Mar
09

Sprint 16 and 17 released

We had several updates for you, primarily in the realm of getting bigger boxes for everything from game recap, boxscore and photo processing, to updating our database servers to make them distributed.

The detailed breakdown.

Epic

Bugs

  • Removed tweets from the Chrome application
  • Gaming updates sent via email now have the up-to-date player rank
  • Amended photo publishing to Facebook and Twitter to provide more value by actually publishing photos

That’s it. The current sprint is all about bug fixes, so we will have more for you next week.

Thanks, as always, FanFeedr

Feb
04

Sprint 15: Gaming, Chrome application improvements

Gaming

  • Relaunch of FanFeedr Pick’Em on Facebook
  • Better badges
  • Faster response time
  • Revamped User Experience
  • If you . . .
    • like to show off, and
    • have a mild inclination for betting,
    • then this game is for you

FanFeedr Chrome Application

  • The Chrome App store launched on Feb. 1st
  • We made several changes to improve your user experience, based on your feedback
    • Box scores open directly in the interface
    • Photos open directly in the interface
    • Recaps open directly in the interface
    • Made it easier to get to your fanned items

Twitter

  • We put tighter restrictions on what gets published to Twitter so that you get more value, less noise, for each of the team and player accounts.

Celery

  • More than just a good source of fiber
  • It is a “Celery is an asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing. It is focused on real-time operation, but supports scheduling as well.”
  • Allows for a more stable FanFeedr so that you will see even better uptime

Minor bugs

  • We had both “Yahoo” and “Yahoo Sports” listed. There is now just “Yahoo Sports.”

Thanks again, and we hope you try out the new stuff, FanFeedr

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

Dec
28

Sprint 12: Upgrades on the backend

On the front end, first, however.

  • Made sure that photos publish to Facebook. They were performing erratically before.
  • Major League Soccer team twitter accounts are now appearing on the FanFeedr service
  • We had an issue in NCAA Basketball where Div 1 teams playing non-Div 1 teams would generate schedule errors. That is fixed.

We have spent a lot of time working on our backend this last Sprint, including

  • Upgrades to our ORM, SQL Alchemy
  • Upgrades to our Mako templates
  • Publishing scores and the like directly out of Solr

That is it. We hope that you are having a fantastic holiday season.

Happy holidays, and best wishes in the New Year, FanFeedr

Dec
14

Sprint 11 in the (wintry) mix


We have to put this here, in case Michael Bay hasn’t seen it.

Non-technical updates for you:

Happy holidays, FanFeedr

Nov
23

Sprint 10 is out for your Thanksgiving pleasure

Nov
08

Sprint 8: HTML5 improvements

We continue to adjust and improve the HTML5 version of our application, including adding social tools to the various articles that we have there. You can try out the HTML5 version of FanFeedr here, if you have an HTML5 compliant browser like Chrome, Safari, or Firefox. That is the primary output of this sprint, along with the usual assortment of bug fixes and speed improvements.

We have also sorted out a persistent bug in our Pick’Em game so that results and badges are rendered almost instantaneously. Thanks for your patience there.

Have a great week, FanFeedr

Oct
27

Sprint 7 and Sprint 8

Yes, we are behind with our product releases, and it is because the writer of this blog has been focused on the revenue-generating aspects of the business to the detriment of clear communication about product releases and the hard work of our engineers. Situation remedied today, as . . .

Sprint 7

Bugs

  • Fixed the way ties are displayed for soccer/European football results
  • Changed “soccer” to “football” wherever we could to least offend your sensibilities
  • Posting comments to Twitter on the website was not working, but it is fixed now

Sprint 8

Bugs

  • Deleted preseason NBA games so that they didn’t show up as betting opportunities
  • Fixed team records to show record for Champions League vs. national league, in context.
  • Slate of fixes for the Chrome application
  • Our aggregation of Tweets fell down, go boom, so that is back and functional
  • Fixed caching on team records, which made them seem slightly out-of-date
  • Fixed schedules for soccer/European football teams. Check out FC Barcelona’s schedule, for example.
  • Comment notification emails now linking to the right place.

As always, thank you for supporting us, and let us know what we can do to make your experience better by using the big red “Feedback” tab on the left-hand side of every web page at FanFeedr.

Thanks, FanFeedr

Sep
29

New release: Mobile upgrades and improvements to football/soccer

Mobile goodness

All of our mobile apps are up-to-date and chock full of goodness.

iPad FanFeedr
  • New FanFeedr release is live today
  • It gets rid of the adult warning, which is a relief (Apple made us put that on because we linked to Yahoo, Yahoo links to porn. They seem to have forgotten about our linking to Yahoo.)
  • It makes the login much less of a PitA. If you have already logged in, it just dumps you into your FanFeed
  • “Search” has been replaced with “Add teams” which is a much better conveyance (or affordance, to use the user experience term) for what is done with that button
  • iOS4 features
  • Icons look fantastic on the iPhone 4
  • Introduced background multitasking. If you exit the app, and come back, there is no reload. You have to have iOS4 to see this.
  • Download it here.
iPhone FanFeedr
  • Same as iPad, with the following goodness . . .
  • iOS4 features
  • Icons look fantastic on the iPhone 4
  • Introduced background multitasking. If you exit the app, and come back, there is no reload. You have to have iOS4 to see this.
  • Download it here.
Android FanFeedr
  • Live in the Android Marketplace, you have to search for it under “FanFeedr”.
  • It makes the login much less of a PitA. If you have already logged in, it just dumps you into your FanFeed
  • “Search” has been replaced with “Add teams” which is a much better conveyance (or affordance, to use the user experience term) for what is done with that button
  • Will send out download link when it is live
iPad Redskins
Android Redskins
  • Live in the Android Marketplace, you have to search for it under “Redskins Feedr”
  • Our first ever release of this application for the Redskins
  • All of the same features as the iPad Fanfeedr
  • We had a slate of improvements to our European football features, including adding players and rosters so that you can become a fan of your favorite players, like Leo Messi, Wayne Rooney, and Didier Drogba.

Football/Soccer

We had a slate of improvements to our European football features, including adding players and rosters so that you can become a fan of your favorite players, like Leo Messi, Wayne Rooney, and Didier Drogba.

Thanks, FanFeedr

Aug
30

New toys for the end of summer | Sprint 4 (old R70)

A bunch of fixes and improvements . . .

iPad/iPhone users

Facebook Pick’Em game

  • First, do you know that we have a killer Facebook Pick’Em game? You can predict the outcome of English Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga and Serie A games, directly on Facebook, with your friends.
  • We are using Facebook Credits directly, and you don’t have to go hunting for currency to play the game
  • We added live scores to the game, so you can check your scores as the games take place

First-time user experience

  • We deleted the welcome pop-up screen, because many of you complained about it. She’sa gone.

There were other bug fixes. We hope that you are enjoying your Summer, and remember, if you like the website, you can also get FanFeedr for your iPhone, iPad, and Android.
Thanks, FanFeedr