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!
Kilg.us passed a few milestones on usage yesterday. Here are some fun facts:
In context, we ended the 2009 season just shy of 500 users, right about 700 teams, and around 60 industries.
Keep spreading the word! Knowing lots of people are getting use out of Kilg.us helps keep me motivated to continue improving it!
This evening I completed work to allow Owners to track their Kilg.us teams’ season-to-date statistics. This has been a popular request throughout the past year. Your team’s season-to-date stats are now available from each Team page by clicking on the “Season-to-Date” tab just below your team name. Clicking the “Today” tab will return you to your live, up-to-the-minute daily stats.
Season-to-Date statistics are for the players CURRENTLY on your roster. Kilg.us does not track the changes you make to your roster throughout the season. The Season-to-Date statistics center around a Strat-O-Matic scoring model. I’ve never played Strat-O-Matic, but–as described to me–roster moves aren’t allowed during the season. Rosters are locked in before the season and only change in the off-season.
For those playing in a standard fantasy baseball league, these Season-to-Date stats will be different than your fantasy team’s total stats (accumulating stats for players in your lineup on any given day). For Owners in this situation, season-to-date stats will make it a touch easier to view all your players’ season performance, but won’t be of direct use when tracking your team’s performance.
Adding Season-to-Date stats wasn’t a trivial matter. I had to make changes to more than a half-dozen of Kilg.us’ most important objects. In addition to changes to Kilg.us objects, the database was also expanded to include tables to store the season stats for players. At the moment, the objects are writing to the database via SQL statements. In the coming days I’ll update to use stored procedures like the rest of the database communications.
I have tried to test for unexpected repercussions from the object and database changes, but please let me know if you encounter any odd behavior by posting a comment or emailing me.
I haven’t posted about any Kilg.us changes for a couple days, but there has been a little going on. In my defense, I started a “Road to the Show” career in MLB 2010 The Show, so I MIGHT have been spending a little more time honing by batting skills than publishing about Kilg.us changes.
On the fixes side, there were some issues around gathering players and adding them to Kilg.us. Those have been revised now, so any player on a 40-man roster should be showing up (and then some). If you don’t see someone that you want on your team, post a comment or let me know.
There is an outstanding issue with rookies, though. I think I’ve narrowed it to the stored procedure that saves player stats, but all rookie pitchers show a blank (no zeros, no stats, completely blank) stat line regardless of their performance. This is next on the list of things to fix.
Next up, when players were being collected from MLB.com, they were added to the official “Major League Baseball” owner’s teams if they didn’t currently exist on the appropriate roster. They weren’t, however, being removed from their previous team if they had been traded or were a free agent (rather than a rookie). This never seemed to come up last year, but there code I changed to fix the problem hasn’t been touched in nearly a year, so I’m not quite sure the root of the problem. Hopefully it is resolved going forward.
On that note, keep in mind that you can follow any MLB team’s stats by adding the owner “Major League Baseball” to your friends. That particular owner has all 30 teams with rosters that are automatically updated to have all the latest players.
Among new features for 2010, there are three more items I hope to get out by opening day (or very shortly thereafter):
Opening Day is barely a week away!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Among the other items I’m planning to get to before opening day:
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!
I’ve disabled Kilg.us daily boxscore emails and scheduled stat collection for the off-season.
I got an email today pointing out that homeruns allowed were not showing up on Team pages even if they had been selected to be displayed for the given team. After a quick peak, I noticed a typo (“HRA” vs “HR”) in the table cell classes. I’ve corrected the typo so HRA should now be displaying properly for all teams.
One of the longest running requests of Kilg.us has been to include game progress information. I can definitely see the value in knowing whether the game your pitcher was pitching in is done yet or not (will there be a win coming or is it all over already?). This is a different kind of statistic than what Kilg.us otherwise collects, so it has been low on the priority list. As I got tired of stored procedures earlier today, though, it finally sounded like an appealing project.
The scoreboard is displayed across the top of the page in the banner area. It displays abbreviated linescores: team, runs, hits, errors, and inning (or “F” if Final). The banner area only has room for 8 scores at a time, so there are left and right arrows to slide the scoreboard side-to-side to view all games.
The first draft of the implementation pulls XML data from MLB each time a page is loaded that displays the scoreboard. Currently the Kilg.us homepage, your Dashboard, and all Team pages include the scoreboard. The data is collected from the XML, looped through, and populated into a list/table combination of mark-up. Some JQuery sets up click events on the arrow buttons when the page loads (if they are needed; if 8 or less games are occuring that day, no arrows will appear) and calculates how far the scoreboard needs to slide to display all games.
I only had time to perform a very quick testing on IE8, Safari, and Chrome (in addition to Firefox, on which all my development occurs) so if you experience any problems with your browser, please let me know.
More development will be ongoing with the scoreboard. I expect I will update the process to store the game scores so Kilg.us doesn’t need to continue pulling in game scores even after all game are done. It will function similar to how player stats are collected. It will first check if the XML feed has been updated. If not, it will pull data from the database. If so, it will update the database and use those stats.
While clicking through my team stats today on Kilg.us, I noticed that the stats display layer seemed to be out of date. After a little investigation, I found that the XML feed for the stats had not been updated since June 16. A little more digging turned up what looks like a change in the way MLB is storing their data. The format of the data itself seems to be the same, but they moved its home on the server. After updating the path to the data, all seems to be well and cumulative stats are up-to-date again.
In other news, I resolved an issue that yesterday’s IE7 “fixes” introduced. In the mega-drop-down, the new JavaScript set a negative top-margin for IE browsers. Turns out IE8 is enough better than IE7 for this to be a problem. So that method has been updated to only apply the margin to Internet Explorer version 7.
And lastly, some new language throughout the site. The Account Info page now displays an alert message if the User’s profile is set to Public but they don’t have a first or last name defined. Obviously it is difficult to find people in a search if you can’t search on their name(s). The new language encourages the inclusion of a name to help other Users in their searches. The Account Info and Sign-up pages now also have note text added to the password sections indicating that passwords must be at least 6 characters long. Previously the only way to know this would be to enter a password that was too short and try to submit it. At that point an alert would pop-up identifying the shortcoming. Now the User is informed up front.