Classic Sports Tapes Collection (and hacking WordPress)

I have just posted the foundation for my Classic Sports Tapes collection. At long last, I’ve got a process for cataloguing and posting the details of my collection on the site.

I still have a few hundred hockey games to catalogue and add to the system, in fact I only have about 5% of my hockey games listed. However, my very small NFL, CFL and MLB collection is completely identified.Many of these recordings are original, unedited broadcasts, including commercial breaks, intermission features, and pre and post-game interviews. Look to the “Orig?” field below to identify such broadcasts.

Part of my cataloguing process is to write descriptions for each broadcast, which is contained in the database. I’m just pondering how to present this data on the site. I will probably end up having seperate “detail” pages for each item. The search engines should like that, no doubt.

My recordings are not for sale, however I am interested in trades. My wish list includes:

• Any hockey (regular season or playoffs) from the 50s through the early 90s
• BC Lions (regular season, or playoffs)
• MLB and NFL games with historical significance (regular season or playoffs)

If you would like to propose a deal, please contact me.

The new page required a number of modifications to the “Unnamed” WP Theme, including the PHP code it uses to render CSS on the fly. And the Classic Sports Tapes collection page itself is essentially a custom WP template that contains WP function/API calls as well as my own database logic. It took a bit of research, and of course some trial and error, but everything seems to be co-existing fine so far.

Oh yeah, there’s a customized back-end admin system too, and I will talk about that in a future post.