On sites with rather more traffic than this one, this page would be called Frequently Asked Questions (itself a misnomer – Frequently Given Answers would be more accurate) or something similar but I can’t bring myself to perpetrate such a conceit. This page contains the answers to a handful of obvious questions about the Badgers Cricket Club web site, none of which I’ve ever actually been asked – at least not in the same fashion as they are posed here. Having said that, if there are questions that spring to your mind that aren’t listed here, then please send me an email and I’ll do my best to provide a suitable answer.

You might also care to take a peek at the about page, especially if your questions are more general in nature, or concern the club rather than this web site.

• Why are the totals on my personal page different from the lifetime averages?
• Why is your home page such a mess when I first view it?
• Why do I get a pointing hand over menu items that can’t be selected?
• Why is some text too small to read?

Why are the totals on my personal page different from the lifetime averages?

Simple answer, because they are built from a slightly different set of figures, but you should only be affected if you played in one of half a dozen matches between 1990 and 1995, in the 2006 midweek game against Tadworth, or the Friday game at Martinstown on the 2007 tour.

In the early to mid 1990s we played a number of games that were not included in the official averages for one reason or another, and the same criteria has more recently been applied to short format limited overs matches (eg. Twenty20). Those games are flagged in the footnotes on the official batting and official bowling tables and are only included in the complete batting and complete bowling data. In days of yore the details for such matches generally just disappeared, so there are no such instances prior to 1990, but ever since I’ve been holding the data electronically the tendency has been to record everything and exclude from the generated reports, where appropriate.

When I came to build the personal pages I had three choices – include all matches, include only official matches, or include both sets of tables – and I took the unilateral decision to display only the complete figures. Including both would increase the page sizes by fifty percent, and some are already more than big enough, would add very little real value since for most folk the numbers would be identical, and would only serve to confuse. I felt that the full details were likely to be of interest to most of us, so that was what I went with. If you disagree with that then please let me know because I do generate both sets of tables, I just don’t include them in the web pages.

Why is your home page such a mess when I first view it?

Cruddy monochrome graphic in the top left hand corner, no pull out menus, layout all awry, that sort of thing?? Best guess is that you’re using Netscape Navigator v4 which, for reasons best known to itself, displays the page before it has finished downloading all of the referenced resources (eg. Cascading Style Sheet, Javascript menu code) which are held in separate files from the main HTML page (which decreases the size of every page, and makes it easier to maintain those entities). In my experience the problem disappears if you Reload the page, or indeed if you click on a link and then return Back to the affected page.

If that doesn’t cure it then I suspect that you’re using a browser that either doesn’t support Javascript or doesn’t (properly) support Cascading Style Sheets (or indeed both of those things). One thing to watch out for with Netscape v4 is that disabling Javascript also kills off CSS support, so you lose more than just the menus.

Why do I get a pointing hand over menu items that can’t be selected?

Beats me :) This is one of those aggravating little nits that only occurs with certain browers – Netscape v4 and Opera v5 and v6 (but not v7 or later) of those that I’ve tested – and for which I simply cannot find a workaround. The Javascript menus are controlled via code written by someone else, CoolMenus v4 courtesy of Thomas Brattl of DHTML Central, but I’ve been unable to ascertain whether or not this is caused by a bug in that code or simply by implementation differences in the browsers concerned. It is cosmetic, but it always annoyed me too (since I used to use Opera v6 as my day to day browser) and I’d love to get to the bottom of it. For the time being all I can offer is sympathy and the observation that those menu items that can be selected change from white text to blue text when you move the mouse over them, or at least they do so on every browser that I’ve tested the menus with.

Why is some text too small to read?

In all probability because you are using Internet Explorer with text size set to smaller (you’ll find Text Size under the View menu). Unlike far too much of the web, all of the font adjustments on this site, with the exception of the left hand panel (in order to preserve the integrity of the menus), are done in relative units. This means that those with sight problems, or who simply prefer to use a larger default font size, are able to adjust the display to suit their requirements rather than being forced to view everything at whatever size the site designer deemed applicable. Other browsers also provide mechanisms for adjusting the default font size, so if you’re not using IE then you’ll need to dig through the documentation to find out how to change it (if appropriate).