Tech
ESPN Gets a Mini-Facelift
ESPN.com has restyled the top portion of the home page. I figured I’d give my initial (disclaimer: late-night) thoughts.
There’s a new double menu, with some 2.0-y offerings on top, and the standard leagues/sports menu on the bottom.
The area up top: logo, ad, search box, tv schedule have also been redone.
The gradient behind the top looks more subtle (even if it’s not, this is just my impression of it), and both menus are text on flat colors.
The old-style menus, which you can still see on the inner-pages, had the leagues/sports on a gradient and the submenus on a flat color with a bevel/border highlight on rollover.
The new yellow background for the submenus is a drastic change, but easy to read and the rollover has a nicer look than before.
The top is nice and neat. I have to admit I laughed a bit when I’m shown these are the “hottest searches”: Bracketology | Sports Guy | NFL Draft | TMQ | NBA rankings | NHL rankings
An interesting thing to note is the change in order for the leagues/sports.
Old: NFL, MLB, NBA, NASCAR, Autos, NHL, College, Golf, Soccer, Tennis
New: NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, ESPNU, College FB, Men’s BB, Women’s BB, NASCAR, Autos, Golf, Soccer, Tennis, Boxing, Olympics
Fantasy has made a shift from far-right to far-left, in between ESPN (home) and NFL.
Consideration: the new menu stretches across the home page, designed for a 1024x768 resolution. The old menu, that I’m comparing from the inner pages, is designed for 800x600 resolution. The inner pages do have more conent to the right of it, but the menu is cut off there, so there is room for more menu choices on this new homepage design.
Some sports sites do change menu order depending on season, but the positioning is curious as the NHL is given better position than before and NASCAR, maing its return to ESPN, is pushed towards the right. Most menus are generally left to right in order of importance (at least for English pages). Sometimes important items are broken up, to give the items in between a better chance of being seen, but it doesn’t seem like that’s what ESPN is trying to do here or the NFL and MLB would be the goalposts of this menu.
ESPNU is the only ESPN brand that gets a prime menu position (most are under the home submenu). February is probably the best time for them to push the brand with fans anticipating March Madness. Yesterday was “Signing Day” for college football, something I didn’t know before. The lines between pro and college continue to blur.
Back to the new double menu, with the 2.0-y offerings. It starts off with MyESPN, something I’ve heard little of since the first release. Is anyone using this out there? The only plus for me right now would be to not have ESPN Motion autoplay.
Insider, the ESPN.com offerings behind a paywall is the second option.
ESPN 360 wants to launch a video player. It does. Out of curiousity, I hit “Video” and I get the same player, and it starts the same content. I realize ESPN wants people to bug their ISPs to sign deals for 360 content (as that’s how you get access to it), but I’m not sure if it’s really worth two menu options that lead to the same place.
Page 2 and SportsNation have become ESPN.com standards, and then after that is Blogs. But, they’re all “Insider Blogs”. You need to subscribe to Insider to read any of them. I’m guessing that’s making ESPN some nice coin, because they’re certainly not popular to link to on any of the blogs I read, large or small. I know revenue, not traffic, is the name of the game for ESPN, but I still wonder what the numbers would be if ESPN’s top reporters would have open blogs.
Podcenter is just what you’d think it would be.
After that is Video Games, a partnership between ESPN and 1UP. There’s a good amount of reviews, but not a lot of fresh content. It seems like it’s there as more of a promotional area, which is a good lead-in for the last few options: Travel, Contests, Shop.
The last link is actually to ESPN Deportes, which I haven’t visited in quite a while. It has a look very similar to the one ESPN.com had before this slight makeover.
The change does strike me as a “clean up”, and I think it works well. I hope ESPN takes this approach soon with all their pages.
Getting a Read on Active Users
Active Users of a feed is a very hard number to try and estimate.
A lot of sites will flaunt RSS numbers, but from casual observation, it seems people rarely unsubscribe from feeds.
Sometimes webmasters and bloggers get a clue when a feed is moved and you can see old subscription numbers vs new subscriptions.
