields. Substitute "." "-" ";" "/" as appropriate. The
extract process employs commas as field separators so Excel
interprets any commas you use as a new field when parsing the
data (separating it back into fields).

* Substitute single quotes for double quotes if you want them
to appear in the extract file. The extract process inserts
quotes around each text field so I strip out all the double
quotes.

* Keep the Status to one or two words -- Good, Damp, etc. Expand
with specifics in the Comments area.





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