At first, Dream-Stats was really just a small side university project to help familiarize myself with the many new concepts I was confronted with. Not too long after, I had built a script which retrieved the AFL stats off of the AFL website and formatted it in a list! Looking back at it, the result was pretty crummy (considering it doesn't work anymore...) but at that time it felt like I cured cancer. I mean, I got the script running in under a day and believed it was the greatest thing on earth even though all it did was this:

But this pretty little script triggered what would soon be a project which would consume hundreds of hours of my life.

My initial excitement led me to throw together a quick website and host it on a free web server, which offered Python support. Well, it worked (kind of), but there wasn't really a period where I would have called the website useable. My little experiment began to grow and a small free web server wasn't enough to contain my imagination.
Two months and one failed university subject later (aced my Python class though), I was hosting my website on my brother's paid web server. The increase in speed and web space opened up a world of opportunities and led me to create a functioning website. Now, at this stage I've been only programming for... four months? The scripts were inefficient, the stats logging was ridiculous in hindsight and worst of all I had some web pages built using Python and others using PHP! But... the website was useable and there were a handful of regular visitors.

As a fan of fantasy footy, I was basically creating what I wanted to see, but what wasn't available in the capacity of which I wanted it. I was building a website for myself, but in doing so, I was creating a website which hundreds will hopefully find useful. My goal was always to create something which hundreds will end up using and the more I dedicated my time to the project the more I strived for having this dream become a reality. But there were some things which weren't possible without a more powerful server.

Not wanting to leach off my brother's web host, I put down a couple hundred of dollars and bought a Linode Slice. After a few weeks of redesigning, remodelling and rescripting, I had my website up and running and managed over one thousand visitors by the end of the 2010 season. Still heavily flawed, I set out to completely rebuild my website over the summer. I was focused on creating a website that would not only be the destination for fantasy football coaches, but for AFL fans in general. I had more graphs, a more professional design, social integration, a robust live viewer, a live team viewer which linked to the users' AFL Dream Team account and even a delayed team viewer, allowing users to delay certain matches but still view their team.

I had finally created (nearly) everything I set out to do after the season was over and had what I believe is one of the most robust AFL statistics websites available on the net. I still have a long way to go and a lot of competition to face. So I guess this battle's half won? Meaning there is still half to lose.

Dream-Stats will hopefully continue to grow in the next year or so, both in features and user base. I will continue to support and build this service as long as there is someone left there to support! You can do so too by letting your friends and family know about Dream-Stats.com