Ahh ... a fellow geek
I'm actually a graphic designer and front-end developer IRL.
The leaderboard isn't done by hand, exactly. I'm using XSL to transform an XML document. Take a look (
XML,
XSL) if you're curious. You might have to view source on those to see what's going on.
The "by hand" part is me entering the data into the XML file. XSL's sorting ability is less than great, hence entering all the times in milliseconds.
I thought about building a database, but it'd be a hell of a lot of work to build and maintain. There's two problems. First is managing users submitting their own times, which would require a whole user account system, etc. Second is that the races have a lot of variation (some tracks only have two splits, others have 3, some weeks have multiple weeks, some weeks have car choices ... take a look at that XSL file if you want to see what I mean
). Both are possible, but I'd have to do a lot of entering by hand to make the same amout of work for myself
The current setup took about two days of programming.
This week is pretty nutty in terms of the number of times, but most weeks there are only 15-20 people actively racing, in one car, so it's not much work to do it by hand.