Kilg.us – Fantasy Stat Tracker …Tracker

On the positive side, email boxscores finally went out this morning. And based on the number of emails I’ve received, they reached a lot of people! Unfortunately, after the initial batch they continued to send another 6 or 7 times. I believe I have that process stopped.

At first glance, I don’t know why this happened. The script that sends the emails is unchanged from what used to work (just migrated to the new server). That would seem to suggest there was a problem with the CRON job scheduling. I’ve deleted all CRON jobs from the server and will be doing some more research to try to determine what went wrong before I re-schedule the script.

I’m sorry to all of you that were flooded by emails this morning. I’ll do my best to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Things are proceeding well with the migration of Kilg.us to a new host. The cloud server is up, the web server is installed, database server configured, postfix installed, SSH/SFTP running. I’ve even migrated the codebase with success, although it is all still running on the old Kilg.us database. Tomorrow I hope to get the database copied over and see how things work.

For tomorrow I have moved the CRON job that mails daily boxscores to the new server. An initial test of it was successful. I’m optimistic that tomorrow morning everyone that wants boxscore emails should receive them.

This morning the boxscore email script failed while running. I believe I’ve tracked the problem to a time-out error.

As many of you have surely noticed, Kilg.us is taking MUCH longer to render team pages than it did last year–2-6 times as long in my experience. Each time a team page is rendered, Kilg.us checks to make sure it has the latest stats for each player. If it doesn’t, it pulls in the latest and updates the database. This same process occurs when the daily boxscores are generated. This process is taking much longer than it used to. What used to take a few minutes is now trending over 90.

I’m not sure what I will do about this, yet. As I see it now, there are four options:

1. optimize the current process
2. replace the continuous look-up mechanism with a scheduled process
3. change hosting provider
4. change stats provider

I will likely start with #1, but I hold little hope of its success. #2 would suck as it could mean Kilg.us stats are a few minutes out of date at any given time. I’m also not sure it would actually decrease the load. I would love to do #3 as I’ve never been impressed with Kilg.us’s current host, but better options cost more money and the time to make the transition isn’t insignificant. Number 4 is also a fanciful option as I am yet to find another free source of live stats and paid options cost tens of thousands of dollars.

When I have a solution–or at least a path forward–selected I will post again. Until then…sorry.

Daily email boxscores should resume tomorrow morning–they send about 6am Eastern time. The emails contain your team’s stats for the previous day’s games. If you’d like to receive the daily boxscore emails for one or more of your teams, visit the Manage my Settings page and check out the Kilg.us Boxscores section.

If you think you’ve signed up for the emails and don’t receive one for your team tomorrow morning, please post a comment to this thread so I can investigate.

Happy baseball season!

I’m still working to diagnose the issues with daily boxscore emails. Based on my research, I think I have narrowed the issue down to daily boxscore emails for friends’ teams (although I still don’t know why). Is there anyone who has signed up for daily boxscore emails for their own teams that is not receiving them?

Has anyone noticed a problem receiving some of their daily email boxscores? If so, please add a comment or email me. I think some might be being missed, but would like to hear from any people actually experiencing problems.

Thanks for your help!

Looks like last night’s 2010 Kilg.us re-launch wasn’t spotless–the script to generate and send email box scores didn’t run correctly this morning. Part of the new 2010 efforts included re-structuring the organization of classes in the file system to follow more standard practices. It looks like the script in question was missing a reference to the class it needed to determine the date for which it should be sending the box scores.

I’ve updated the script and expect it to run tomorrow without a hitch. I don’t intend to run the script to generate box score emails today because it is still spring training. If you have an urgent and dire need for a box score email, let me know and I’ll see what can be done.

Kilg.us allows you to form industries with your friends so you can view eachother’s team and track one another’s stats. Here’s how it works.

Enter Your Info

After signing-up for a Kilg.us account, you’ll want to be sure to enter some of your personal information. By default, only your email address will be searchable on Kilg.us. To add more details, click “Manage my Settings” in the utility box at the top-right of any page. This will take you to a page on which you can enter your:

• name
• home town
• home state
• cell phone number

We recommend you include at least your full name. The other information will just make it that much easier for your friends to find you when they search.

Find Friends

Now that you’ve enter your information, go search for your friends! You can begin your search from your dashboard or by clicking “Find Friends” in your utility box.

In both places you’ll find a single search form in the right column. You can type any criteria into this field that you think might match your friend–his name, email address, phone number, home town, or home state. Kilg.us uses an open-source search engine called Lucene to try to find matches.

If matches are found, they will appear to the left of the search box. Once you find the friend you’re looking for, clicking on his name will start the process of adding him to your industry.

While Lucene is a pretty smart search, it’s not perfect. If your search terms don’t return a match, try changing them up a bit. In general, try to use more than 3 characters in a search and avoid punctuation.

What if you can’t find your friends?

It could be that you can’t find your friend because he isn’t signed-up for Kilg.us. If that might be the case, you can send an invitation! From your dashboard you just need to enter your friend’s name and email address to send an email invitation. In fact, you can invite as many of your friends as you’d like. If you want your whole league to try Kilg.us, invite them all at once!

Confirm Friends

Once you make an industry request, your friend will receive an email notifying them of the request. At that point, they will need to log-in to Kilg.us and accept your request before you can start viewing eachother’s teams.

When you get industry requests from friends, you will receive an email notification and will see an alert on your dashboard. You can accept or decline the request by clicking on the alert message on your dashboard.

Share Your Teams

Once the request is confirmed, you will see your friend in the right column of your dashboard. By clicking on your friend’s name you can select which of your team’s they can view. By default, they won’t get access to any. Keep in mind that sharing your team just allows your friend to view your stats. It doesn’t let them edit your roster in any way.

You can also change which of your friends’ teams show on your dashboard. This is managed through the “Select teams to Display” link in the middle of your dashboard. This page will list all the teams your friends have shared with you. You can pick whether to show or hide each one.

I have re-enabled all of the Kilg.us scheduled tasks. This includes the following items:

1. Usage statistics (tracking how many people use Kilg.us and how they use it)
2. Player stat collection (pulling in the latest stats for all active players)
3. Daily box score emails (sending emails with daily stats)

If you’re tracking any Spring stats, #2 will be of interest to you. #1 shouldn’t have an impact on anyone but myself. #3 is the most likely to create an un-expected surprise. Anyone that had their team set to email them daily box scores will again receive those emails on a daily basis.

To turn off daily box score emails, log-in to Kilg.us then access your Account Info. From there you can enable or disable Kilg.us Boxscores for each of your teams and your industry teams.

If you forgot your Kilg.us password, you can have a temporary password sent to you. If you forgot your username, too, shoot me an email from the email address whose credentials you need and I’ll try to help you out.

I’ve disabled Kilg.us daily boxscore emails and scheduled stat collection for the off-season.