Jan
10

Sprint 12: Goodies for the New Year

First the really good news: we hit over 160,000 Twitter followers across our accounts last month. Yay for us!

For the following site upgrades, most are technology fixes and upgrades, so you are duly forewarned.

  • We paginated our Leaderboard, so the pages loads faster and you can do a deeper dive on your favorite sports
  • We are now aggregating all of the player and team tweets from Major League Soccer, as you can see here via our list of MLS Tweets
  • Fixed a weird glitch with SIU Edwardsville Cougars’s basketball schedule, because we were besieged with requests and prioritized it
  • We added monitoring to all of our server processes to ensure better uptime
  • We upgraded SQL Alchemy and Mako to versions 0.6.5 and 0.3.6 respectively
  • We are publishing some additional material directly out of Solr
  • We upgraded and fixed a number of FanFeedr API calls, which are noted in detail on the developer portal

More good stuff in the pipeline, and thank you, as always for using the service.

Thanks, FanFeedr

May
17

R62: Control your destiny

Release 62 is all about giving you more control over what publishes to Facebook and Twitter from FanFeedr, and how frequently.

  • With that in mind, we have a new pop-up panel that controls what gets pushed out to both sites. We also made it so that you can get notified whenever you have a new follower. We won’t ever send you mails without your ability to control them. The controls can be accessed via your profile page account settings, and it looks like this:

As always, thanks for your support, and let us know if we missed anything right here.

Feedr of the Fans

Mar
05

R52: One year anniversary edition, now with Twitter Authentication

Hello and good morning/afternoon/evening.

This week we enabled the ability to sign up using Twitter as well as Facebook, so if you would like to use those credentials as the primary way you login to the site, no problem. You can also post material to and from Facebook, but you will be known on the service primarily by your Twitter handle.

You can try it out by going to the homepage and logging in with Twitter. If you already have an account with us, you can add your twitter credentials whenever you make a comment and post to twitter or if you share via Twitter.

Facebook

You can follow your favorite teams on Facebook now, and that functionality is exposed on the team pages (in the left column, the blue button.)

Some examples of team pages on Facebook:

These feeds publish headlines, scores, boxscores, photos and other updates directly on Facebook.

Pick’Em Game

  • We fixed the badging so that there is only one Commissioner, and so that Newbies show up in the right place

Content

UX

And we are up to 7,000 content sources, including all of the material submitted in the past month.

Thanks for your support, and let us know if we are missing anything, here.

FanFeedr

Dec
24

Release 43 is up

And next week we will have the super-fresh thing that we think you will find quite enjoyable.

The short list for this week:

  • We are providing better info in the search box (team names for players, columnists listed as such; go ahead, try it.)
  • Soccer scoreboard improved
  • We added in the complete list of authorized Twitter accounts from your favorites athletes, coaches, retired players, broadcasters and writers. Some of our favorites include Ted Leonsis (owns the Capitals), Alan Hahn (of Newsday), and Greg Aiello (of the NFL)

Have a great holiday, and thanks, FanFeedr

Sep
04

Release 27: Housekeeping before the US Football onslaught

Housekeeping stuff this week, but let us wade into the details.

  1. We optimized the experience for first-time users coming to us from Twitter. They were churning off of the site at a higher rate than other users, in part because they didn’t have great context when they came to an article or video. We have a small welcoming experience for users who come to the site from Twitter, as of today.
  2. We also optimized the first-time user experience for people coming to us from Facebook, so that they get the initial welcome screen exposing them to the site’s functionality
  3. We created a series of feeds for our API partners so that they can get the full firehose of data, or a subset according to “strict” rules or the much sterner-sounding “severe” set of rules.
  4. We changed our feeds that we publish in Twitter to adhere to “Severe” filtering, thereby optimizing our feed results in Twitter (so that users there don’t get content about other teams.)
  5. We made sure that football boxscores work. They are functional for the NFL, and the NCAA will be up and running next weekend.
  6. We added about 50 news sources, including Dime Magazine, news about the University of Hawaii teams, and more.
  7. We also did some UX housekeeping as well. Look for a simpler interface next week, as we take to heart the usability testing we have been doing over the last two weeks.

As always, thanks for your support, and let us know if we have missed anything using the Feedback tab on the left of every page.

Ty

Aug
14

Release 24 for the weekend

Folks,

This week we have added Twitter integration using their super-transparent OAuth implementation. Which means that you can . . .

  • Post your status update to Twitter as well as Facebook
  • Send stories, videos and blog posts to Twitter

We have added the ability for you to follow your favorite teams ON Twitter, if you would prefer to do so there. So far we have all MLB baseball teams (like the Red Sox), and the top European football teams (like Barça). The NFL and colleges will be added next week, and the NBA and NHL in September.

We have also made some subtle changes to the typeahead box, so when you type any name, like, oh, say . . .

We show you whether it is a player, a team, a college, or a news source.

Speaking of news sources, these are some favorites that you may not know about:

  • Fantasy Players: Fantasy football news for the fantasy fan
  • Wages of Wins: Insanely detailed basketball commentary based on regression analyses, and the level of discussions in the comments is also rarified.
  • SLAM magazine: top-shelf hoops coverage

Also on the content side of things, we have added all of the NFL players who are tweeting.

Last but not least, a reminder about our iPhone application, for free, man, and a recent blog post about the company from our friends at Carrot, here.

Have a great weekend, FanFeedr

May
08

Release 10 is up

And that means a bunch of things:

  • Images are associated with posts where we have them. We will add more photos over time.
  • The page titles reflect the content of the page (instead of saying “Fanfeedr” at the top of every page)
  • Full Twitter readouts so that athlete tweets don’t get truncated
  • Hotness across the site works
  • We sped up the type-ahead in the search box
  • We added rosters for a number of sports
  • We added in charts, on each search bar in the upper left.
  • Your comment activity shows up on the activity feeds
  • Reduced the size of the team logos so that your eyes don’t fall out of your head
  • We added 500 athlete and coach Twitter feeds

And some other odds and end that will put you to sleep but make the site better.

As always, let us know what you think via the Feedback tab on the left side of the site.

Thanks, Fan of Feeds