Bullock Smithy - Information on the Results Pages
This page contains a variety of information that you may find useful
when you are using the results pages. If you are looking for
information about the route, try the
Route Information page.
An index of the information on this page appears below or you
can simply scroll down to reach these items.
Navigating the Results Pages
Like the Bullock Smithy itself, navigation can be a bit of a problem
in these pages. There are lots of hyperlinks and it's very easy to
wander round and round and then end up not knowing how to get back to
the start (sound familiar?). Unlike the hike however, you have the
Back button on your browser to help you and if you still end up stuck
then there is a link at the
bottom of most of
the results pages which will take you back to the main page.
Each hiker's name which appears on the results pages is a link to the
surname search mechanism. It will bring up a list of all hikers with
that surname and show you their results over the years. The years
shown on that page are links which will take you to the main results
page for that year. From that page you can then link to the other
results formats for that year. You will also see a
RESULTS INDEX link
here and there which will take you to a table of all result formats
for all years.
Result Formats
There are currently four formats or views of the results data that you
can obtain from the results pages. These are:
- Full results
- A full listing of all hikers, their position, their times at each
checkpoint and their total time. This is nearly identical to the
format currently in use in the official results booklet.
- Stage times
- A full listing of all hikers and the time (in minutes) that they
took to get between checkpoints.
- Statistics
- A summary of the average, maximum and minimum times for all
hikers who finished the hike. The times for each stage are given as
well as the total time. The numbers of entrants, finishers,
non-starters and non-finishers are also shown here.
- Women's results
- The three results views described above are presented on one page
for the women entrants. If you find a blank page when you try to
obtain this view it's because the results didn't differentiate between
men and women in the early years of the hike. Women's results first
appeared in 1985, disappeared again until 1989, were missing in 1990
and were back for good from 1991.
In addition, you can choose to have the results displayed in HTML (the
standard Web presentation format) or as Plain Text. You may prefer the
latter for printing and it is likely to be useful if you want to
download the results.
Current Status and Change Log
- Current Status
- All years of the hike are now online.
- 03 Jan 2015
- Main pages updated to HTML5
- 01 Oct 2014
- Site moved to new server
- 02 Jan 2004
- Changed style to match Hayfield Fell Races site
- 10 Sep 2003
- Added results for 2003. Added route profile page.
- 16 Jan 2003
- Minor update to search to try make it more obvious that it only
works with surnames.
- 13 Sep 2002
- Added results for 2002.
- 08 Nov 2001
- Added the first four years - 1976 to 1979.
- 06 Nov 2001
- Added years 1980 to 1990. Created three hand-crafted pages to
make it all a bit more user-friendly. Changed search facility so it
works on surname only.
- 21 Sep 2001
- Site updated to cover the years 1991 to 2001. Added link to each
hiker's name to display that hiker's BS career.
- 10 Sep 2001
- Initial release of the web site - results for 1998 to 2001 go
online. Linked to from results page on main Bullock Smithy site.
About the Results Pages
I started to put these pages together after the 2001 hike. Before the
hike that year I had downloaded the results for 1999 and 2000 from the
Bullock Smithy web site and had written a simple program to read and
analyse that data. This was so that I could easily see how long it
took people to get between the various checkpoints as I was planning
to run the hike in 2001.
After the 2001 hike the organisers got wind of what I was up to and
seemed to think it was interesting so I set about putting all of the
results onto a web site. Unfortunately, the results for years before
1999 are only available in printed form in the results booklets. I
have been scanning these booklets, loaned to me by the organisers, and
using OCR software to generate the data (which now totals about 0.5
megabytes). It doubtless contains quite a few errors introduced by the
OCR process and I would appreciate some feedback
if you spot an error.
The data is stored on the web server which hosts these pages and all
requests to the server to generate pages of results are handled by a
CGI program (written in Perl) which automatically generates a page of
results in the desired format from the raw data files.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the encouragement and assistance that I have
received from Peter Wood, John Feist and John Corfield - the hike
organisers. Brian Dooley has kindly provided a link to this site from
the main Bullock Smithy site.
Thanks also to Jane for assistance with data entry and checking (and
for giving me the map wheel, which has provided hours of
entertainment).
Feedback
I would welcome any comments you have on the content of the results
pages. I will be very happy to correct any errors that you may find
and I would be grateful for any suggestions for new or better ways to
present the data.
If these pages fail to work for you, please contact me telling me what
you were trying to do, what went wrong, which browser you were using
and anything else that you consider relevant.
I can be emailed at
steve@t42.org.uk