Dudspuds Blog

I have a handful of things to talk about in this week’s update.

Site Improvements

The reason for soft launching Dudspuds was to allow for many iterations of improvements before going mainstream. Here’s what we’ve done this last week…

• Publishing Tool Improvements
  • Linking players and teams to articles is now faster. After linking, you return to the player/team entry form instead of the article view.  While this improvement saves you several clicks, there is still room for improvement here.
  • You can now auto-link highlighted text within an article to Dudspuds search results.  (ie.  highlight “brett favre”, click the auto-link button and it creates a link to search results for brett favre)  This is a handy way to highlight player names in your articles, and also helpful for readers if they decide they want to see more articles about a particular player or team.  Even with this improvement, it can still be a hassle if you’re linking 10 to 15 players within an article.  Next iteration, this will be done automatically, based on the players and teams you’ve linked to the article.
  • Added a “Publish” toggle link to the article listing.  This makes it faster to toggle articles between “Published” and “Not Published”.  This is common when pre-loading articles before you publish them, or if you decide to take an article down.  When looking at the article listing, you click the link, and the “publish” status will change accordingly.
• Viewing and Searching Articles
  • Added the article date above the title.
  • Improved the article preview page, hopefully making more clear that the article is for sale.
  • New articles are displayed on the home page for everyone.  If you have a watch list defined, you’ll see articles matching entries on your watch list.
  • Confirmation messages are now more noticable.

Tradeshow

I will be attending the Sports Media and Technology Show on November 13-14, 2007, in New York City.  Agenda: listening, networking and decide if Dudspuds should exhibit at this show in 2008.

Pilot Users and Feedback

With the first batch of articles in the system and a handful of pilot users, I’ve started collecting some great user feedback.  It’s amazing how helpful users are when you take the time to listen.  I’m keeping a log of enhancement requests that will eventually make it onto this blog, as they’re implemented.  There’s plenty of work ahead.