I've taken on another minecraft related project in an attempt to learn some more python as well as some basic web development.

 

Introducing wools++

Centered on the Overcast Network (formerly Project Ares) collection of minecraft servers, wools++ collects data from a user's profile a few times per day and produces more sophisticated statistics (such as rolling values) and even some time series plots.  Here's a couple from my profile:

 

With:

• KD = kills/deaths
• RK7 = rolling kills (kills over the last 7 days)
• RD7 = rolling deaths
• RKD7 = rolling KD

The name itself comes from a capture-the-flag type game often played on the servers, where the flag is replaced by a minecraft wool block.  If you successfully capture a wool block, your "wools" count is incremented.

The project is hosted on Google's app engine for a couple reasons.

• It can be free (if your app is small enough)
• Built in datastore (no need to worry about setting up my own SQL database or anything)
• Python support.  This is great because python is generally a super useful language to know, particularly in the computational sciences.

In the future I'll definitely spend some time discussing the process I went through building this app, because in some cases Google's documentation was a little bit light on the details.  For now, check out the about page if you'd like to read about more details, and you can find the source here.