Sunday, June 3, 2007

How many stories fit on Jason's website?

Let's have a look at the following URL:

http://www.cascadecrusades.org/SkiMountaineering/baker/colemanheadwall/ch2007/chjune.htm

First breadcrumb:
Fatboy engages in 3 sports as far as I can tell: skiing, kayaking and hiking/etc.

Second breadcrumb:
This is more difficult. Skiing, there are perhaps 100 peaks that might be interesting in Washington. Kayaking... I dunno - 40 rivers? Hiking... hard to guess. Let's use 80 for this breadcrumb.

Third breadcrumb:
This appears to specify the route on a particular mountain. It does not appear to be used in river or hiking trip reports. Thus, ski mountaineering trip reports have an order of magnitude more possibilities, and we can safely exclude hiking and kayaking from our calculations. Let us assume that an average mountain has 5 routes.

Fourth breadcrumb:
The used of this crumb is inconsistent - it may be the final html file, but it can also be an additional folder, usually specifying the year. Some times it adds in the month. But the month can also be a fifth breadcrumb, as in the URL above. Let's consider all of this one "yearly crumb" with 12 possibilities (the months)

Summary
Let's calculate:

3 X 80 X 5 X 12 = 14400 trip reports per year!

It is clear that Fatboy's web-fu is strong, and he has created a very scalable trip report solution.

10 comments:

cascadepoet said...

Ha. Ha. Funny Phil. There is a method behind the madness. It keeps things clean, in their own tidy place. For me it works ;) Looking at it must remind you of your work at Microsoft? :)

Lefty said...

I think it's a window into your mind :-)

Hey how come you left out the part in your TR about where two guys came up to you on the trail and said "hey, I know who you are", and you stood there awash in famousness, and while trying to project coolness, you knocked your over your gatorade all over the forest floor?

SkiSickness said...

LOL. You guys are too much. Please post more.

Thank you.

It is true that your URLs are whack, Jason. There's just no excuse for that many directories.

Careful though, Phil. If you convince him of his folly, then he might break every link and it will be six months before we can find anything on his website again.

Tough love, baby.

SkiSickness said...

Nice pun there, too, Phil. I just caught that. Brilliant.

Lefty said...

If you're talking about the window/Microsoft thing, I wish I could say it was unintended. Perhaps you are the brilliant one for finding that :-)

Anonymous said...

SELECT max(epicness) as It FROM all WHERE poison REGEX "skiing"; d00d1!1

Lefty said...

some database geek always has to ruin the party.... sigh...

Anonymous said...

Ah, but you inspire me, Siphu.

Lefty said...

You might just have inspired my next movie, Mr Asswerked...

Anonymous said...

Well written article.