Freakin’ Busy
I am freakin’ busy. This is quite possibly the busiest I have ever been in my entire life.
I am in Chicago for a training course this week/weekend and my internet accessis super limited. I’ll be in California almost all of next week hunting for an apartment. Again, super limited. Then I have two more weeks of work in Raleigh, were the firewall prevents external ‘net access. Crap. How the hell am I going to get anything done in time for the Vuelta?!
One good thing: my mind often wanders during training and when my mind wanders, I start brainstorming. I have a big, long list of features, methods and better ways of doing things for FC2. Trust me when I say this: it’s going to be cool.
On a related note, I think I’m just going to go the opposite direction and simply get rid of leagues entirely.
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Version 2
Okay, it’s been a while. I’m sure you can understand why. Not only has the Tour de France been in full-swing for the past three weeks, but I’ve also made two cross-country trips for job interviews, attended a wedding in Pennsylvania and vacationed at the Jersey shore. Needless to say, I’ve been pretty darn busy.
The site is… good. I am happy with it. We’ve got more than 70 teams from twenty or thirty unique users who log in once every handful of days to check their performance and set their future line-ups. It’s a great situation. I couldn’t really ask for much more. The site’s running. It’s kicking ass. I can hardly believe it. We’re finally where I dreamed of being in December. It’s a huge milestone.
Now, you’ll never believe this but… I’m feeling that itch again. New feature ideas are piling up. Database limitations are bogging me down. So is messy code. The site is suffering a bit, too, under the increased load. The itch is back. It’s time to start working on Version 2.
I’m going to leave the site up as-is. It will get me through the Vuelta just fine. But once I get settled in to my new apartment in California, it will be time to start re-building FCYCLE 2.0 from the ground up. I’m going to take what I’ve learned over the past eight months and redesign the site from scratch. It can be better. It can be faster. I know it. And if I start now, I’ll have a full year to get it running before the next Tour de France.
I might need it.
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Busy, busy, busy.
Good God, I have been busy these past few weeks, and not only with the site. Getting all of the riders into the system more than a full week before the start of the Tour de France was no small feat! Neither was adding a new navigation system at the last second, revising the dashboard, fixing some issues with the race view, and adding stage checkpoints (twice! the first copy was lost in a DB crash).
Now we’re a day away from the start and things are looking good. We’ve got 75 teams signed up, 62 of which have their stage 1 line-ups set. Now I just have to get the rest of these folks to get their butts in gear and get riders onto their teams before midnight. Again, that’s no small feat.
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The Pipeline.
I revamped the ‘credits’ section of the site to go along with the new-ish ‘bio’ page. So yeah, that’s that.
I had a long talk with user Celestin last night, an avid cycling fan who actually runs his own fantasy game on the Bicycling.com forums. He gave me a few ideas that I may try to implement before we go live with the Tour de France in the next week or two.
Probably the most significant of his suggestions was an overhaul of the site’s general navigation methodology. He recommends drop-downs or sub-menus to help users find what they are looking for in an easier way. For example, you would hover over ‘Teams’ and three options will appear: Overall Standings, Best Manager Standings, Stage Victory Standings. Likewise, you would hover over races and three options would appear: Current Races, Past Races and Future Races.
I’m trying to figure out how I can implement this without cluttering up the top bar. It is a little bit empty at the moment, so a ten or fifteen-pixel horizontal menu bar won’t break things up too much.
He also convinced me to award points for riders who lead the “Best Young Rider” classification at the Tour. These riders definitely won’t earn many points: maybe three points per stage in the jersey and twenty-five at the end of the race – but it’ll be an added bonus to those who choose to add some younger cyclists to their team.
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Site updates, Volume 1.
Last night, I uploaded a host of changes to the FCYCLE website. I’ll run through them quickly:
- Logging in. Now when you log in, you’ll be redirected to the page you were viewing before you hit submit… UNLESS you were on the index page, in which case, you’ll be sent to your Dashboard. You’ll also notice the MOTD screen has been revised slightly. More real-estate!
- Team list. Standings and whatnot have been completely revamped. Now there are a lot more numbers on the screen. Not only that, but they are sortable by clicking on column headers.
- Leagues. I incorporated the league-standings view into the regular team list. League owners now have a separate screen that they may use to manage their league and invite new users. Everything else (including ’smack talk’) can be done from the league/team list page.
- Completely revamped race page. There are no more individual stage pages, unless you count stage results. I’m also not storing/maintaining any maps or profiles – those will all be links to the official site. The race page will display a rolling view of eight stages, highlighting the ‘next’ or ‘current’ stage.
