Hockey
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
ISAPI Rewrite Convert for AllPosters.com PostersFeed
For quite some time I had a posters page on hockeyfights.com as an affiliate of allposters.com (affiliate link).
At first, I created a series of manual links from a text file they had. I downloaded preview images and the info needed, dumped some of it into a db and had a couple of pages.
It became a bit much to keep up with, so I stopped. I took a little piece of code from their affiliate website and just had an iframe that displayed a few top sellers that someone could scroll through. Not really ideal, but no work involved.
Eventually allposters.com released a datafeed. You download a series of files (text, csv or xml) and have all their store information. You can then easily dump it into a database (or use the files as they are if you like) and can build a relatively dynamic store from that. Images and such are all stored on their site and locations/names are referenced in the datafeed files. I wanted to do something with it, but never got around to it.
Semi-recently allposters.com released web services. Web services allow you to access all of their store info on their own machines. No more frequent manual updates. While I know I’d still have to update some code now and then, this was ideal and I wanted to take advantage of this to make a nice looking store front for my users.
Instead of building from the ground up I looked for an already built solution. I found a few ok ones and then I came upon PostersFeed XML by One Click Designs (demo store). It was neat and a good base for me to work with. I also liked that they offered Posters Feed Professional, which is the same script, but with a slight modification for mod_rewrite, allowing you to have cleaner urls (so besides looking nicer, they can be copy and pasted easier, and search engines will follow them easier). mod_rewrite is Apache web server-only. However, Helicon has made an alternative for us IIS users: ISAPI Rewrite. I use it a good deal already. I don’t run Wordpress anymore, but when I did I had a good set of rules that allowed me to do the same url rewrite as Apache users.
So with Posters Feed Professional and ISAPI Rewrite, and a few other conversions to the base script I was able to build a nice hockey posters store for hockeyfights.com. I’m not completely finished with it yet. I will probably add a few more “convenience” links on the right, along with replacing the ad up top with a posters ad (or perhaps a Google Adsense ad). I also plan on having posters come up on actual team and player pages when applicable. This is something that will require a bit more work, but should look pretty good when done (along with hopefully producing some nice conversion rates).
I’d love to post the code for the ISAPI Rewrite modification, but One Click Designs charges for the mod_rewrite tweaks (the base script is free, although they ask you sign up for the affiliate program through them so you would be a child affiliate of theirs at no cost to you). Because the ISAPI Rewrite script isn’t that different from it’s mod_rewrite counterpart I’d basically be giving their script away for free, which is something I obviously shouldn’t do. However, if you look at a few conversions (like the Wordpress one, or a few on Helicon’s forums), it shouldn’t be too hard for you to do the conversion yourself.
Here’s an allposters.com webmaster affiliate link, in case you’re looking to sign up as an allposters.com affiliate yourself.
Tech • Sports • Hockey • 0 Comments • Permalink
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Future of The Ice Block
As some of you know (at least half of both of my readers), I do plan on “knocking down” The Ice Block and blog-ifying it. Basically, taking my hockey posts from here to there and writing much more. In the end, it’d let me have a place to write about general hockey topics freely, and I was never interested in promoting another site with a forum.
The only thing that has been asked repeatedly of me is: What about Newslinks? Newslinks is the most visited page on the site, understandably. Well, I haven’t quite decided yet. I’m either going to shut it down for a few weeks and try and re-build it quickly for whatever system I choose to run on TIB (right now I’m leaning towards pMachine’s ExpressionEngine), or I’m going to simply move it over to hockeyfights.com. Having it on hockeyfights.com would be easier, obviously. I would have many people willing to submit stories (yes, they do love hockey in general), and it could be very active in that regard. I will be adding commenting to Newslinks, making it a bit more interactive. However, to reach the general hockey-loving audience, it would probably be better to have Newslinks on TIB and just have it be slower for a bit. So a few things are definites: they’re not going anywhere, there will be commenting, and there will be an rss feed for them. So you’ll be able to read them easily in any feedreader, or even put them on your own site as well.
I do wish I would have made up my mind about all of this already as I’d love to have TIB up today to post lockout updates on. I’ll obviously make an announcement about the re-launch of it here, and until then I’ll keep posting hockey here as well.
