This afternoon, Marc and I were swapping ideas on Twitter and e-mail about possible site enhancements, particularly when it comes to tracking the draft for those of us who are a tad compulsive about it and find ourselves constantly checking this web site during the draft. I decided it would be worthwhile to bring our discussion to this forum in case others have their own ideas or would like to join the conversation.
It started with Marc suggesting that an automated email message be sent to the DTBL mailing list after each draft pick. The reasoning behind this would be so that everyone could keep track of the progress of the draft without having to continually hit the web site and/or refresh the draft page. Personally, I like the idea, but was concerned that some of you might not be so keen on having your email in-boxes bombarded with DTBL messages.
My counter proposal was to use Twitter to do this instead. In fact, this seems like the kind of thing that belongs on Twitter. I could easily write some code that would automatically generate a tweet from my account each time a pick is submitted. But the problem there is that this would only be useful to those of you who follow me on Twitter, and maybe not even those people if they don't routinely check their feeds. So, I have since decided I don't think this is a worthwhile approach since so few of our league members are Twitter addicts.
Next, Marc went back to the mailing list idea, but suggested that we set up a new mailing list, separate from our full league list, for which each person could choose whether or not they wish to join. Each time a pick is made, an email would be sent to this new list with the pick information. Adding onto Marc's idea, I thought maybe this list could be used for other league alerts, besides draft picks. Perhaps the weekly transaction processing program could generate an email containing the transactions for the week. I could send messages to the list when new DTBL News articles are posted. Stuff like that. Basically, this list would be for any sort of league alert. Would you be interested in joining this list? Do you think it would be wise to separate this from our existing league-wide list?
Finally, one other thing that I could do to improve the draft tracking process is to make the draft page dynamic. If I were to do this, all you would have to do is keep a browser tab open on the draft page and it would update automatically (no need to refresh). This is actually something I want to do with the live stats pages as well, but just haven't gotten around to it. In fact, I think I will make this enhancement to the draft page at some point, but I don't know if it will be ready until we are well into this year's draft.
Any thoughts? Other ideas?