A USE COUNTER FOR THE USATF COURSE SEARCH ENGINE?

The course registrar does a whale of a lot of work to make the USATF course search engine work. I am not sure how Gene does it, but what I did was:

1) Put the just-received certificates in a pile and type in a line of data for each course.
2) Change the codes when various courses get replaced.
3) Feed the maps through the scanner and get a set of numbered files. Rename each file with the proper course ID.
4) Feed the certificates through the scanner and rename the resulting files.
5) File the certificates in a file cabinet.
6) Say “whew.”
7) Send files to USATF every so often

As a result we have a pretty good system of making course lists and maps available. This results from a lot of hard work. Is the benefit worth the cost? We have no way to know, as the course search engine has no counter.

It’s always nice to be able to know whether one’s work is paying off. I wonder what would have to be done to get a hit counter installed on the course search engine?

USATF has total control of the search engine. The registrar can only input data. Any changes will have to be done by USATF.

Guys I'll check with USATF to see about a counter for each time one checks a map.

The Registrar also checks that measurer's info is correct plus he will add any new measurer's to our data base.

I have found that's easy to make a mistake, hence I then go through each Certificate and do a double check of the data entered.

Counters are notoriously unreliable because they register page views, and those can include hits by search engines.

Any decent web server has logs and I would be very surprised if what USATF uses doesn't have one also. They should be ale to run reports they show usage and well as which maps have been referenced.

In short, they shouldn't have to change anything just run a report again data they already have.

I think easycounter may filter out the hits by search engines. I had one page that I put a counter on and the count on that page didn't change for two months. It's possible that no search engine ever touched it, but if it did it wasn't counted.