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!