2015 site updates/enhancements

Post any thoughts you have on how we can improve this league. Give suggestions for rule changes or mention any ideas you have to improve the web site.

2015 site updates/enhancements

Postby Kevin » Mon Apr 06, 2015 12:24 pm

Happy Opening Day! Last night, I released several web site updates and enhancements. I already mentioned one of them with a post about the new team pages. But I'm starting this new thread to chronicle all of the changes I made yesterday and will reply with more updates as they happen throughout the season. Please provide any feedback you may have.

* New team pages: Each franchise now has a home page that contains useful info and links about the team. These pages also allow owners to start new chatter threads on their own pages.

* New player photos: I have replaced the player photos "borrowed" from other sites with pretty realistic looking photos of players in their DTBL team caps/uniforms. This was done using FaceGen technology within the Out of the Park baseball simulation game. OOTP has a pretty dedicated and talented fan base which has created a ton of cool add-ons for the game, including these very nice FaceGen photos of MLB players. I used a couple of those tools to create the DTBL team caps and uniforms. I didn't put a ton of effort into this though, so if you don't like your team's uniforms and/or want to try your hand at creating your own, just let me know and I'll share some links with you on how to do this. You don't need to have the game in order to do this.

* Enhanced player pages: The individual player pages use these new player photos. Also added a new column to the stats table called "Honors". This column contains info on All-Star selections and post-season awards voting results. So far, I've entered all of these honors back to 2005. Eventually, I'd like to get the entire league history in there, but that's going to be a slow process as I scour my very old electronic and printed records.

* Added "Today's Best" and "Week's Best" on main page: You may have noticed the ESPN scoreboard/news widget is gone. It quit working sometime last fall. I have replaced that with a list of some of the hottest players in the league which will be automatically updated throughout the day for the daily best and each morning for the weekly best. "Week's Best" is simply the batter and pitcher with the highest PAR over the past seven days. Related, I'm also going to start calculating weekly PAR numbers for all active players. So those numbers will appear on the team stats pages. I may also start automatically naming a Player of the Week award at the end of each week based on the highest PAR for the week. But that is still TBD. "Today's Best" isn't exactly a daily PAR calculation, but it is closely related. I came up with a formula to award points for each statistical category. The batter/pitcher with the most points for the day will appear on the main page. For now, I'm not going to display the actual point values for players since it just gets wiped out at the beginning of each day anyway. I may tweak this formula throughout the season if it doesn't seem to be pegging the correct players as the day's best.

* Added an email link to the header: I created a new email account to use for some league correspondence (commish@dreamteambaseball.com). So you can send me mail at that address if you wish. It just forwards to my regular Gmail account though, so it really doesn't matter which address you use. Automated league notices should appear to come from this address from now on.

That's all for now. Time to watch some baseball!
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Re: 2015 site updates/enhancements

Postby Kelly » Thu Apr 09, 2015 2:13 pm

Is there a way you can add a second layer menu to the team pages for the sub-pages (Roster/Stats, Transactions, Current Leaders, etc.)? That way each of those sub-pages can still be accessible with one click. As an example, I most often want to view my team's Roster/Stats, so it would be helpful if I could just choose menu item "Team Pages" > "Cougars" > "Roster/Stats".

The new pictures, team colors, and logos are excellent!
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Re: 2015 site updates/enhancements

Postby Kevin » Thu Apr 09, 2015 2:42 pm

Kelly, I can look into making the change you suggested. But I think I should reiterate something I mentioned in the "team pages" thread in case you didn't see it. The team stats/roster pages are still accessible from the main menu under the "Stats" header. Prior to this update, the "Team Pages" and "Stats" menus were essentially duplicates, because I had always intended on creating these team pages. So everything that was accessible via one click still is. But if there are additional pages that you think should be added to the menus, I can certainly make some modifications.
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Re: 2015 site updates/enhancements

Postby Kelly » Thu Apr 09, 2015 4:35 pm

Got it - sorry, apparently I missed that feature where you can access individual team stats via the "Stats" menu item. This works for me!
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Re: 2015 site updates/enhancements

Postby Kelly » Thu Apr 09, 2015 4:39 pm

I have one more for you... I would suggest that you put the team name in the page heading on the "Live" stats pages (similar to how it is on the main team stats pages). I sometimes click through all the teams' live stats and then forget which team I'm looking at because I don't necessarily memorize which players are on which teams.
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Re: 2015 site updates/enhancements

Postby Kevin » Thu Apr 09, 2015 8:46 pm

Done! No idea why I didn't include that in the original version of those pages a few years ago. But it is there now. Thanks for the suggestion.

I made one other minor change to the live stats retrieval program. I've noticed a few times this week that not all pitchers' wins have been reflected on the live stats pages, including Aroldis Chapman earlier today. This was because the win wasn't recorded to a particular player's record yet by the time the program ran after the game's conclusion. And the way it works is that the first time the program runs after a game ends, it marks it in such a way that the game is skipped for the rest of the day (to save processing time). So now I've changed it so that the game will continue to be processed until a win is recorded to a pitcher. This had/has no impact on the official team stats. This was only an issue with the live stats.
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Re: 2015 site updates/enhancements

Postby Greg » Sun Apr 12, 2015 10:33 pm

First I want to say I like the site updates. Great job Kevin, things are looking good! I like the players in the DTBL uniforms, that's a nice touch.

One thing I did notice is on my team page, it has the highest AVG guy as Wil Myers...but he's far from my highest. He has the most ABs though, so maybe that section is pulling ABs instead of average? Other teams don't have any, and a couple just happen to have their highest AVG guys with the most ABs. So not sure what's going on there.

Other than that, pretty slick!
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Re: 2015 site updates/enhancements

Postby Kevin » Mon Apr 13, 2015 9:42 am

Greg, the reason why Myers was listed as your team leader in AVG yesterday is because he was the only one who had enough at bats to qualify. Several others have reached that minimum today, so Cespedes is now your AVG leader.

Everywhere on the site that lists leaders (main page, team pages, leaders) uses the same formula to calculate the minimum AB and IP to qualify for AVG, ERA and WHIP. It takes the current date and uses it to determine which fraction of the full season AB and IP minimums are needed to currently qualify. The full season minimums are 400 AB and 150 IP. The catch here is that the formula assumes a season start date of April 1. Of course, the season started almost a week later than that this year, so players are a bit behind pace right now. This will rectify itself soon though. I suppose I could change it to use the actual season start date each year, but I don't think it is worth the effort since most players will catch up to the minimum after a week or two anyway.

Hope that explanation helps.
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Re: 2015 site updates/enhancements

Postby Greg » Mon Apr 13, 2015 12:04 pm

See, I knew there was a good reason for it. Thanks Kevin!

I was afraid it might be hurting ticket sales, the "Raul Casanova bobblehead night" didn't go over so well opening day. Maybe I need to rethink my PR campaigns...
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Re: 2015 site updates/enhancements

Postby Greg » Wed May 06, 2015 5:14 pm

Just a QoL suggestion, and I'm not sure if this makes sense or not, but is there a way to automatically move "Released" players to the bottom of the list, or maybe create a separate table for them?
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Re: 2015 site updates/enhancements

Postby Kevin » Thu May 07, 2015 4:07 pm

Greg, now that I've implemented most of the new features that I had in mind, my next major project is to completely revamp the roster management and transaction submission processes, to fix a lot of the short-comings of the existing system. I have tentatively targeted this upcoming winter as the time to tackle that. Your suggestion fits into this, so I will definitely keep it in mind. But I probably won't be making any changes to the roster pages this season. I'll be seeking a lot more suggestions for this project later.
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