Kilg.us – Fantasy Stat Tracker …Tracker

I have moved Kilg.us back to referencing the database on the new servers. Once again, things seem to be going well. Hopefully that will still be the case in a couple hours!

I did not attempt to copy over the old database. There is a lot of complexity involved in merging databases and I just didn’t have the patience after yesterday. As a result, if you added or removed players, moved them on or off the bench, or manipulated a team or your account in the last 24 hours, those changes will be lost. You will need to re-apply any changes.

To the couple people that signed up for Kilg.us today–I’m sorry, but you’ll need to do it again! I promise this isn’t a regular occurrence. In fact, I’ve never deleted an account before!

The only outstanding issue that I am aware of from the migration is the appearance of players that are not on the bench. They are rendering as gray and “benched” right now, but the team is still calculating their stats in totals. I’m working on that now and assume it will be a quick fix.

If you notice any other anomalies, please comment here, email me, or post to Facebook or Twitter (@kilgustracker).

**UPDATE 10:40PM**

It appears that batter stats are being collected properly for individuals, but tallied improperly for teams.

It appears that pitcher stats are not being collected properly for individuals, but tallies are correct for teams (based on day-old data).

Still investigating.

**UPDATE 11:19PM**

The culprits seem to be the stored procedures that Kilg.us tries to use for storing stats. All the procedures seem to be failing with the move to the new server. Luckily, Kilg.us included fallback string concatenation mechanisms for exactly this situation. I have disabled all the stored procedure calls and everything now seems to be working.

Earlier this Spring I changed the search function for finding friends and creating Industries. The biggest change was moving to a system that uses the Lucene search engine. Part of that engine requires that an index be built for the data to be searched. This was my first implementation of Lucene, so I didn’t have experience with maintaining that index of data. As it turns out, each time the data within the database changes, the index needs to be rebuilt to include all the correct information.

Initially, I wrote a short script to build the index. As more and more people signed-up for Kilg.us, though, the data became out of date because it wasn’t automatically re-indexing.

I have updated the processes for creating an account and changing user settings to display information publicly. Both processes now include a step that re-indexes user data. This should ensure that the user index is always up-to-date and all users with their information shared will be findable in the Find Friends search.

Kilg.us makes it simple to track major league baseball stats for your fantasy baseball team–or any other group of players you want to follow!

Step 1. Sign Up

The sign-up process is simple. From the homepage, start entering your desired username in the “user” field. If Kilg.us doesn’t recognize the username you enter, it will expose some additional fields for you to enter and confirm your password and your email address.

Form used to sign up for Kilg.us

If Kilg.us recognizes the username you enter, you’ll need to try a new one–someone else is already the one you tried.

Step 2. Create a Team

After signing up you can create your first team. This couldn’t be easier! Click the “Create Team” link in the utility box at the top-right of your dashboard. This will take you to a page where you enter the name of your new team. That’s it!

We do recommend keeping team names between 3 and 24 characters, but you can enter as many as you need. We also would suggest that you don’t create multiple teams with the same name–it’ll make life harder for you when you are trying to track your stats.

Step 3. Add Players

Once your team is created, you’ll be taken to your team detail page. From there you click the “Add Player” link. This takes you to a page where you can search for players, view their season stats, and add them to your team!

Add Player page with result for a search on "Young"

You can add as many–or as few–players as you want.

Step 4. Track Stats!

Now you can track stats!

Team page

A snapshot of your team’s overall statistics will be pulled into your dashboard so you can review all your teams at once. Clicking through to a team page will show you the day’s stats for each player, as well as the team totals.

Now in year two, Kilg.us has seen significant growth. Since the start of the baseball season, membership has increased about 10-fold. Our community grew 6% just in the last day. With so much interest materializing, I was inspired to encourage further growth. To do so, I’ve added an “invite your friends” feature to the Dashboard and Find Owners pages. You can invite up to 5 friends at a time. All you have to do is enter their email address (preferably their name, too, but it isn’t required) and click “Send Invitations.”

There is some client-side validation to check for email address formats. I also included a quick check on the back-end to ensure you aren’t inviting someone who is already a Kilg.us user (based on email address). Right now the system doesn’t report back if you invite a current user–it just neglects to send them an email.

The invitation email that is sent includes a brief description of Kilg.us, an offer to sign up and join your (ie, the person sending the invitation) industry, and a list of links for more Kilg.us information. Last, but not least, there is a disclaimer at the bottom indicating who requested that the email be sent. This includes your name (if you’ve defined it in your Account Information) and email address.

So, go forth, invite your friends, and build your industries!

Today’s work continued to focus on improving the sign-up process. I included more instructional information in the form of a 4-step flow diagram on the home page which links to a new How it Works page. This new page walks through Signing Up, Creating a Team, Adding Players, Tracking Stats, and Selecting Stats. Hopefully the new thumbnail screenshots will make the application feel more accessible to potential Users and encourage them to join and offer feedback on the tool.

The biggest outcome of today’s work, though, was my renewed realization of how bad I suck at Photoshop. I’ve never been good at computer illustration and it’s painfully obvious. If anyone out there has a graphic thumb and wants to help on Kilg.us, shoot me a line.

One of the first improvements to Kilg.us is some clean-up on the account creation process. The old process used server-side error checking. This means that someone creating an account would be able to enter a username or email address that already existed in the system and submit the form before receiving any negative feedback. The account creation now uses an AJAX validation process that checks username and email addresses for duplicates as soon as they are entered. This will help prevent users from trying to use an existing username and alert them if they already have an account setup for a particular email address.

If you’re a new user and create an account, let me know how it works for you!

With 2009 Spring Training fast approaching, I’ve begun work to improve the Fantasy Baseball Stattracker for the new season. As you’ve probably already noticed, the Stattracker has a name: Kilg.us! There is a brief overview of where the name came from on the site. I’ll likely move that over to the blog eventually.

Besides the name change and subsequent move to Kilg.us, there are a number of back-end upgrades already in place.

1. The database has been upgraded to a newer version that allows for stronger password encryption.
2. A new login script has been added that takes advantage of the stronger password encryption so as soon as you log in, your old account will be upgraded with the new encryption.
3. This blog is now running the latest WorkPress – 2.7. Between the upgrade and the server change there were a few hurdles to overcome, but I think everything is up and running.

Among the front-end changes I anticipate before the 2009 season starts are improvements to the account sign-up process, SSL implementation of the sign-up and log-on processes, and an iPhone-optimized web application. I’d like to build a real iPhone app for Kilg.us, but with no budget I probably won’t try to tackle the $99 iPhone developer fee.

If there are other improvements that would make the site better for you and your friends, please post a comment and I’ll see what I can do.

Here’s to an exciting 2009!

Just a few minor tweaks today. I cleaned up the “create account” process a bit. It’s still not elegant, but it at least gives an error if you try to create an account using an existing Username or Email. I’ve also added a footer with a link to the homepage (not sure if that’s actually valuable or not…) and a link to email a Fantasy Stat Tracker account I set up with Google.

Now that the application is starting to get a few pieces of functionality, I’m noticing the need for a navigation structure. Currently the application has the following navigation:

1. Blog nav—top-left: links to the blog
2. Account nav—top-right: links to manage account-level things
3. Team nav—below banner-right: links to manage on the team-level
4. Footer nav—site-wide links

This seems like a pretty disparate navigation scheme. I’ll have to tighten it up and try to make an architecture of pages/functions in the application.