wp-SwimTeam

As the season comes to a close we are seeing a lot of scratches for our last couple meets. For this week we will be missing about 40% of our swimmers. Previously I had written about the pros and cons of Opt-in and Opt-out for swim meets and after watching this season unfold, I believe my thinking still holds.

Originally I had thought that opting in or out from a meet as a binary decision:  A swimmer was either participating or not.  It turns out it isn’t that simple.  Year round school is pretty popular here in Wake County, North Carolina and roughly 1/3 to 1/2 of our swimmers are in school for either all or part of the summer swimming season.  Since our meets are held on Tuesday nights, they tend to run pretty late and some parents are taking their kids out of the late events (e.g. Butterfly and/or Freestyle Relay).

This has resulted in what my wife is referring to as a “partial scratch”.  In addition to kids needing to leave early, we have also had some kids come late due to other commitments so they are missing one or two events early in the meet.

So as I sit down to implement opt-in and opt-out, I have concluded I need to account for partial participation in a swim meet.

I have been using the Inline Google Maps plugin on the MacDolphins site but lately it has been flaky to say the least.  Sometimes the Google Map is displayed and sometimes it isn’t.  There isn’t any real rhyme or reason as to when it displays and when it doesn’t that I could find AND the plugin is actually hard to use, particularly for the casual author.

So I implemented a new short code for Google Maps called wpst_google_map which will take an address as an argument and display a Google Map.  The plugin uses this as part of the Club Profile to map a swim club for directions and such.  The short code is based on a Google Maps class called Phoogle Maps which has been extended to work with the plugin.  Phoogle Maps works pretty much as advertised.  I wish it didn’t echo it’s output directly to the output buffer but fortunately PHP can control the output buffer so it can be captured and used in the context of the plugin.

[wpst_google_map address="1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington DC, 20006" align="center"]

The short code syntax above will display a map similar to this: