This weekend’s SoccerPhone fixes

By | July 27, 2002

In the scoring details on the MLS webpage, the time has always been given as just the minute of the goal, e.g, 34 for a goal in the 34th minute. The main exception is that goals in extra time are sometimes given a plus sign, e.g., 92+.

In today’s game between Dallas and Colorado, Steve Morrow scored in the 92nd minute. For some reason, the time was entered as 92:00+. Fortunately, the only breakage in SoccerPhone was that scoring details were unavailable for this game after Morrow’s goal was added to the website. A quick addition of a : to the regular expression for extracting scoring details fixed this.

I also cleaned up some inline JavaScript code in the mls.vxml file. I added the use of && for doing logical ANDs. I had temporarily forgotten that the JavaScript code is just the data for an XML element in the VXML file. Therefore, any inline JavaScript must be written as well-formed XML. In my case, that meant using && instead of &&.

The biggest problem is that the MLS website was really unreliable for a large part of the evening. The whole site was very slow. I often got timeouts on the scores and on the standings pages. I think it was their MySQL database getting hosed again. On one attempt to retrieve the scores, every score was replaced with the text from a MySQL error. I can’t remember the exact text, but the exception was occurring in a php3 file and appeared to indicate a connection failure. Obviously, when problems like this are occurring on MLS’s end, SoccerPhone is useless.

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