Build Your Own Brewerfan

[squarepusher]

I've been busy at work on the next version of Brewerfan.net (we'll call it 3.0)... As the site has grown and evolved, I've noticed that the site (referring to the non-message board aspect of things) has grown into what's referred to as a "portal". Basically, fans, players, media, and family come here to get the latest on the organization.

 

With such a diverse group of users comes a problem (and an opportunity). We'd like to offer the opportunity for users to customize their content to turn this site into _exactly_ what it needs to be for them. For example, a player's parent may only want to see information relating to a certain player... Or perhaps a die-hard Stars fan only wants to see info related to the Stars (or perhaps former Stars players as well). Or a die-hard fan of the organization may want to see as much information on the home page as is possible. Or perhaps the casual fan wants to add a stock ticker, news feed, or weather forecast and turn brewerfan.net into their general home page.

 

Content on each page would be able to be moved up, down, left, right, to subpages, added or subtracted at will. It's also our hope that every aspect of each portlet would be able to be customized as well, leaving no stone unturned...

 

The following is a listing of portlets that I have finished or am near finishing:

 

BASEBALL-RELATED PORTLETS

 

Recent Articles

----

Display the newest original Brewerfan.net articles

 

customizers:

- change the number of articles to display (1-5)

 

defaults:

- shows the newest 3 articles on the home page

 

 

Recent Transactions

----

Display the newest transactions

 

customizers:

- change the number of transactions to display (1-10)

- pick the teams you wish to see transactions for

 

defaults:

- shows the newest 3 transactions on the home page

- shows the newest 3 transacstions on each team page (relevant to each team)

 

 

Daily Brew

----

Display the newest Daily Brew entries

 

customizers:

- change the number of Daily Brew entries to display (1-5)

 

ArticleCrawler

----

Display the newest ArticleCrawler entries

 

customziers:

- change the number of ArticleCrawler entries to display (1-5)

- pick the teams you wish to see ArticleCrawler entries for

 

Schedule

----

Shows all games for the current month, allowing you to scroll forward and back through months

 

customizers:

- pick the teams you wish to see games for

 

defaults:

- shows the schedule for all teams on the home page

- shows the scehdule for individual teams on the team page

 

 

Brew82

----

Display the newest entries from the Brew82 weblog

 

Al's Ramblings

----

Display the newest entries from Al's weblog

 

FantasyInfoCentral.com/Brewers

---

Display the newest Brewers-related entries from the FantasyInfoCentral.com weblog

 

Player Search

----

Allows you to search for Major League players (via ESPN) or Minor League players (via Baseball America)

 

Customizers:

- pick which search boxes you wish to show

 

Defaults:

- Show on home page

 

Team Info:

----

Shows basic info given a team

 

Customizers:

- pick which team you want to see info for

 

Defaults:

- Displayed on each team page

 

 

NON-BASEBALL-RELATED PORTLETS

 

Weather

----

Displays the weather given a zip code

 

customizers:

- pick a zip code you wish to see the weather for

 

defaults:

- shows the weather on the home page (pick your zip code)

- shows the weather on each team page (given the team's city's zip code)

 

Stocks

----

Displays the Price, Volume and Change information given a stock symbol

 

customizers:

- pick the stock symbols for the companies you wish to see information for

- pick the columns you wish to view (Price, Volume, Change)

 

Various News Feeds

----

Displays news headlines from various news sources:

(Apacheweek, BBC Front Page News, BBC Technology News, BBC UK News, BBC World News, Mozilla, XMLHack... more coming soon)

 

customizers:

- show title description (yes/no)

- open links in popup window (yes/no)

- number of items to show

- show text input (yes/no)

- show item description (yes/no)

 

Web Search

----

Allows you to utilize various search engines:

(Yahoo, Google, Altavista, Dejanews, Excite, Hotbot, Infoseek, Webcrawler, Freshmeat)

 

 

-------

 

The following is a listing of portlets i'd like to create:

- scoreboard

- individual player tracker

- my favorite links

 

 

Please respond with questions... comments... etc

 

EDIT: Corrected spelling error.

