Dudspuds Blog

The fourth weekly update for Dudspuds.  Man - time flies!

We have some major enhancements to talk about this week.  I’ve been implementing features that will speed up article loads.  This will help our publishers, who have tons of content that must find its way to Dudspuds quickly and consistently, every day.  Dudspuds won’t get very far if it’s a pain in the ass to load articles.

Publishing Articles in Dudspuds

Before I talk about the specific enhancements to the publisher tools, lets briefly review the steps to publishing an article at Dudspuds.  I’ll write a detailed post about this in the near future.

1. Login to Dudspuds
2. Go to My Account
3. Go to Publisher Tools (assuming your a publisher)
4. Click “Add Article”
5. Fill in the title, synopsis and other details
6. Set your price (or Free, if you’re feeling generous)
7. Enter the text of your article
8. Save it
9. Add related players
10. Add related teams

TEN STEPS.  Damn.  Seems like a lot.  I bet it takes more to list an item on eBay (that’s a blog post for another day).  Here’s a quick run-down.  Steps 1-4 are simply navigating the website. Step 5 is important - you want an effective title and synopsis, since this is what people read when finding and deciding to buy your article.  Step 6 is real easy - set the price LOW.  Step 7 & 8 are a simple copy/paste, since you probably already have the article written in MS Word, OpenOffice Writer, or in HTML.  Steps 9 and 10 are the biggies.  Linking players and teams is important because it tells Dudspuds specifically what is related to this article.  These links will determine who’s watch list, and RSS feeds the article shows up on.

So that’s it!  If you’ve already written the article, it shouldn’t take more than 1 minute to load it and link players and teams.  Obviously, if you mention 13 players and 6 teams, it will take longer to load.  My goal was to get the load time down to 15 seconds or less - no matter how many players or teams are mentioned.  Now, on to the enhancements…

Publisher Tool Enhancements

AJAX to the rescue!  The first enhancement involves finding the player or team you want to link to your article.  We now have a handy auto-complete box that you can use to search…  Here’s what it looks like:

Now, you can simply type the name, and select from the drop-down.  This is pretty fast. Trust me, I’ve used it extensively.

The second enhancement scans through your article and looks for any important links (typically player names and teams that are hyperlinked)…  It then presents you with several options prior to completing the article:

1. Automatically link the player(s) to the article (saving you from doing it manually)
2. Automatically link the team(s) to the article (again, saving you from doing it manually)
3. Automatically replace your hyperlinks to point to the Dudspuds search results for that term.
   • This is valuable if your current hyperlinks point to premium content that is behind subscription content.  If hypher links point to stats pages, player profile pages, or other publically available pages — you can just leave them be.

This feature requires that you have a hypertext link around the players and teams mentioned in your article.  Come to think of it, I should also support the use of a <span> tag around the player or team name.  This would work the same as a link without having a link. I made a note of this.

So now, steps 9 and 10 above are combined into a single step that does the work automatically.

Content Bandwagon

My next focus is to ensure that fresh new content is being loaded every day from our publishers.  This means I’ll be doing most of the article loading.  Eventually, publishers will be loading articles themselves (assuming we find some success here at Dudspuds). Or even better, articles will be automatically fed into the marketplace.

After the content is flowing every day, I’ll start bringing in more beta users.  I expect to make a good number of improvements to the home page view — taking better advantage of the watch lists, and presenting content in a more condensed, and relevant format.