Preservation of J-Ball

- My wife & I's goal is to create a web site, small at first, with detailed info about the game here. I want to be able to show people what they've been missing with players/stats/history stuff basically. Since I'm starting from scratch on this, any help anyone could provide would be helpful!

Well, considering that I've set up two sites dedicated to the same thing, I think I may be able to help.

First of all, you need to know what kind of setup you'll have. That is to say, will you be able to run programs on the web server or will you just be able to post static pages? This is very important when it comes to how you generate and/or present the data - automated or staticly.

My first site was static only - the kind you generally get when you sign up with your local ISP. Since I'm a computer programmer and love playing with databases, I did generate a Player Meikan (Registry) one year on my local system, saving each page locally then uploaded it all. I used some client-side JavaScript to make it a bit more dynamic (especially for generating links in a common way between the local dynamic application and the static pages).

Next, take a look at Latham-san's site. This, too, is a standard static site located on his ISP. Latham-san used some Microsoft tool to build and deploy the entire site (which is why it looks so bad in Netscape with Japanese set to the default encoding - but that's Microsoft's fault, not his). Unfortunatly, Latham-san only used the site as a method to upgrade jobs (he now works for Asahi Shimbun, I think), so he retired from updating his site a couple of years ago. But there is still a great deal of very useful information there, and I often point people there for certain resources.

My second Pro Yakyu site, this one, is also my little playground for learning new technologies. I'm a computer programmer by day, and fiddle around with this site by night. The reason that I haven't been writing so much lately is that I've been working on a face lift and expansion. You will be seeing a great deal more data and information here soon. Major branches other than this forum will be teams and players for histories, schedules, and stats, and a writers' section where frequent submitters can have a little site of their own (starting of with highlighting their "articles," then perhaps migrating to more services).

But back to your question, namely pointers.

First of all, you should learn HTML. I know that a lot of HTML WYSIWYG editors can generate most of what you'll want to write, and you should use one to get started. But you should be able to open up an HTML page in a text editor and be able to edit it - add, delete, rearrange things. An intimate knowledge of HTML will get you a long way.

Second is graphics. Are you (or your wife) artistically tallented? If so, you've got it made. If not, you need to look for public domain (not copyrighted) images that you can use. Many come with various web site development kits - and Latham-san used some nice ones in the background of the first look-and-feel to his site. I've been using the Gimp to generate nice looking buttons for my remodelling.

Finally, there's programming. If you want to supply data (which I'm working on now), then you'll want to have a database from which to extract data and generate HTML pages either on the fly or once (creating static pages). To do that, you'll need a database and some software to get that data and output HTML. I'm a computer programmer and my language of choice (right now) is Java. I can (and did with the Nihon Series contest) write a page in JSP from scratch that accesses a database and displays a table of the results in an evening, complete with security checks. (If error and security checking don't take up most of the time, then you aren't doing it right. Ask Microsoft about their weekly security patches.)

Ah, and there is one other option available to setting up your own site. That would be to join forces here and see what can be done together. If you're like me, you'll probably turn down the offer in favor of being in full control of what you do. I understand that well as I turned down a paying analyst offer from the Baseball Guru. And I'm afraid that I can't offer pay - this is a site done for the love of the game.

Remember the addage from Field of Dreams: If you build it, they will come. That's true for a Pro Yakyu site. And if you send me a link to the finished site, I'll send people your way.

My reply to your second, more detailed, questionare via e-mail was returned undeliverable, so I'll post my reply here. After all, more people interested in building a Pro Yakyu site might be interested. Besides, it's got some good links as well.

- First off, thank you for the reply.

My pleasure. With both the e-mail and web-based replies.

- [...] I'm not looking, right now, to make my site a very fancy or super-powered site.

OK, then. A simple static site through an ISP or Geocities would be best. Oh, and speaking of Geocities, have you seen Borisov-san's site at:

    http://www.geocities.com/s_borisov/jb2001/index.html

yet? He's got quite a set up, entering data into an Access database and generating much of the data on the pages via Visual Basic scripts. What you describe is very much like this, no?

