Kilg.us – Fantasy Stat Tracker …Tracker

There has been an unforeseen development since adding drag-and-drop to Team pages on Kilg.us. The purpose of drag-and-drop was to easily move players on an off the bench. Drag-and-drop also lets you change the order in which players are listed on your team page. A number of people have noticed that, after they re-order their players, that order isn’t maintained when they reload the page.

Kilg.us does not keep a record of the order you place your players in–it only tracks whether they are on or off the bench. When you load your team page, your players will always display in scorecard order–Catcher, 1st Base, 2nd Base, 3rd Base, Shortstop, Left Field, Center Field, Right Field. If you have multiple players at a position, they will be in alphabetical order based on last name, then first name. The position for a player is based on what MLB lists as the player’s primary position. This may or may not match up with the position qualifications for players in your league.

MLB doesn’t differentiate relief and starting pitchers, so they are all listed alphabetically–again by last name, then first name.

As time allows, I will look into letting Kilg.us monitor the order players are dragged into. For the immediate future, other features are priority.

I received an email notifying me of a second repercussion of the 2010 re-launch. When players were moved on or off the bench, the change was not being saved. Upon re-visiting the team page, the bench would revert to its previous state.

After review, the script that is intended save the bench changes to the database was trying to access a User class that wasn’t available to it. I’ve fixed the issue so you should now see the normal, expected behavior from benching and activating players.

This is the second issue that has occurred in a non-visible script where a class was not properly referenced. This is caused by the re-architecture of the objects in Kilg.us and is a bit frustrating. I’ll be reviewing all similar scripts this evening in hopes of catching any other situations where this is occurring.

I’m in the process of implementing a series of updates to Kilg.us for the 2010 season. The biggest noticeable difference will be an entire new look and feel. The new layout will allow for 1, 2, and 3-column pages that should let Kilg.us more efficiently use space.

Other changes in progress include:

• Integrated log-in/sign-up function
• User-defined backgrounds
• More flexibility in the “invite friends” functionality
• Updated log-in flow
• Drag-and-drop bench
• Integration with Zend framework

Among the other items I’m planning to get to before opening day:

• Add OPS to statistics available for tracking
• Implement Lucene search for “Find Friends”
• SSL for log-in flow

If you have other suggestions, please add a comment or drop me a long at admin@kilg.us

I’ll go into more detail about the updated features over the coming weeks. In the mean time, I’m just trying to get things done before the season kicks-off!

It is now possible to change the order in which your Kilg.us Industry teams display on your Dashboard and team-selection drop-down menu. Both displays use the same ordering. To change the order, click the “Select teams to Display” link from the “My Industry” section of your dashboard. This will open a page that lists all the teams your Industry friends have exposed for you to view. In addition to selecting to show or hide the teams, you can drag-and-drop to change the order of list. After making all the show/hide and ordering changes, click the “Save Display Selections” button to save your changes.

For a team to be visible on your Dashboard and team-selection drop-down, they must have the “Show” option selected. All teams (whether shown or not) can be re-ordered on the page, but only teams marked to Show will be visible to you elsewhere in Kilg.us.

The new drag-and-drop functionality is done using a JQuery plug-in–TableDnD. It should work across all modern browsers, but if you have any difficulty with it, please let me know.

In other developments, I tweaked the display of the Find Users page to utilize avatars and look more like the Owners list on the Dashboard. Doing so removed the “+” that used to be the activator to request an Owner join your Industry. You can now click anywhere (their avatar, name, email, etc.) on the Owner to make the request. There is still a confirmation dialog before the request is actually make so you won’t accidentally add people you don’t know to your Industry.

I also did some tuning to the logic behind the process of requesting Owners to join your Industry and the acceptance/denial flow thereafter.

Lastly, some style tweaks for all elements that use avatars and contain links. To identify hover-states, those elements will now display a gray border. The style uses the border-radius attributes from CSS3 that Webkit (Safari, Chrome) and Firefox make available. Those of you using less capable browsers (ie, IE) will have to suffer through square corners on your borders.