JOEL'S BLOG

Interesting Use for myPlayoffs.com

Joel Ross — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:36:00 GMT

One of the best parts of putting out a piece of software is seeing the different ways people use it - especially the unintended uses. That's part of the reason I have a search feed for most of the domains we launch. myPlayoffs.com is one of those searches, and recently, I came across a forum post about your favorite movie. They're using myPlayoffs.com to track the results, which isn't at all how we pictured the site to be used.

Of course, that's just fine with us. It's great to see people using it and it definitely gives us some ideas of how we can improve the system - we could build in the voting mechanisms right into the site!

Personally, my money's on The Hunt For Red October.

Tags: myPlayoffs.com

Creating Your First Bracket On myPlayoffs.com

Joel Ross — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 01:01:00 GMT

myPlayoffs.com has been live for a little while now, and the feedback has been good, so I figured this would be a good time to highlight what you can do with it and explain some of the concepts behind the features. Maybe it'll even give you a little view into what's planned down the line.

Registering with myPlayoffs

To start, we need to register. We opted to use Live ID for membership, so you sign in with your Windows Live ID. Then you're prompted to finish your user profile.

From there, you're on the "My Brackets" page, where you can create a bracket. You also have the option of clicking over to the "My Tournaments" tab, and create a tournament.

So what's the difference between a bracket and a tournament, you ask? Well, a bracket is just one individual, stand alone bracket. A Tournament is a collection of brackets, and is good for collecting a set of brackets. Think 3-on-3 basketball tournaments where you have different brackets for different age groups, but they're all part of the same weekend tournament.

Creating and Viewing a Bracket

To start, let's create an 8 team bracket - we'll create the 2007 MLB Playoffs. First, we set up some basic information about the bracket.

Once done, we go to the bracket management page. Here, we can change each competitor to match the MLB bracket. The editing is done right in the bracket, making the data entry pretty easy.

Now the bracket's ready, so we can view the public page, which everyone can see.

Managing Results

Once some results start to come in, we can enter them in the bracket - quickly and easily.

Now that the bracket is finished, the public page shows the overall results.

You can see the final results for yourself here, but that's the basics for publishing brackets. It's pretty simple and straight forward. There's another feature that I didn't show here, but we do have a feature where anyone can report a result to the bracket publisher. In the screen shot above, there's a button called "Report Matchup Result" and if you click that, you can select a winner and a round, click Submit, and an email is sent to the bracket publisher so they know a result has come in.

We have many features planned for the future, but this is a very basic step in the right direction!

Tags: myPlayoffs | Brackets

Tourneytopia.com's Content Placeholders

Joel Ross — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 21:08:00 GMT

I received an email tonight asking about our content customization abilities on Tourneytopia.com and realized we don't have great descriptions of what each one does. So, until I can get it in the system, I'll post what each does here.

Top Ad Placeholder: Shows up in the header on every page next to the pool logo. This is meant for a banner ad.
Top Body Placeholder: Shows just under the header on every page. Spans across all content on the page.
Right Ad Placeholder: Shows up on the right side of the content on every page. This is meant for something like a tower ad.
Welcome Placeholder: Shows up under the header and Top Body Placeholder in the upper left corner on the pool's home page only.
Rules Page Placeholder: Shows up in the rules section of the scoring page.
Scoring Placeholder: Shows up at the top of the scoring details section on the scoring page.
Access Code Placeholder: used on the home page of a pool if you require your users to enter an access code to get to your pool. It won't show once they enter the access code.
Entry Confirmation Placeholder: This will show on the screen to the user once they submit their pick.
Entry Email Placeholder: This will be the email that gets sent to the user once they submit their pick.
Tie Breaker Placeholder: This is the text to use for tie breaker one during entry submission.
Tie Breaker 2 Placeholder: This is the text to use for tie breaker two during entry submission.
Notification Placeholder: This will be the introduction text used when notifications are sent out - this year, a notification will be sent out after results for each round are entered.

That's 12 places that content can be modified - I didn't even realize it had gotten to be that many until I sat down tonight and wrote this out!

Tourneytopia.com's Teams Are Ready!

Joel Ross — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 19:40:00 GMT

We usually plan a couple of hours to get the brackets entered into Tourneytopia.com, but we always hope it doesn't take that long. And that's the case this year too. If you've got a pool over there, you're all set to take entries, and if you don't, it's not too late to sign up!

Tourneytopia Updates

Joel Ross — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 20:46:00 GMT

Usually, after March Madness is done, Tourney Logic sits relatively dormant for a few months as we recover from the rush, which usually starts in November or December (getting upgrades ready to go) and culminates in March with the tournament. For us, it means many, many late nights pounding out features and bug fixes until we meet our vision.

And once it's over, we usually end up a little burned out. But not this year. We've been working hard to get a new release of Tourneytopia out the door, and there's some really cool features in it.

First, some back story on where Tourneytopia came from. This year, we decided to move the Tourney Pool Manager to .NET 2.0 and make use of some of the cool and exciting new features available. And that's what we did, only it took longer than expected. We knew it was technically ready to go, but there were still some bugs and decisions to be made about how to best release it. Ultimately, we made the decision to use last year's version of the Tourney Pool Manager (running on .NET 1.1) as is and take the upgraded version and make it a hosted-only version. By doing this, we could fix bugs right through the tournament (which we did, although, luckily, no major bugs showed up), and we didn't have to worry about deployment as much - we can deal with manual deployment steps, where as a software package needs to be automated.

In the long run, it was the right decision. In the short run, we continued a few poor design decisions from years past so we could get it done. All in all, it didn't really hurt us - this year. We knew where the inefficiencies were, and, despite having a ton more traffic than I expected, the server held up fine - after a few late tweaks we made before certain features were used.

