Building SportsNode.com

I’ve been quiet for a bit, that’s mostly because I’ve been preparing for or traveling to Cozumel for a weeks holiday. Behold, the view from my room:

The wife and I are having a lovely time, trying to decompress from all of our daily work stuff. It’s working pretty well. I’m already getting the urge to dive back into some SportsNode projects.

I will resist however. I must resist.

Jack
SportsNode.com

Burnout. I’ve been trying to avoid burning myself out with too many 18 hour days between the day job and running SportsNode. Luckily the wife scored me an XBox 360 Elite, so I’ve been plowing through Gears of War the last few days in an attempt to keep myself (relatively) sane.

Of course sports news marches on, there are lots of exciting things happening at the moment. With the NBA and NHL in their playoffs, the NFL having the longest draft ever and MLB marching on, there’s been a ton of news flying around lately. Since I’ve been putting the site together I’ve gained a new appreciation for baseball which fell to the wayside somewhat. I also managed to catch a few NHL playoff games too (in HD, the only way to watch hockey).

Bugs. I found and squashed a few unfortunate bugs that made their way onto the live site in the past couple of days. One was that the SF Giants and Sacramento Kings pages were actually pulling up NY Giants and LA Kings news… whoops! I knew it could happen and thought that I had accounted for that in my code but I guess I was mistaken. It didn’t show up until it was live due to caching issues. The second bug was in my redirect script. Some destination URL’s were a little tricky and the encoding that I put on them didn’t work 100% so a couple of users got sent on a joyride. I apologize for that, I’m going to try hard to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

Bending. I still have to work with Jake on redesigning my feed management console. Hopefully we can carve some time out this weekend to take care of that so that I can get back to the business of putting new cities up. Once we get that put together, I’m going to change my plans somewhat (see, bending, yes an alliterative stretch). I was originally going to put up Dallas next but from the looks of things (people signing up for new city launch notifications) there is a fairly sizable demand for Pittsburgh! So Steelers, Pirates and Penguins fans rejoice!

Jack
SportsNode.com