Dudspuds Blog

This has been a maintenance week, it seems. One of those weeks where it feels like you’re not getting too much done, but you really are.

Here are the highlights.

It’s the Tables, Stupid!

There was major problem posting articles with large and numerous html tables. In fact, would take a vacation while working on these tables! I discovered this working with content from FootballGuys.com - they include good number of data tables in some of their articles.

The issue was resolved, and we’re back at it. It was a problem with the HTML sanitizer — and how it was processing the articles. For anyone interested – the HTML sanitizer removes HTML tags from the article, so the system can accurately count the number of words. It’s important, otherwise you wouldn’t know how long the article is that you’re buying.

Another problem came up with these articles involving the WYSIWYG editor (TinyMCE). After you “Save” article, the editor likes to massage the HTML to make sure it’s not malformed. This occurs right before the article is sent to the server. With lots of tables in the article – the “massaging” may take a while and the browser may pop up warnings that say things like “Script is taking a long time”, or “Do you want to continue running this script?”. Since we’re stuck with this issue (for security reasons) – just let the browser finish running the script… Thats the easiest. Firefox seems to go much faster than Internet Explorer. This only applies to large articles with lots of tables - most folks won’t even notice it.

Rotobowl League Update

There’s a reason I started Dudspuds… It’s because I’m terrible at fantasy football. So bad, in fact, that I’m last place in my Rotobowl league this year (out of 12 teams). Even worse, I’m #289 of #348 overall. Ouch. Now – in my defense, I’ve had the misfortune of injuries, bad luck, under performing players, poor drafting and a lack of preparation to deal with…. My goal is to finish somewhere in the middle – which will require that I win the rest of my games. If I win in coming weeks, I’ll be sure to mention it. Otherwise, there will be no more talk about the Rotobowl until next year. Now, off to read the Week 9 Cheatsheets, and Week 9 Player Matchups.

New York Tech Meetup - Tuesday

Seeing that New York City is a stones throw away, I’ll be attending the New York Tech Meetup on November 6th. Not sure what to expect… other than to see some cool technologies, and chat with like-minded folks. It’s a big group (~400) – so it’s probably done in lecture style, with power points and static demo’s. I may try to present Dudspuds to the group in coming months. We’ll see.

Weekly Updates to become Individual Posts

I’ve been debating on whether I keep this weekly update format, or I do individual blog posts. I’ve decided to do individual posts for a handful of reasons…

• Each post can be more in depth
• Posts are easier to find when searching (or when being searched or indexed by Google, Yahoo, etc)
• Posts can be linked to directly, since they cover one topic

I’ll reserve the periodic updates for special occasions, or when I haven’t updated the Blog for a long while. (this should never happen, of course)

Okay - so we’re nearly a week late with this update, but we saved it for what we think is exciting news!

Publisher Progress…

FootballGuys.com is now on board. These guys create tons of content every week for hardcore fantasy football fans. Their articles will be available individually within the marketplace starting this week (Week 8).

Our goal is to sign up 5 large publishers before we begin marketing the site to an extended audience of fantasy sports players. We’re taking a slow and steady approach to ramping up the site — to make sure all the kinks are worked out, and so we have some breathing room to respond to user and publisher feedback.

You can easily see all articles available from FootballGuys by searching for “footballguys”.

More Enhancements

We have made a couple of important enhancements.

1. Flexible pricing - Publishers can now set the price of an article from FREE ($0.00) to any desired amount, with $0.01 increments. Previously, publishers could only price articles in common denominations of US currency. (i.e. $0.05, $0.10, $0.25, $0.50, $0.75, $1.00, etc..) This opens up many possibilities for listing and selling articles of varying length.
2. Printer-friendly views - Now, when someone buys and prints an article, the site uses a stylesheet that is designed for printers. This means that unnecessary things are turned off in the printed page — such as navigation, footers and the search bar. The result is a much more readable printed page. It’s not an earth shattering enhancement, but worth noting.

That wraps it up for this week’s update.

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.

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.

The last week has been busy.

Articles for sale!

We hit a big milestone today. We’re now selling articles from our first major publisher, Rotowire.com! Woohoo. They started off with 61 articles today.

Take a look at new articles. Also, here’s what search results for a specific player look like.

Speaking of loading articles - it only takes a few steps to load each article, but it will get even easier as our web publishing tools improve. Eventually, we’ll support publishers who want to link their database directly to the Dudspuds site.

Many small changes

I made a bunch of changes to the system, and will continue to do so as things get rolling with more content. Nothing worth noting here, since they are administrative changes or bug fixes.

For next week, there is a laundry list of improvements that will be available — which I’ll talk.

Publishers

I’m getting organized with a second large publisher who will soon be offering content on the site. That will be another major step towards getting more content on here before we target consumers. I’ll be spending a good amount of time in coming weeks finding more publishers. Contact me if you’d like to chat.