Building 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

I went and did something that wasn’t even on my “To Do” list.

There is now a “Latest Headlines” area at the top of every team page. This is all of the latest news from all of the sources for the team. I think that it’ll really help people find the new stuff.

Jack
SportsNode.com

Well it looks like that new server isn’t going to work out as well as I thought it would.

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The last 48 hours have been a little crazy for me here. My article 10 Tips for Being a Better Office Professional hit the front page of Digg.com and the rest was history. I’d like to thank all of the readers that came and offered their kind words and (mostly) constructive criticism.

We essentially pushed out 25 times our month to date traffic in 2 days. I’m planning on doing a post mortem and followup on the whole affair in the near future, but for now I need to concentrate on making sure that our new server is up to speed and get back to work on Chicago.

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It was quite the long weekend working on everything imaginable on the site.

• Updated the news layout to 1.09. I’m not sure if I want to go that last .01. We’ll see if we get a bunch of long headlines that causes them to break to two lines. In which case we’ll be moving the “send this link to a friend” envelope to a new location.
• Uploaded a sitemap to Google and Yahoo. Hopefully they will enjoy my offerings.
• Got Los Angeles out the door! Wooo! I’m already seeing a bunch of Kobe Bryant fans filter into the Lakers page.
• Noted with GREAT consternation that there really isn’t a decent Los Angeles Kings blog out there. Oh don’t get me wrong, there are some out there, they’re just usually not updated very frequently or are too profane to put up on a family site like this one
• Updated my javascript libraries to Prototype 1.5.1 RC2 and Scriptaculous 1.7.1. There was much rejoicing.
• Fixed a bug in the news layout that was causing things to go all wonky when a team didn’t have any blogs (thanks again LA Kings).
• Tweaked my adwords campaigns again and added LA. It’s a shame that since it appears that SportsNode is still in Googles “sandbox” we won’t be able to drive much organic traffic via SEO for another 3-6 MONTHS.

I think that that’s all I’ve got for you at this point. I think I’m gonna go take a long bath and then hit the sack. Chicago’s calling my name as we speak.

Jack
SportsNode.com

Let’s see what I did today:

• Put together a mockup for source layout 1.1 I’m not very happy with the current news layout so we’re going to move some bits around. Grow some things, shrink others.
• Continued work on the LA pages. Truth be told, they’re probably in the same shape now that NY was when I put it live. I’d like to get more stuff up though because I like to have a nice, full page when I launch it. You can preview it here if you like.
• Added about 30 new links to the Philly and NY pages.
• Wrote a little redirector script so that I’ll know when people are actually using the site as intended. We’ve been live for almost 2 weeks now and I never realized that I have no idea if people are actually using the site to read news or just coming, shrugging, and leaving.
• Tweaked my Google Adwords campaign because everything got switched off, I guess Google doesn’t like my ads for some reason. Poo on them I say.

Looks like the Phillies might stink (read: finish a handful of games out of the playoffs due to a poor April) AGAIN this year. Where’s the Kruk’er when you need him? Bah.

Jack
SportsNode.com

The SportsNode that you’re looking at now is just phase 1. We had a LOT of functionality that we wanted to include but had to cut in order to keep our development schedule as straightforward as possible. Now that we’ve launched and we’re examining how the site is performing and how people are liking it, we’re just about ready to start mapping out phase 2 of the site.

Of course, no features are worth much without CONTENT! Yes indeed, we’re working on new cities like crazy. Here are the cities that are on our schedule:

• Los Angeles/Anaheim
• Chicago
• San Francisco/Oakland
• Dallas

I’m hoping we’ll be able to knock out a new city every 7-10 days so keep an eye on the site! If you have any questions you can drop them in a comment below.

Jack
SportsNode.com

Welcome to the SportsNode.com development blog.  This is where I’ll toss out random junk that I’m either working on or thinking about with regards to the new site.

Here’s my first topic that I’m sort of waffling on.  The Nets and the Devils, do I create a whole new subsection for “Jersey” or do I just bite the bullet and add them to New York like the rest of the civilized publishing world?  New York already has 7 teams!

Of course if I make a Jersey page then it’ll have only 2 teams which may look funny and I’m guessing most Jersey team fans are also NY sports fans.

Yeah, I just like this picture…

Jack
SportsNode.com