[tookej]

Brian,

Could I suggest a spot to save my favorite links.

[squarepusher]

[ Could I suggest a spot to save my favorite links. ]

 

Consider it official.

[pogokat]

can we get a link to the mlb gamecast?

[Katuluu]

Can we get a "Pin the Tail on the Selig" simulation?

[SenatorShriv]

When can we expect the new Brewerfan to be done?

[squarepusher]

Sometime after the the beginning of next year, i'm assuming. It all depends on how much free time I have, and how many problems this new portal architecture will give me.

[SenatorShriv]

Cool. As always Brian, thanks for all of the hard work that you put into this site! I can't imagine how the site could get much better, but I'm really excited to see how things turn out. Although if the site gets any better, I may have to blame you for my poor grades and failures in school. Brewerfan is the ultimate procrastination tool!

[BrewMoon]

Can we get a "Reality Check" blocker?

 

Kidding, sort of.

[rluzinski]

Always seemed odd that the same article is always there to greet you..... Would be nice to see a huge "Sexson Traded" headline....

[mothershipconnection]

Can we get a "Reality Check" blocker?

I wouldn't go that far, but I do think Brian needs to take the same action in censoring the word "yankees" as he did with the name of that city where the timber rattlers play.

[pogokat]

Hey, i still want some kind of headline on the sight...

 

i know when picks get signed they get a little baseball card...but what about other newsworthy events???

 

i know the dailybrew is supposed to cover these, but it isnt really daily...so it doesnt fit the job...

 

i think we need some kind of headline that covers major events, like Jenkins' injuries and Paul Molitor's induction...

 

of course, having an article with these would be excellent, or maybe even a link to coverage elsewhere, at the least, just the headline and a brief summary of what happened

 

I hate having to go to other sights to get info, and i really wish that the front page didn't ignore important brewers events...

 

if this is alot of work, ignore me...but i still think it would be great

[MassBrew]

I hate having to go to other sights to get info

 

I can't really say I agree with this, pogo.

 

I really can't fathom being a Brewer fan wanting as much information as possible and not visiting both the Brewers' own site and the Journal Sentinel's daily.

 

Each day this spring training for instance, Adam McCalvy has provided a game story, a feature article, and a notes column. That's three major components, and to be honest, it would get pretty repetitive for us to link to all three in the most relevant thread at the time each and every day. Colbyjack has surprised me on occasion by indicating that the JS coverage is only brought to his attention when linked within Brewerfan. Say what you might about Drew, Tom, et al, but the JS again does normally provide at least three relevant distinct daily links, obviously some of more importance than others.

 

I do think we do a pretty good job of locating some of the more obscure Brewer links, thanks in no small part from posted contributions from our readers.

 

I believe that squarepusher has experimented with an ESPN2-type ticker / crawler across the home page in testing mode. Perhaps it's something the "staff" could re-visit.

[pogokat]

let me clarify...

 

i don't mean the other news sites are nopt beneficial...but that i would really like to come to brewerfan FIRST to see the headline of the day...rather than having to go to rotoworld/espn/jsonline, etc..just to see the news...

 

i know this info is readily available on the message board...everyone is ludicrously fast about posting new info

 

still, i would like to be able to come to the frontpage and find out whats going on right away...

[Katuluu]

I think what pogo is trying to say if you could only visit Brewerfan, he would like it to include as much relevant information on the homepage and as up to date as possible. Their are plenty of people that don't or can't use the message boards at all and just use the main page to get information. Their are still plenty of people that use dialup connection and would like to limit the number of sites they need to visit to crave their hunger for Brewers info. A "ticker" would potentially cover a lot of info and save a lot of people a lot of time. During the off-season I know I rarely check the homepage. It just tends to lag behind current news. I'd be interested in knowing if their is a big drop off in unique hits to the homepage during the offseason. It wouldn't suprise me if their was, and anythign that could help maintain a steadier flow of visitors would be a bonus in my mind.