But we knew those decisions would ultimately hinder us going forward, so we looked at a re-architecture of the whole site. Ultimately, we came up with a Codesmith template that generated all of our business objects (more on that later), and rewrote the site's foundation. For the most part, the UI is the same, but the framework it's running on is much more scalable and efficient.

But this isn't the post to get into that. From an end user's perspective, this new back end gives us the ability to support more than just a 64-team tournament - you can now create tourmanents for any number of teams, such as the 16 team tournament for the World Cup.

Which is exactly what we are offering now - the World Cup. The window is small - the bracket play starts less than 24 hours from when the group play ends, so there's not a lot of time to enter, but it should be fun!

Technorati Tags: Tourneytopia | Fifa | World+Cup

The Benefits of Being a VIP...

Joel Ross — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 11:15:00 GMT

...arent' exactly what they're cracked up to be! Somehow, I got on the VIP list to watch NCAA games online this year, and in case you were wondering if you were missing anything, well, this pretty much sums it up.

Technorati Tags: NCAA | basketball | VIP | mmod

March Madness 2006 Is Ready!

Joel Ross — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 15:59:00 GMT

We just finished updating the teams for this year, so if you are a Tourneytopia.com user or a Tourney Pool Manager user, the teams will be downloaded shortly, if they haven't been already!

Now, I have to go back and actually look at the seeds. When you're focused on data entry, you don't get a very good look at what's going on!

Technorati Tags: Tourneytopia | Tourney+Pool+Manager | March+Madness | Brackets | Selection+Sunday

Tourneytopia's Speed Boost

Joel Ross — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 19:54:00 GMT

If you happened to be perusing Tourneytopia's offerings early this morning (around 12:30 or 1:00 AM), you might have noticed a little bit of downtime - something we are very cognizant of as we get close to the Big Dance. We try our best to prevent down time, unless we have a good reason. This time, we had a good one - we switched servers to one that's much faster.

The NCAA tournament presents a challenge - there are five days when you get absolutely pounded. From the time the selections are made until that first game, we typically get more traffic than any full month (other than March, obviously), so we want to make sure that we are on a server that can handle it. So, last night, that's what we did. Moving the domain and getting the new environment all set up gave us a little bit of downtime, but overall, I don't think we were down for more than 5 minutes, if that. We had the new machine set up, and was just waiting for the DNS to switch over. We did have one deployment issue, and that was the license for the Tourney Bracket Control - yes, we even have to have a license! We use the same build you can get on our site.

Anyway, we're all moved over and don't have anything that we want to add, so now it's just a waiting game. Tomorrow will get hectic again, and around 5:00 PM or so, we'll be busy again. We want to watch the Go-Live process and ensure that everything works as expected, and then at 6:00 PM, it'll be time to get the teams in. By 7:00 PM, we hope to be live and ready to go, and by 8:00 PM, most pools will be open to accept picks. We'll monitor it all and ensure everything runs smoothly, as we will all week.

Technorati Tags: Tourneytopia | March+Madness | Selection+Sunday

Late Nights With Tourneytopia

Joel Ross — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 22:36:00 GMT

Here we are, about 1:30 AM, and I'm just finishing up deploying a minor (very minor) update to Tourneytopia. We're definitely starting to stabilize, as we were able to skip a build last night, and both tonight's and Sunday's build were purely cosmetic.

Now, Saturday's build was a different story. We had some major fixes in there. The web services we expose weren't working, so we fixed those. We didn't (and still haven't, really) hyped those, but we offer a few feeds that allow you to get data out of Tourneytopia, so you can use it on your own site. There's quite a few integration scenarios that you can do, so instead of just listing out what we offer, we'll walk through a quick scenario.

Let's say you run a forum and you decide to use Tourneytopia as a promotion for your members. First, you set up a custom user demographic field to collect their forum member id (we're hoping to have a better user account integration story later this year), and once all picks are submitted and the window closes, you go export all of the entries and users to an excel file. Work a little data magic, and you can import entry IDs for each user in the system. That's the first part. Now, whenever a user comes to the site, you can do a couple of things. First, the simple one. You can show them the top overall standings. Then, you can show them how they are doing - you can query our site for information about their entry IDs, and we'll give you information about them, including their total points and current rank.

But that's not all. You're the forum administrator and everyone knows you. So you set yourself up as a Featured Entry. You can also query Tourneytopia to get the featured entries and show them on your site too. You can also get the featured entries based on an entry - so you can show a user how their pick is doing against the featured entries.

You can also query the standings by name, email address and entry id, so you also have some searching capabilities too. Overall, it's a nice way to bring some of the information in Tourneytopia back and be able to use it in your site. Of course, if you just want the standings, you can just use the RSS feed that we have for those.

One last feature we added? A new way to upload images. Before, we allowed you to upload an image and then we put a size on it. Unless you did some planning to get a logo the size we specified, you could end up with a pretty distorted image. So we fixed that, and now are using a tool that resizes your image to fit into our space, but keeps the image looking good.

I'll talk more about that tool a little later, but if you want to check it out, head over to Tourneytopia and set up your own pool, and test it out.

Technorati Tags: Tourneytopia | web+services | images

Tourneytopia's New Look

Joel Ross — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 20:25:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago, we decided we couldn't wait for the final logo to launch Tourneytopia.com, so we went with a nice little text-based header, with plans to switch once we had a real header. Well, today, our designer, who's been awesome for us thus far, delivered again, sending a few different sizes we can use. So, with that, I'm happy to show you guys our new logo:

I'm very happy with how it turned out! What do you think?

Technorati Tags: Tourneytopia