- I just want to start with basics like each player, little info about them like bat/throw, weight, height(both KG/Pounds CM/Feet, inches), primary position, date of birth. Then what each person did that year for their team.

I've got all of the above mentioned information (kg and cm only) in my database for players from 1996 (with some from 1995). In the coming weeks, you'll see this data appear on my site. I can write a program to do the metric conversion when it gets displayed. That's a good idea.

- For batters, Avg, Ab, R, H, 2b, 3b, Hr, Rbi, Sb, Cs, Sh, Sf, Hbp, Dp, Extra Bases, Total Bases, .Obp, Slg.

I think the only ones there I don't have in the database are OBP and Slg. But those can be calculated.

For the time being, though, I only have the data for a few players' careers entered. Kind of a "proof of concept" thing.

- Pitchers, W, L, Sv, Era, G, Gs, Gf, Cg, Sho, Ip, H, R, Er, Hr, Ibb, Bb, So.

Some of these I don't have, but it seems to me that I also have more categories than this. Essentially, anything in Baseball Magazine Sha's yearly Record Books is what I have (as that's my primary source). I've gotten data from Jim Allen in the past that has GS and GF which aren't covered in the Record Books, but even Allen-san's records are incomplete in that regard, so I dropped those fields.

- Close to what http://www.inter.co.jp/Baseball/ does, but with more stats.

My thinking exactly.

- Then every year in a review. Where each team stood, win/lose bracket. Which ones made the playoffs & a little info about that.

Ah, I never really have time to do that right. I would love to read your reviews.

- Then who lead the either the Pacific or Central League in each of the categories for batters & pitchers. An award section for MVP's, Sawamura, Rookie of the Year, Diamond gloves, Best of 9 for each year.

I've got that. But Albright-san has gone well beyond my announcement with stats and write ups. You can find his data/articles in the Yahoo files section for the Pro Yakyu (J-Ball - I hate that name) mailing list:

    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/j-ball/files/

He's started posting data in csv format so that I, who you couldn't pay to use a Microsoft product, can also read them. CSV is the standard comma delimeted format that ANY spreadsheet can read.

- Also, on the players playing stats, either a bold number for league leader or italics for a league leading tie.

This one is harder to do with automatically generated pages (which I'll be doing). Not impossible, mind you. Just harder. But it is something that I will eventually get to - so your doing it would be value added compared to my eventual set up.

- And a career leader section for careers in pitching/batting, highest seasonal leader, leader for each year.

For the historical section, right? Career top ten for lots of categories is something I'll get around to eventually.

- Hope I haven't lost you yet.

Not at all. You've got me excited!

- Then for a team section, team yearly totals, dimensions in both meters & feet for the field, seating info, locations for if someone wants to see a game.

All the good stuff that Latham-san did. I've been meaning to ask him if I could use his maps for my team section as well.

- [...] And ofcouse, daily box scores with current standings.

Current standings I experimented with a couple of years ago and can automate fairly easilly. But box scores.... I still have no idea how to make that a simple procedure. That's a lot of information! I did line scores before as well (with hits, runs, errors, double plays by each team). But even that was pretty much a full lunch hour to input.

If you can get box scores on the web every day, you'll have the admiration of Pro Yakyu fans throughout the world. Everyone wants them. But nobody is putting them out. (I don't consder Yahoo Japan's to be box scores, although they do carry a great deal of valuable information.)

- I have no real "programmer" knowledge of building a web page. How do I go about learning the basics for what I'll need?

1. Buy a book on HTML
2. Download Netscape Communicator 4.79 and create a page with its "Composer"
3. Open the page you created with a text editor
4. Download a page you really like the look of from the Web
5. Open that page in a text editor (separate window)
6. Compare and contrast the two text files

You can Save As HTML in MS Word, but Word really butchers "standard" HTML. Any single quotes will not display properly for me, so "Taguchi's decision" would become "Taguchi** decision" - where the ** is some strange Kanji I'd never seen before.

