Looking For Something To Hold You Over The All Star Break?

SnapTV Games was gracious enough to send me their latest dvd game, Grand Slam Trivia, to take a look at and review. And I must say that I was addicted right away.

I'm a recent baseball fan (10 years or so), so I was a bit concerned about there being lots of questions about history that I would have no clue about. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this was not the case. They able to weave in historical questions along with questions from last years world series.

I can honestly say that I would recommend this game to any level of baseball fan. If you would like to learn more about this game, check out the complete run down at:

http://sportsblogs.org/snaptv/

Density Clouds - How Active Is Your Team?

What is a density cloud? These "clouds" are a neat way to view how active a particular team is by comparing number of blogs per team and number of entries per team. The larger the font size, the larger the metric is. You can hover over the link to reveal the metric count for each team.

Check out how active your favorite team is at:

http://sportsblogs.org/cloud.php

-- Todd

View SportsBlogs.org On Your Mobile Phone!

We just released a new feature at Sports Blogs. You can now view entries on your mobile phone!

Just point your phone browser to the following url:

http://m.sportsblogs.org

If you have any problems or questions, please let us know.

OPML Support

Hi Everyone --

OPML support is finally here. Right now we have basic OPML files for each team and sport. You can get there a couple of ways....

1.) Blogs By Team Pages. Example: http://sportsblogs.org/blogs.php?team_id=2. This will bring you to the Red Sox blogs page. At the top middle of the main table, you will see an OPML graphic (). If you click on that, you will see the subscription list for all the Red Sox blogs that have RSS feeds.

2.) RSS Feeds Page. http://sportsblogs.org/rssFeeds.php. This page contains all of the feeds and now OPML listings for each team and sport.

This is currently a work in progress, so if you see anything that should be changed or that doesn't quite match up to the spec, please let us know. This is a new thing for us. :-)

Updated Load Process

We have updated our load process tonight. We think everything should be okay, but if you notice anything funny (like your entries not getting updated), please shoot us an email. Thanks.

Special Offer For Our Readers

Sports Blogs has arranged for a special offer together with GetGoodTix.com. For a limited time only, you can get a 10% discount on your entire ticket order. Use coupon code: sportsblogs when checking out to receive your discount. Hurry though, this offer will end on October 1st.

Start shopping now.

Yesterdays Outages

Just wanted to let everyone know that our servers are located in Los Angeles where the major power outages occured. We should be back up and running fine, but if you notice anything wrong, please let us know.

Vacation

The Sports Blogs staff will be on vacation until 8/22. We will respond to all email as soon as we return.

Blog Suggestions

Please accept my apologies for suggestions that have gone un-approved. I had a problem with my mail reader and my own emails were getting dumped into the spam folder. Woops! I will get these approved asap. If you suggested a blog in the last week or so, don't worry, it will get looked at!

The Sports Blog staff will be on vacation until 8/22, so they will get processed when we return.

Thanks for your understanding!

Todd

RSS Feeds Have Been Fixed

As mentioned yesterday, we have been cleaning up our RSS feeds so that they really contain only the team and sport entries that are supposed to be there.

We have pushed the changes live, so if you see any problems, please email as at: support@sportsblogs.org.

RSS Feeds Cleanups

As some of you have noticed, some of the team and sport feeds were getting poluted with entries that didn't belong there.

We are fixing the process that is causing this problem and should have it fixed by tonight.

If you notice the feeds acting a little strangley, please email us at: support@sportsblogs.org.

Headline Generator Update

I have just implemented a couple feature requests for the headline generator application - http://sportsblogs.org/headlines.php:

• Entry Summary: Now there is an option to display a short (250 character) summary of each blog post
• Blog Exclusion: You can now exclude your own blog from the list of blog posts that the headliner generates. To find your blog id, simply go to http://sportsblogs.org/blogs.php and find your blog and click the details link for it. Your blog id will be in the url of that page.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to email us at: support@sportsblogs.org.

Button Graphics!

We finally have some great button graphics for everyones use at http://sportsblogs.org/about.php.

A very special thanks to Richard Ceccarelli at The Pearly Gates for creating the graphics for us. He's got a great blog, go on over and check it out.

Maintenance Seemingly Complete

Well, with only a few hickups, I managed to upgrade the feed parsing engine using MagPie.

The main reason for this was so that we could finally support RSS 2.0 and Atom syndication feeds. Yay!

So that means over the next few days, I'll be taking a look at all of the blogspot hosted blogs listed on this site and checking them for their atom feeds.

I've already begun and have noticed that a few of you still havn't turned on your feeds! Come on, its easy as pie. Just go to your "Settings" tab, then to "Site Feed" and then say yes to publish a syndication feed. Easy as 1-2-3.

If you see anything funny going on, please feel free to email me at support@sportsblogs.org.

Site Maintenance

I'm going to be performing some site maintenance over the next couple of hours. Should be transparent.

Please let me know via aim: sportsblogs if you see anything that you think is incorrect.

Thanks!