- I cleaned up the account control panel slightly.
- The user profile pages have been revamped. This is still a work in progress, but I like the direction I’m headed in right now. I want to add a few more fields to the profile thing (like website, for example) before I am done. (Link to our most decorated user: http://fcycle.com/users.php?u=7)
- Note: You’ll notice I removed the link to the user list. Still undecided on this one. I like the slimmer navigation at the top. I’ll have to incorporate links to the new user pages into the team list. I’ll take care of that today.
- I seem to have screwed the pooch and accidently deleted all Paris-Nice team data. Whoops! This was bound to happen at some point – there have been too many changes to the DB structure since that race.
- You can’t really see this yet, but I am phasing out rider specialities. They will not be present on the roster build screen and I’ve replaced the Speciality filter with a Nationality one… so now if you need a climber, filter on Spanish riders!
- New, lower-key specialities are: contender, sprinter, climber, support rider, stage rider, and none or undefined.
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Revisions Underway.
I am revamping the race/stage views. That is to say, I’m getting rid of them. Going forward, I think the Races link will lead to a more results-driven race dashboard. Instead of the lengthy previews and recaps, the page will only feature important details.
A rough example:
Thoughts?
edit – now with a sneak preview of what is to come… the 2008 Tour de France!
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As requested!
No matter what way you slice it, Dobovedo’s 1..2..5 (3 Sir) squad won the first Giro fantasy game on FCYCLE.com. And I’ve sliced it a BUNCH of ways. However, it would have been silly if any other team had won: that squad DID boast the winners of all three competitions (overall, points and mountains). It was the only team to have that trifecta going for it. Fairly unstoppable if you ask me!
One thing that’s kind of interesting – bizarro scoring reveals Celestin’s forza italia team actually earned the most ‘Stage Victory’ points (79), with Chief42’s team coming in second (tied with 3 Sir) at 77 points.
Anyway, here is the overall in the ‘new’ system. Keep in mind, I’m still tweaking the crap out of this stuff. =)
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Team Detail Revamp
I got up this morning and went for a modest ride. When I got back home and showered, I found an e-mail waiting for me from one of my users. It got me to thinking… and I’ve been working on the site ever since.
Now I know I’m going to have to work to more intelligently organize the information on the site before the Tour de France. I’m thinking I’ll take the site down for a week or two after the Giro ends to revamp a few things. But one of the things I found myself working on today was the team view, otherwise known as the rankings page.
It probably took six straight hours of coding, but the page (and the process surrounding the assignment of points to teams) has been completely overhauled. Most of the changes were behind-the-scenes: optimization and whatnot. But one of the best features I was able to add? History.
I’ve wanted to have something like this for a while and now it’s there. I added a clickable stage list at the top of the team screen. Now users can click those to view the status of the fantasy race as of that stage. The Stage Victory view has become a bit more useful. By default, it will show overall standings in the victory competition – but by clicking on any particular stage, the user will be able to see how their teams did on any given stage.
Best Manager hasn’t changed much, but all of the values are calculated in a much more efficient manner. It’s pretty sweet. All of these changes will soon be applied to the League Views as well, so you’ll be able to view rank history in your league as well! (Still don’t have alternate competitions in leagues… I don’t think I’ll ever get around to that.)
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Bizarro Scoring Update
For whatever reason, I’ve been maintaining a ‘bizarro world’ version of the site on my local machine that makes use of the modified scoring system I mentioned two posts back. Here’s the latest standings in that environment. Not that it really matters, but I just like to compare.
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Whos-it whats-it?
I was running through my routine morning site diagnostic yesterday and found an error on the Rider List page. Something about the table joins in the SQL statement resulting in too many rows… hrmm. Not good. This means I’m going to have to devise a new way to select that information and make it sortable, because right now there are simply too many different rider/score/place combos. The join must result in over 1,000,000 rows!
I started trying to tackle that problem when I realized I could make the squad list page just a tad more useful by temporarily incorporating a “Who’s got this rider?” pop-up box into the squad rider list. It wasn’t difficult and that certainly isn’t where that functionality will end up… but I thought it’d be fun to throw it out there until I can find a better place to put it.
Hovering over a rider’s name on the squad page will now display a spiffy little box that contains the rider’s name, the points he’s earned and a short list of the teams he’s riding for.
Update: some clever SQL scripting means the rider page is back to original functionality… and the query might even execute a little bit faster, too.
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