Microsoft's bread and butter is making tools that create INCOMPATIBLE, non-standard compliant output. There's a program called the "demoronifier" or "demoronizer" that takes output from Microsoft tools (like Word) and converts them to more standards compliant HTML. I suggested that Latham-san use such a tool after he put his site up, but he told me that I was the only one complaining (meaning that I'm the only one who doesn't use IE to view the Web). I use three different browsers right now, and unless the encoding is specified (which MS tools neglect to do), all three display Word/FrontPage documents poorly when viewed with the default Japanese encoding (which I usually use).

Ah, and I mentioned FrontPage. That's a tool to create and manage an entire site, creating and updating it locally, then uploading it to your ISP in one big "deployment" function. There are many similar products on the market which don't output mangled HTML like FrontPage does. Unfortunatly, because I don't do MS Windows, I've never given any of them a try myself, so I can't recommend one. HotMetal is one that I've heard a lot of good things about, though.

Can I copy/paste basic info from someone else's info (or just write it down on paper & type it in)? Are there any copyrighting laws I should know about?

Plagerism is something that you should try to avoid. I know that Borisov-san cuts and pastes articles from news sites, which is something that I won't do. Whether I agree with the politics behind copyright and/or IP (intellectual property) is a different matter. But I'm not willing to become a test case. I do quote from other sites as part of my own writing. Howevery, I include a link to the original article and add my own commentary as to what I think they mean - much is a similar fassion to this e-mail, where I quote a piece then comment on it.

So long as you are adding value to a work and siting that work, then I believe (I am not a lawer, so I may be wrong) that it is fine. You should read the copyright notices and/or user agreements from any site to see what you may or may not do.

And there was a case where some design company sued someone for taking their layout design (the HTML code) which they claimed was copyrighted. I don't know how that case came out, but find the suggestion of copyrighting a layout to be proposterous. If there is something in the HTML code (when using a text editor) that says that you can't use the HTML, then find another site to emulate. Reading notices and common sence should be fairly easy guides to
follow, though.

- Such as on Latham-san web page, he has a section for selling hats. Could I do that legally?

I'm not sure what he did to do that. You might want to e-mail him or the ProYakyu Shop to see if they did anything special to resell goods. But I do know that neither are doing it for profit (just covering costs for purchase and shipping).

- What books, newspapers would help the most(in English)?

He, he, he. I don't read the English press because I don't really like it. But I do have a list of "required reading" for researchers somewhere in the "Ask the Commish" section which I'd recommend. Search for Cromartie and/or Whiting.

- If the site gets good & popular, will any team/person official ask me stop?

Highly unlikely. The "powers that be" in Pro Yakyu are still pretty clueless to the Internet. Besides, I've ripped into a lot of people in high places in the business and have never recieved anything asking me to stop.

The only reason I can think of for a ceace and desist would be if you were making tons of money from your site (I've earned a total of 0 yen per year on both of mine), in which case the "powers that be" will be looking for a chunk of it.

> Or higher/buy the site?

Hmm. There is that possibility. The Baseball Guru, for example, appears to have been a hobby site gone commercial. I can see the possibility that they might value your content to the point that they want to bring you aboard to expand their own offerings. I've turned down all offers at "stratigic parterships" (many from on-line gambling sites) that I've gotten over the years as I have no desire to have my hobby be controlled by someone else. I even had an offer to scout from the Montreal Expos back after Nomo's big debut. (Glad I turned that one down.)

- How would I put individual stats on the page? Download something special for that or make it on Excel & copy/paste? How much can I start on this on a Microsoft program(Word, Excel, etc)?

