Kilg.us – Fantasy Stat Tracker …Tracker

By now, everyone should have received their daily boxscores. If not, please comment below.

We were not without bumps, unfortunately. That I am aware of so far:

• As many a 50 boxscores were sent out multiple times (apologies!)
• The public SMTP I tried to use apparently uses a 24-hour window (rather than a day) for its quotas

The duplicate boxscores was just a goof by me. Last night as I was running my final tests, I commented-out the line that removes an email from the queue after sending because I didn’t want to keep re-entering data into the system before each test. I forgot to un-comment that line when I was done. Because of that, when the system pulled the first 50 boxscores to send, it still left them in the queue. When it went to pull the next 50, it returned the same group. I noticed this after a few times through the process, so hopefully everyone that got duplicates only saw a trickle–not a deluge–of them.

The SMTP issue is frustrating. In my testing, I was able to generate the full list of emails. I assumed the quota would reset at midnight. Apparently that wasn’t the case. So hundreds last night plus hundreds this morning meant the sending account was locked out mid-process. To resolve this, I used one of my personal accounts to complete the send. Many of you will have seen messages come from “matthew@encoredigitalmedia.com” rather than Kilg.us. I figured this was better than making you miss a day’s boxscore.

I have spent most of the last two days trying to get a dedicated Kilg.us SMTP server up and running so I don’t need to worry about stupid quotas and such. Unfortunately, I have absolutely no experience with setting up SMTP and have had just about zero success–hence the use of a public SMTP to get this moving. If anyone knows SMTP and can offer a helping hand, I would be greatly appreciative! Get in touch by email (admin@kilg.us), comment here, or on Twitter (@kilgustracker) or Facebook.

All that said, I think all emails should have been delivered and I have received feedback from some people whose emails weren’t rendering properly before that they look good now. All in all, I’m going to call this one a draw. I’ll keep plugging away today in hopes of a perfect push tomorrow.

It was brought to my attention this morning that Chrome was not laying-out the player detail layer as intended. The season stats table was showing below the player’s photo.

Before: Incorrect layout of stats table in Google Chrome

The culprit seemed to be a lack of a width defined for the element that contained the season stats table. I do not understand why it was a problem. Depending on the player, the width needed to be set to smaller and smaller values for the layout to work properly. I have set it to what, as best I can tell, is a low enough value to work for all players. This change is only in place in the new 2010 code base, so you won’t see the fix until I launch in the next day or two.

After: Proper layout of stats table in Google Chrome

As I said, I don’t understand why this was a problem. The width values are well below the width of the actual table that they contain. The overflow is set to “visible” so that the extra width of the table isn’t hidden. All values are well less than the actual physical space available for the element.  Unless I didn’t identify the real problem, it seems that there is a flaw in the Chrome rendering engine for this.

After launch, if you encounter a player detail layer that still isn’t laying out properly, please let me know.

There were a number of nice additions to the Fantasy Stat Tracker today. Among them:

• Change team name – edit the name of a team you have created
• Delete team – remove a team from your account
• Linked player names – player names now link to the player’s MLB.com profile page
• Google Analytics – added GA webstats to the site
• View Team link – added a link to the “account nav” to link to your team’s stats page (or render a drop-down list if you have multiple teams)

I also moved the “home page” link from the footer up to the “blog nav”. So we now have links to the blog home page and the Fantasy Stat Tracker home page in the top left corner of the page. The addition of the “view team” link and the relocation of the home link already seem to make it a lot easier to navigate the tool. As I mentioned the other day, though, I’ll be continuing to look at the navigation architecture for the site.

Along with the additions mentioned above, I performed a number of minor code enhancements. I worked on better escaping of SQL strings to be sent to the DB and some advancements in auto-redirecting users about the site based on whether or not the user account has a team associated with it (or multiple teams). There is also a check in place now to prevent people from accessing teams’ stats for other peoples’ teams. Previously you could edit the Location bar to change the TeamID that was being passed and see other peoples’ teams. You wouldn’t have been able to make any changes, but you could view the team nonetheless. Now you can’t.

Most noticeably, I re-organized the home page and brought a log-on form directly onto the page. The Fantasy Stat Tracker home page content was re-written slightly to better explain the free nature of this project. Some advertising verbiage was also added to encourage people to sign-up for an account.