I’ve done a gradual transition of the “Author’s links” sidebar section between seasons in the past, but I made precedent today by taking down all of the summer league links and putting up all of the fall/winter league links at the same time. Part of the reason is that the standings pages don’t change location (there will be nothing new on those pages until my first standings update, at the earliest), but also that I’m putting up my actual spreadsheet log as a Google Docs spreadsheet, as I was thinking about doing. The log will be automatically updated as I sync the file on my Google Drive, and has two pages, the first with all of the games and most of the calculated averages, and the second with the pair averages and game and series score percentages. The more detailed spreadsheet log replaces the BowlingTracker.com sheets I’ve linked in the past.

Having been informed that the Northeast Junior Scratch Tour no longer exists, I have removed the link from the sidebar. I liked their concept of getting the best youth bowlers in the region together at different bowling centers, so I hope someone revives it in the future.

I just wanted to note here that I finally updated the animation of my arsenal in the sidebar to include the Marvel Pearl, which I had punched up some time ago. I did have to resort to an animated GIF creation site because I was having trouble getting the animation to save properly if I used GIMPShop 2.8.

I had thought I was missing someone (who did it recently) in the list of 300 games by the men in my season recap post, and a perusal of the April archives confirmed that I did leave out Mike Johnson’s 300 game in the Westgate Mixed league; he has been added to the list.

Just wanted to note that the summer links transition in the “Author’s links” sidebar section is complete, with the Wed. Summer Mixed standings and BowlSK index added, and the winter league-related links removed.

Bowling lends itself to statistics, as you’re even judged as a bowler by your average, and I know many bowlers track their scores on spreadsheets. I’ve been keeping spreadsheet logs since I returned to bowling, even tracking my early practice sessions with them, but they haven’t been in too great detail so far.

Enter 2013, and BowlingTracker.com, which I’ve been keeping stat sheets on since I started bowling in leagues again, has encountered a spam problem on their forums, which has, in turn, caused the score tracking part of the site to be slower than usual. Because of that, I’ve been forced to find a way to make my Excel logs do more, and have generated a prototype log that does everything BowlingTracker.com does, and more. Wanting to give back and help my fellow bowlers, I decided to post a tutorial thread of sorts on BowlingCommunity.com that shows you how to use Excel to do many things with your bowling scores. I have linked the thread on my blog in the “Author’s links” sidebar section, and it should be noted that I have shared my prototype log in the thread so users could see how I have things set up. FYI, if you don’t want to use any sort of standalone desktop spreadsheet application, many of the concepts I go into in the thread will also work in Google Docs spreadsheets.

You may certainly post in the thread if you have questions. 😀

Note: If you’re viewing this as a single post, just click the header to go to the front page, and the sidebar will load.

I’ve been meaning to add more photos to the “scrapbook”, and I noticed that Junior has been taking some with his new tablet for the Westgate Lanes Facebook page. I got his permission (on at least one of them; if he doesn’t want others on it, he can let me know and I’ll remove them) to repost them here. I have a photo of the Westgate 1 travel league team this year (who won the league), as well as photos of the winning teams of the first two thirds of the current Coke league season.

Also, to prevent slow-loading and possible browser crashes from pages having too many photos, I decided to cap the number of photos on each page at 20, and, having reached that number on the original page, created a second page off of the main “scrapbook” page (which has both of the Coke league teams on it).

By request, the video of Dan Esdale’s 300 on Thursday night has been removed.

It’s been a while since I added something other than a post to this blog site. 🙂

I came across Richard Shockley’s site via a post on the BowlingCommunity forums about release position, which had his video tip embedded. His site has an archive of his “Tips of the Week,” but you can also, for about $50, submit video of your bowling from 3 angles (side, back, and release) and he’ll send you back a 30 minute customized lesson, much like “My Bowling Coach” does. The link to his site can now be found in the sidebar in the “Coaching/Tips” category.

Note: Shockley is a USBC-certified Gold level coach.

The standing issue of having my “old” BowlSK information transferred to my “new” Google Account (actually, the one I’ve always had that I changed the email address on) has been successfully resolved, and, as a result, I am announcing that the entire backlog of league recaps (including tonight’s) will be made up tomorrow. Each night will have a separate recap and will have the same presentation, including my averages and +1 scores after each night’s bowling.

I announced on Facebook that I’m waiting to post my league night recap until an issue related to the change of email address on the Google Account my BowlSK information is associated with is resolved. I hope to be able to post about last night within a few days, anyway.

There is other administrivia, as well: I noticed an error in the formula in my Excel log that calculates my average for the last 9 games; the range only specified the current three games, and was copied to all of my weeks after the fourth week, so I edited the formula, copied down, and recalculated, after which I have edited the last three league recaps for the proper floating average.

It is with some sadness that I must report that the BowlSpace website went offline sometime in the recent past, so the link to my profile on that site no longer works, forcing me to remove it. In the early days of this blog, I had BowlSpace “exclusives,” and those have now been lost. A couple of them only related to stuff that happened in my first league back, but I did tell the story of my LBT win there, so I’ll be forced to re-tell it here (but I do have added content in mind).

I’m always looking for ways to promote my blog, and I found “The Tournament Source” has a good links list, but I have to give them a reciprocal link to get listed, and the way I had to do it is with an image linked to their site. Therefore, I had to add an image widget with one of their images (one that fits, as they have a couple of sizes available) with the image linked to their page. I’ll comment when I know I’m listed there.

The site is mostly a state-by-state tournament listing, so this site can be useful, too. I thought I saw you could list one event for free, so if you’re running a tournament in the future, you may want to check this site out.

Note: I can’t get the image widget to set a target for the image’s link, so it opens in the same window/tab; you may want to right-click the image to open it in a new window or tab.

Ray alerted me to a new ball company named Lordfield, which appears to be based out of Korea, but is on the list of ball companies registered with the PBA, so I’ve updated the “Ball Sites” listing to include the link to their website. While I was at it, I gave the list a cursory examination for dead links, and found I’ve had to update the one for Visionary, so the link to that company’s site works again.

Note: I am vague about whether the company’s name should be one word or two words, since the site uses both forms of it in various places.

My friend in Virginia, “CoachJim,” was having problems finding the channel with the webchat on EFnet’s website, so, playing around with stuff on the website (mostly the channel search), I got the URL format for a particular channel, and have figured out what the webchat URL for my bowling channel should be. I have added the link in the “Author’s links” sidebar section; just input your nickname and click the “Log In” button to join. 😀

I decided to make a minor addition to my “About” page, one that notes my membership (in my mind) in “Storm Nation,” but I did add the caveat that my spare ball is not a Storm ball (Brunswick makes the T-Zones). If this ever changes, I’ll let everyone know, but I have liked every Storm ball I’ve had to this point.

The site in the post title came to my attention in a comment to a recent post, which I approved, and it appears to be a good general bowling site, with a bowling center locator, tips, and a blog (though this site won’t be part of the blogroll), as well as a Twitter feed (I don’t use Twitter, but have thought about it as an adjunct to this blog because you can post via text message, but I’m not at the bowling center for leagues often enough to make a Twitter feed really useful.) and a Facebook page (which should be linked on the site). The site was added to the sidebar under the general “Bowling Sites” category.

Another change to the blog was an oversight in re-categorizing a post in the month of March of 2008 to add the “Youth” category last summer; I have done so with this post today.