Please, avoid MS Word at all costs. I belive that Excel's output is much better, but don't have any personal experience with it. For building tables, though, that would probably be the easiest way - building the tables in Excel, saving them in HTML format, then cutting and pasting the <table>...</table> in a text editor to where you want to put them on a page. Again, understanding HTML in a text editor is a must, and it only comes with lots of practice - and viewing the results with more than one browser (as IE tends to be more forgiving of bad HTML - since Microsoft failed to read the standard specs properly from the start!).

- Could I make any type of a profit on this? If so, how?

You're asking the wrong person about this one. But if you do it right, offers will come.

- Can I copy/paste team logo's, team info like phone numbers, address, coaches info without having to ask?

I've got contact information for the team front offices up. That's public information. You might want to avoid individual people's phone numbers and/or e-mail addresses as that would be an invasion of privacy. If for no other reason, than just to be a good semeritan.

Team logos are copyrighted materials and there's a chance that someone might come after you. I'd used them in the past, with my own touch ups from original ones without any problems. And now that I'm getting team pages up again, will most likely start using them again. Generally, their use by fans (not-for-profit) isn't frowned upon as they help contribute to team recognition. A fancy non-official logo created by a fan might not like his work put on someone else's site, though. So use good judgement and ask when you can. (Most "official" sites don't seem to bother with contact informatition, making that rather difficult.)

- I really do like Latham-san's web page   one of the two that got me interested in making a webpage(along with the PJB page). Did he take long on making that site?

It took him almost a year. Yes, a year since he first asked me for pointers. He didn't want to start off small, though. He wanted a complete site before he made it public. I feel that the site should grow, like a living entity, exposed to the forces of nature to bend it and shape it. Latham-san wanted to keep it in its nursury until it was in full bloom.

The problem with not having given it a "peer review" first was, among other things, not having that one little meta tag in there to set the page's encoding so that people browsing with Japanese as their default could read the page fine. Since he wasn't told of this flaw early on, it would have been too much of a task (according to him) to go through all of his 100+ pages and put in this one tag. I offered a UNIX shell script that would do it in seconds, but he refused. (The command line is so powerful, yet this generation of Windoze users don't understand it and dismiss it without a thought.)

- Since I can't put the info on my own computer because we only get 90 hours a month here before getting charge a lot. Which is better, buying my own domain name or using a share site like geocities?

Buying your own domain name will cost a great deal! And you'll have to find someone to host said domain, too. Now, it's best to either use your local ISP (it does offer like 5MB of home page space, right? Most do) or Geocities. You don't have to be connected 24/7 to use your ISP's. You generally FTP (File Transfer Protocol) the page to your home page directory (your ISP will have information on how to do that, if they offer the service), and there it sits, waiting for people to acces it.

The only reason I can think of for having your own dedicated domain name and/or server is to program it to do what you want. Most ISPs don't allow you to execute your own code for security reasons. I'm a programmer and want to run my own code, so that's the solution that works best for me. After you've gotten good with HTML, played around with JavaScript, and perhaps studied a language for generating your pages, then you might want to take that next step. But for now, your ISP or Geocities is most likely all you need.

Well, it's been a pleasure to answer so many good questions. Most of them, though, are just advice which you can take or leave. If I had my Writers' section up and running, I could even act as Geocities - which is something that I think I'd like to do. But there are a lot of security issues that would have to be worked out first, so I don't see it happening any time soon.

To conclude, I recommend starting out with a few pages - a main page with links to a few secondary main pages with links to prototype player, team, etc. pages. Put those up on a site and inform a few people about them for some feedback. Put on an asbestos (flame retardent) suit and read the reviews. That means, be ready for critisism and accept it as constructive, not an attack on what you did. Belive me, it won't be easy to accept at first. But if you aren't somewhat flame retardant to begin with, putting anything on the Net will be a heart breaking experience. Gamman! After that, tweek the few pages you have until all of the little details are
determined. Then, create the rest of the site using these as a template.

I wish you the best in your endevor. Gambare!