 

Heck, I'd love a scoreboard watch as well during the season. I have no idea how hard that would be to implement. Anything that would limit the amount of time I need to spend on MLB.com or ESPN.com would be a huge bonus.

[colbyjack]

I agree with all of pogo's points. I do think we focus too much on the minors & the draft sometimes, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that we're really searching for hope for this franchise (at least IMO). There have been several instances in which we have reported a big signing such as Rickie Weeks last summer, but I can't say I remember the Richie Sexson trade being reported as front page news. We had a graphic announcing Bob Uecker's induction to the HOF, but nothing for Paul Molitor. This is Brewerfan.net, and in this day & age of information that is news we should be covering, even if we're not the first to announce it.

 

And MassBrew, is it really that surprising that I don't visit the MJS every day? Their info may be great to you living out East, but I rarely if ever see anything there that I didn't already know from reading the forums here. This time of year is different, since they do offer first-hand information that we simply cannot access. However, as we've seen with Toby's reports in the past, when we have our OWN first-hand reports the ones by Olson & Haudricourt pale in comparison.

 

If nothing else I take it as a compliment. People don't want to go elsewhere because they know they get the best information here. Why not get the best info on each & every story out there? I don't think that's going to stop people from visiting other new sources.

 

I also like the scoreboard idea & I know Brian likes it too (although we've talked about it more for just the Brewers & their affiliates, not for every team at every level). That is more of an issue with complicated programming from what I understand, unless we manually plug that info in each & every time, otherwise it would already be a reality. Getting up to date news on the homepage really is up to us (me, Jim, Toby, Michael, the DB guys).

 

And with no disrespect intended towards the Daily Brew contributors, that was & still is part of the point of it, to be daily. In their defense that is a tough job to fill, because it is a huge daily repsonsibility. When Brian first offered that "job" I passed because I simply cannot offer my services on a consistent basis, especially over the summer, and I remember most everyone else saying the same thing. Hopefully Bill & Jason together can make that feature as cool as it could be, and has been at times, for the entire season.

[Iron Chef Napalm]

Being the geek that I am, I spend a significant number of my online hours at tech sites. My favorite among them being Arstechnica.com (mostly for their forums). However, I also like the way they do their front page news.

 

They have a few people who write original articles and others who write summaries or commentary with links to the referring articles on newsworthy topics. Then at the bottom of each story is a link to a news and discussion forum for the visitors to comment on the subject. The news and discussion forum does not require registration, which encourages lurkers to actually post and get involved in discussion.

 

The casual visitor to BF might not easily find the forums or be daunted by the by the prospect of registering and posting. I think this type of concept would being more life to the front page and draw more voices to the forum.

 

Here are a couple of links to places that provide better explanation of the concept than my description.

 

www.arstechnica.com

 

www.tech-report.com

[squarepusher]

I don't want to leave the EZBoard editor for posting comments, because there's a ton of features it offers that I don't want to deprive users of.

 

One thing I am working on as we speak is Java API for EZBoard, meaning, a way for brewerfan.net (the site) to read topics from EZBoard. So, maybe the title of the newest thread would be offered on the home page (one from each forum, or something like that).

 

I suppose if people find registering a daunting task, I can remove the registration requirement from posting... although that could open the hole for much mayhem.

[Iron Chef Napalm]

I was not suggesting replacing the EZ board or adding another BBS, just adding an additional category for front page news and BF articles that did not require registration. I don?t think removing registration for the entire board would be wise.

 

I like the idea of just generating a post under the appropriate current forum categories, but sometimes those seem to sink to the bottom under the weight of all the new posts and polls.

 

 

Just offering my 2 cents of bad advice. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif

[squarepusher]

[ Just offering my 2 cents of bad advice ]

 

No I think it's a great idea, and i'm planning on implementing it. I'll probably just create a topic for each article, and then link the topic to the article so it's easy to locate.

[lynchmobster]

How about adding the save statistic to the player info "cards"?

[squarepusher]

ok, saves are added.