PVS Webmaster’s Blog

There are more questions about the swimming databases than any other thing on the PVS website. Since the new season of swim meets is beginning, I thought I’d make this the next topic on the blog.

There are two primary databases for swim times, one from USA Swimming and one run by Potomac Valley Swimming. You can get to these databases using the “Online Database” menu button on the PVS Home Page. There were so many questions about the differences between these two databases, that I wrote a Primer on Swimming Databases. The essential differences are that the USA Swimming database includes all USA Swimming-sanctioned meet results, including approved and observed meets. What is doesn’t include are 25 yard/meter event results or 100 yard/meter relay results. The PVS database (using the commercial Hy-Tek TMOnline product) contains results from the events the USA Swimming database doesn’t include. But, it does not contain results from approved or observed meets.

The rest of this blog posting will be about the USA Swimming database. A future blog posting will cover the PVS database. Unless you are looking for results from 25 yard/meter events, I recommend you use the USA Swimming database. It is the most complete and accurate database. In the PVS database, errors generated from a meet database such as typos of names, birth dates, or ID numbers are often not corrected due to the difficulty of doing so.

When you click on the link for the USA Swimming Database on the Searchable Databases page, you get taken to the following screen on the USA Swimming Website.

This “Find a Time” page shows you all the different ways you can search the database. If you want to find a swimmer’s rank within an event, select the link in number one. You will be presented with the form below. You can enter the swimmer’s name, the data range of interest, the event and some other optional parameters.

If you want to find all the times for a particular swimmer, select the link in number two. You will get the form shown below. In addition to the swimmers name and time frame of interest, you can enter other filtering parameters such as only LCM or SCY times, only the best time in each event, only a particular event, etc.

The next option is to search by Event Rank (shown below). Here you can get the list of top swimmers in an event. You can select the list to only include swimmers in and LSC (e.g. PVS), or a zone (e.g. Eastern Zone) or all of USA Swimming.

The final option is for the IM Extreme Challenge Ranking (see below). You can find out more about the USA Swimming IM Extreme Challenge program on the USA Swimming website.

While you are on the databases page of the USA Swimming website, you might also want to check out the Toyota Virtual Club Championship. See how your team stacks up against other teams in PVS, the Eastern Zone and all of USA Swimming.

As you can see, the USA Swimming Database provides you with the most different ways to filter and view swimming results. Take some time to explore the options, and I think you will find this to be the better database.

The next installment of this blog will describe how to use the PVS Searchable Database.

As an experiment, I have enabled comments on this blog posting. Questions and comments are welcome, but the comments will be moderated and any comments that are inappropriate or not related to the topic will be deleted.

Tim

Today marks the launch of a RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed on the PVS web site. By subscribing to the RSS feed, you can get notified through your RSS Reader whenever anything new is posted on the “New Stuff” page of the site. If your web browser is Mozilla Firefox (my recommendation), you can just click on the link at the top of the “New Stuff” page to subscribe to the feed. Likewise, if your web browser is Internet Explorer 7, you can also click on the link to subscribe to the feed. If you are still using Internet Explorer 6 or an earlier version as your web browser, you will need another RSS Reader. You can get some guidance on selecting a reader here.

If you want to find out more about RSS, read this article or check out this tutorial.  You can even subscribe to a RSS feed of this blog by clicking on the “Entries (RSS)” link at the bottom of this page.

I wanted to introduce myself as the new Webmaster of Potomac Valley Swimming. I am taking over for John Hirschmann, who helped start the PVS website in 1996 and made it a great success for eleven years. You can contact John at hirschj@erols.com and let him know how much you appreciate his efforts for so many years.

This blog will be used to explain various features of the PVS website, particularly new features as they are implemented. Two new pages that are planned for this fall are a page for Parents and a page for Athletes.

Please send you comments to me at webmaster@pvswim.org. Tell me what you’d like to see on the blog, what you like and dislike about the website, and what you’d like to see on the website.

Tim Husson