Friday, October 29, 2004
We Can Make a Statement
There are few ways fans can ever really affect a sports league on a large scale. Many have tried to organize merchandise or ticket boycotts, but rarely has it ever done anything other than get some small media attention. In this time of an NHL lockout merchandise is probably not expected to bring in much and tickets obviously aren’t being sold not to buy.
There is one thing both sides do need right now: attention. While those failed boycotts garned small media attention they’d be more likely to reach more people now if done successfully over the internet. Blogs and other news websites would pick it up fast. Right now the NHL and a whole bunch of players are doing what they can to keep the media talking hockey, even in the States. Even if it’s just one line on SportsCenter like “would have been a good night for some NHL hockey” as was the line last night (paraphrased from Steve Levy if my memory serves me correct).
A huge amount of people get their fill of news from the web daily. Many of us own hockey-related websites or blogs. What if we all just shut them down? Not long enough to hurt the sites, but long enough to make a statement. Perhaps that could be our voice, our way to reach the league. Take down a site and put up one single message, something like “We’re not going to cover your lockout bickering. (This site will return soon).” I’m sure I can think of something more creative, but you get the jist of it. As much as we all like to print player quotes and league statements, we may need to take a break and let our own voices be heard. Individually it’s hard - collectively it’s not. Maybe it’s time we should be involved in this PR war?
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
Introducing: Newslinks
I have a big announcement for anyone looking to easily follow the CBA and all other hockey-related matters (mostly NHL-related). On The Ice Block, Newslinks has been unveiled.
The concept is simple - it’s just a list of links. To make it easier to manage, there’s a small form so anyone can submit a link. As the site grows, stories from all markets will appear, and as soon as they’re made live.
The process is semi-moderated. Guests are allowed to post links, and all of those are moderated, fairly quickly. If you sign up and are logged in and are a reliable link poster, we can mark you as such and your links will appear immediately.
I’ve also made it so that the domain being linked to is posted below each link. It’s easier when looking at a big list like that instead of mousing over each one to see where you might be going.
After the site takes off, I’m considering adding the ability for comments about each, but I figure I’ll hold off on that until it’s bigger.
Any suggestions welcome.
Monday, September 27, 2004
Getting the Hockey Blogs Together
After patiently waiting for a way to improve the way I can produce a feed, I’m finally able to starting pushing the blog feed on The Ice Block. Blogger only produces an atom feed by default and I couldn’t read those for a while. Unfortunately many sites use Blogger. No problem anymore, atom is all good now. I did have to write a few to ask them to change the encoding, but no one outside of Jes GÅ‘lbez (who does need to use Eastern European accents) will see any difference in their site by doing so, and probably allows more to use their feed besides myself. Jes did change his encoding to an ISO format and hopefully I can tweak my script to include it soon.
Until then, have a look at some of the best blogs around and follow the feed to easily get a nice group update. If you think I’ve missed any major hockey blog, or even a small one that’s just really good and regularly updated, please let me know.
Saturday, September 04, 2004
A Preview of ESPN Broadband
As you all know I’m a hockey nut. ESPN was advertising they were showing all games, however four weren’t on the tv schedule. These four are all on ESPN Broadband.
It pops into a large-ish window and has a SportsCenter/ESPN video game like feel. I think it’s all Flash 7 (which is fine since they’re catering to a broadband/cable audience). The video isn’t clickable or right-clickable, I’m going to assume it’s streaming through Flash 7 rather then integrating another format, but you never know.
They’ve got their pipes going strong as the picture quality is very good. I’m watching Finland beating Sweden 4-3 in the third period right now. Easily the nicest integrated streaming video I’ve ever seen. To be able to see the puck in a small window through a live feed is pretty decent work.
Now, this hasn’t been over-promoted, so hopefully if they boost it more, they’ll keep the bandwidth at this high level, the rare stuttering is the only thing that can bring it down. Even when a live game isn’t on, they have some news clips to watch. Also, after the game is completed, it’s supposed to also be available on demand.
There’s a “free preview” from now until Monday. It will be a service available to certain subscribers of cable or dsl companies. I read how RCN has a deal with them, so this should be included for all RCN subscribers, but I have not read anything about Time Warner NYC (my current provider). Hope they pick this up if they haven’t already; there’s supposedly already some bitterness between ESPN and quite a few cable services due to the high price ESPN charges per subscriber (and some cable systems even wanting to make it a premium channel).