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.

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.temple@cs.man.ac.uk

Main Page ST - Fri Jan 2 14:33:25 GMT 2004