MMSTL - Behind the Numbers

Shown below are some intriguing numbers associated with the weekly operation of the Maryland Suburban Traveling League. As it's been said, "You only get out something, the amount of effort you put into it".

KEYBOARD INPUTS
The first 6 years of the frame-by-frame inputs (from the 1994-1995 season to 1999-2000), was performed using the Atari ST computer. Under this operating system, each person's line score was 42 characters in length. From 2000-2001 through 2005-2006, I migrated over to a Windows PC. Using Visual Basic, an error-trapping algorithm for line score inputs was added, which reduced the number of keystrokes from 42 down to about 29 per bowler, per game. So, with all things considered, the number of keystrokes for the last 12 years of the league under my watch, totalled up to well over an astonishing 5 million! It sounds like a lot -- and admittedly, it was -- but the benefits and insights reaped from the additional work were well worth the effort.

BOOKLETS
Regarding the weekly sheets/booklets, the numbers are somewhat staggering, as well. The last 10 years of the league yielded the total number of weekly booklets produced being at over 50,000, which also includes folding and stapling.

WEB PAGES
The Internet also had some substantial numbers. While over 50,000 booklets were produced, there were approximately twice the amount of web pages produced for the league -- somewhere in the neighborhood of 98,000 pages generated, overall, and sent to the MMSTL website. There were the standard web pages for the league, in general, such as the Team Standings, Individual Statistics, Counts and Frames, Weekly Highlights, and other stats that included the entire league at one glance. But there were also pages dedicated to each individual in the league on a weekly basis, including the weekly line scores and an updated history of each bowler's sets.

ANALYTICS
Today's method of tracking website visits includes advances in web technology in the form of "Analytics", involving an array of features regarding web traffic to each website. In the early days of the web, prior to the year 2000, the primary means of measuring website popularity was the "hit counter", which was essentially a small piece of web programming code plugged into a web page, which interacted between the web host of the MMSTL account, and the individuals who visited the web pages. Sometime around the year 2000, the beginnings of a broader range analytics were developing, and with early utilities, such as a web plug-in called "Statcounter", websites could determine where the web surfers were viewing the pages from, as well as information being stored about each page of a website. While it may not seem like much these days (with the advent of smartphones being so commonplace), the MMSTL, via only desktop PCs and Web TV users, had run up a total of approximately 2 million web hits during that early timeframe from 1996 to the mid-2000s, spanning somewhere between 85 and 110 countries. It should be noted, however, that there were a number of "web crawlers" or "web bots" out on the web that would programmatically visit web pages for a second or two from all around the world. It's interesting to consider that even when factoring in these "web bots" and their short visits shown in the analytics, the average visit time for the MMSTL site, according to StatCounter and Google Analytics, was 3 minutes and 45 seconds. This would mean that when compensating for short-timer 'web-crawler' visits, real people would be spending a considerable amount of time on the MMSTL website.