Some 2016 Pre-Season Changes to the Site

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Over the past week or so I've made some changes to the MatterOfStats website, the main ones being:

  • Considerable simplification of the content on the Home Page including links to the four major blogs, in an effort to be kinder to first-time visitors. 
  • The creation of a new, Data Visualisations page where I'll be posting the occasional visualisation that I think is interesting and that doesn't require much explanation. As I type this, there are visualisations on that page looking at the history of winning and losing scores, the season-by-season history of teams' MoSSBODS Ratings, and the round-by-round history of 2015 team MoSSBODS Ratings. Let me know if you've any suggestions for charts that I might create and add to this page.
  • Amalgamation of the Links and Archives pages, and updates to the Links component. Please let me know if you think there are more sites I should add to the list.
  • Simplification of the Navigation Bar that runs down the right-hand side of every page. A lot of the content that was there previously, and that was not heavily trafficked, has been moved to its own page.
  • Changes to the menu that appears at the top of every page to reflect the new site structure.
  • Categorisation and tagging of all the 2015 Statistical Analyses posts. (This is one of those jobs that are so much easier if you do them progressively, but which you always put off because of the sheer tedium of it.)

It's entirely possible that I've broken something with these changes, so I'd be grateful if you let me know of any glitches you encounter. I'm also happy to receive any feedback - good or bad - about the changes generally, and to hear about suggestions you might have for new, different (or less!) content.

MatterOfStats has now been visited by people from 146 different countries, the latest a visit from someone in Saint Bathelemy in late December. There are still though, according to Flag Counter, 95 countries that have yet to visit, amongst them Afghanistan; Andora; The British Virgin, Christmas, Cook, Faroe, Falkland and Virgin Islands; Guernsey; The Isle of Man; Samoa; Sudan; Swaziland; Togo; Tonga; Tuvalu; Vanuatu; and The Vatican City (go figure). I'm hoping that, sometime during the next 12 months, a visitor from the 150th country will stop by MoS, but the time between new countries has been extending significantly. (For some interesting, somewhat related maths on this, Google the Coupon Collector's Problem.)

There's now also been at least one visitor from every State In the US (most of all from California), and from 8 of the 13 Canadian regions, the missing ones being Newfoundland and Labrador, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Prince Edward Island, and Yukon Territory. 

In a few weeks it'll be exactly 10 years since I wrote the first e-mail to a handful of friends, summarising the predictions made by now long-retired The Model. To think that MoS has since then touched, however lightly, on the lives of people in almost 150 different countries frankly amazes me. Thanks for being one of them.