I’m not in the mood to write tonight, so I’m going to be brief. Kilg.us now has avatars for Users and Teams. Hopefully this will make the dashboard easier to disgest at a glance. To define your User avatar, use the Account Information page. Team avatars are set via the Change Team Avatar link on the team page. All avatars are pre-defined images at this point, but flexibility will be coming soon.
Updates to Kilg.us today:
I’ll be out of town most of the next two weeks, so there probably won’t be many–if any–Kilg.us updates until late May.
The new mechanism for calculating statistics that I mentioned yesterday is now in place and in use on Kilg.us. Instead of only calculating team stats on your team page, Kilg.us now can calculate the stats anywhere on the site. The Team page has been updated so it is now using the new stats calculator which might show modest improvements in page load time (previously stats were calculated client-side, which is generally slower). More interesting, the Dashboard is now displaying summary team stats for all your teams and your Industry teams. The summaries display batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage on the offensive side and ERA, WHIP, strikeouts per 9, and walks per 9 on the pitching side. All summary stats are only for the players currently in the team’s lineup.
After monitoring the performance of the new calculator, I plan to implement the stat totals on the daily boxscore emails. Look for that in the coming days (but not tomorrow).
In addition to the new calculator, I also had to put in place a new engine for collecting stats. Previously stats were collected each time a Team page was loaded. For every player on the team, Kilg.us would check if newer stats were available (newer than what Kilg.us had stored in its database). If there were, they would be pulled into the system and the database updated. This process is still in place. But this method meant if nobody had visited their team page on any given day, the stats that would be displayed on the Dashboard could be out-of-date.
To solve this dilema, I added a scheduled process to gather stats. The process runs on the hour from 10am-1am Eastern time each day (March through October, anyway). It collects the latest stats for every player that is associated with a team in Kilg.us. This means dashboard stats could potentially be a little out of date, but should be reasonably recent. And up-to-the-second stats are, of course, always available on your Team page.
It can’t be seen yet, but there is some ongoing work with Kilg.us. I’m currently adding in some new mechanisms for calculating team statistics. Right now all team totals are done with JavaScript on the client-side based on the numbers displayed on your team page. This made sense when I was only putting stats on that one page. Now that we have boxscore emails and a dashboard, it would be nice to have access to stat totals throughout Kilg.us. As such, I’m building statistical totaling into the object model. This will give access to team stat totals for emails, dashboards, and anywhere else they could be of value.
I have the batter stats collected and calculated. Next up will be the pitcher stats. After that, I’ll start working the output into the different locations they’ll be used. Stay tuned…
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!
A bunch of little improvements today that will hopefully make life a lot easier on Kilg.us. First–and most importantly–I think I have finally fixed how Kilg.us is gathering Win, Loss, Save, and Hold data. Since adding holds a few weeks back and tweaking how those categories are gathered, the numbers had been very inconsistent. Sometimes they would seem correct, sometimes empty, and sometimes it looked like season totals instead of daily ones. After digging around in the method for almost an hour, I finally I identified a missing character that was causing the SQL insert to fail in one of the three options for saving data. That’s been fixed and all the numbers are looking more accurate now. Hopefully that will keep up.
On the Dashboard, I’ve removed the alert message describing the new Dashboard. In its place there is now a “What’s This?” link in the My Industry column of the page. It links off to the blog pulling up all articles tagged with “social networking”. Hopefully that collection of articles will amply explain what Industries are.
Also on the Dashboard I added a link to determine which of your Industry teams you want to view. The idea is that you may have been given permission by others in your Industry to view teams you might not care about (for example, if you join the Major League Baseball Teams Industry, you’ll have 30 teams to view). Rather than having an enormous list of teams, you can now restrict the teams that display to those that are of most interest. Of course, at any time you can go back in and change those preferences.
On a related note, the team selection drop-down in the top-right navigation now includes sections for both My Teams and My Industry. Like on the Dashboard, only Industry teams that you have selected to view will display in the drop-down. You can now use the drop-down to jump straight to any team you can view with one click.
Each User in Kilg.us can create an Industry. An Industry is a collection of other Owners whose teams the User can potentially view and who can potentially view the User’s teams. Industry members cannot edit or change one another’s teams in any way–they can only view them. All team management functionality remains the sole rhealm of the team’s Owner (the User who originally created the team).
To build an Industry, a User must search for other Owners and add them to his/her Industry. Before an Owner is added to another User’s Industry, the Owner must approve the addition.
Once Owners are associated through one-another’s Industries, the Owners can select which of their teams they wish to share with the other Owner. These viewing rights can be changed at any time by the User that owns the team.
All management of a User’s Industry is performed via the Dashboard: searching for and adding Owners, accessing other Owners teams, and changing viewing rights for teams.
To add an owner to your Industry, you must first search for and locate the person you wish to add. On your dashboard is a form labeled “Find Industry Members.” This is the form you will use to locate owners to add to your industry.
The form allows you to search on first and last name, home town and state, email address, and cell phone number. You can enter as much or as little data into each field as you’d like. If you know the email address the person is using with Kilg.us, that will be the most reliable way to find them–Kilg.us requires every user to have a unique email address.
After entering your search criteria, click the “Find Owners” button. This will take you to the Find Owners results page. The Find Owners page lists all Kilg.us users that match your search criteria and have their profiles marked as public. Owners that are already part of your Industry will be grayed out. All the rest will have a plus sign next to their name. Clicking the plus sign will send a request to that Owner to allow you to join industries.
Once the request has been sent, a notification will show up on the other Owner’s dashboard alerting them to your request. If the Owner approves your request, you will be added to one another’s Industries. At that point, both you and the other Owner can select which teams you wish to share.
Once an Owner has been added to your Industry, you can select which of your teams that Owner can view. This is done using the Team Permissions page.
Access the Team Permissions page for an Owner by clicking on that Owner’s name from your Dashboard in the Industry section. This will bring you to a page that lists all the teams you own, along with “Hide” and “View” radio buttons for each team. To make a team viewable by the industry member, select the View radio button for that team.
Once you have made your selections, click the “Assign View Permissions” button. This will save your team viewing assignments to Kilg.us and reload the page. After the page reloads, you should still see your assignments properly selected.
The next time your industry friend logs-in to Kilg.us, they’ll see your teams (the ones you selected for them to view) on their dashboard.
[This note was posted to all Users' dashboards on 4/5/2009. I've included it here for archival purposes.]
Welcome to the new Kilg.us Dashboard! If you’ve been using more than 1 team in Kilg.us, the Dashboard is a familiar concept to you. If not, this is a whole new concept.
The purpose of the Dashboard is to provide quick, one-click access to all the functionality of Kilg.us. On the left side of the screen you will see the “My Teams” section. This provides links to all the teams you own within Kilg.us. Simply click on the link for a team to access that team’s stats page.
The right column now contains the “My Industry” section. This consists of 4 main sections: 1) Notifications of Industry requests (think of them like Facebook “friend requests”), 2) link to all the teams shared with you through your industry, 3) a list of your industry friends, and 4) a form to find new industry members.
The core of the new Industry functionality is in place, but it will be undergoing lots of development and improvement in the coming weeks. Please check out the Tracker blog to learn more about how the Industry features [will] work and for the status of new functionality. As always, feedback is appreciated either through blog comments or email!