Yesterday I read about PVRWire shutting down on Jason Calacanis’ blog. Tonight I read the farewell from AdJab.
These, and any other blogs shutting down over at Weblogs, Inc. have an opportunity to test out their active RSS base. They can keep the feed urls going and watch the subscription numbers, and how quickly they decrease. Sure, everyone doesn’t unsubscribe right away, but over the course of a few months you should be able to get a good read on things.
I know a lot of people don’t want to know these numbers as they feel it can hurt promotion, but for accuracy’s sake, I think it’d be a good experiment.
Just a thought.
Anyway, so long to AdJab, I was a loyal reader. Chris, Adam, Bob, Ryan, and Tom, did a great job over there.
Random Youtube Thought
Youtube, now owned by Google, only has “add to Yahoo” links on their RSS page. Was there a previous deal in place with Yahoo to have these links shown, or has Youtube just been slow to pimp their new overlords and change it to “add to Google”?
ISAPI Rewrite for Expression Engine
I use Expression Engine (or EE) for many of my blogs, and I mostly use a WIMP setup (and I know the LAMP users love that acronym).
WIMP = Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP
LAMP = Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP
While I do have a LAMP box, I also use SQL Server and .NET, so a couple of my WIMP boxes are a bit more than well… WIMP-y, for lack of a better term.
EE has a nasty default URL. It would look something like this:
yourfunkydomain.com/index.php?/templategroup/templatename/article-title
Most people want to get rid of the /index.php? and I can’t blame them.
IIS doesn’t have mod_rewrite for URL rewriting, but there is ISAPI Rewrite and it’s very powerful, if not on par with mod_rewrite. I’ve posted my methods in the past for when I used Wordpress and decribed them when I added an All Posters front to hockeyfights.com.
I was reading the EE forums on pmachine.com today and saw someone asking specifically about getting rid of the /index.php? with ISAPI Rewrite and IIS and thought I’d post my method here:
First, it’s helpful to read the wiki entry about removing posts from your URLs.
Second, go into your control panel and remove index.php from any of the urls defined for your blog.
Third, in the control panel set “Force URL query strings” to no.
Fourth, get your httpd.ini file ready to go with this code:
[ISAPI_Rewrite]
RewriteRule (/(?:template1|template2|trackback|member|search|P\d{1,8}).*) /index.php?$1 [I,L]
That’s it 
I’m using what the wiki entry describes as the inclusion method because I use many other directories that aren’t associated with EE and I don’t want anything related to them. For someone like me who only has a few templates per domain, it’s not a big deal. For someone who might use many template groups and names, it’ll be a little more work, or they might want to look into using another method.
AIM Bounced Email: Pimp Us
At the top of a bounced email I received was this:
Reason: Remote host said: 550 We would love to have gotten this email to xxxxx@aim.com. But, your recipient never logged onto their free AIM Mail account. Please contact them and let them know that they’re missing out on all the super features offered by AIM Mail. And by the way, they’re also missing out on your email. Thanks.
I’m not sure if this gets sent if the screenname doesn’t exist at all, or only those screennames that are taken, but don’t have active emails.
Pretty creative way to encourage users to activate their email accounts: have others do it for you.
My assumption is the most common bounce is from one AIM user trying to email another within AIM and this message in the bounce email could cause one person to IM another and ask why they can’t email them.
A Great Headline
Politics aside, this is a great headline on CNN:
Bush uses ‘Internets’ to reach ‘The Google’
All CNN videos are in a pop-up, so I doubt many link directly to it (CNN’s loss), and the javascript that detects your Windows Media Player is very wonky in Firefox (allows me to at least watch on one machine, while it won’t let me in at all on other, despite having the latest plug-ins for both).
CNN news videos are nice, short segments and they have ads before you watch your first (and occasionally in between segments too?) so I assume they’re at least covering the costs of bandwidth. By limiting in-bound links (intentionally or not) they’re really stunting their own growth and popularity.
A New Gaim to Come
Linux.com has a preview of Gaim 2.0. I’m a Windows user, as well as a Trillian (Pro) fan, but recognize the program could use some improvements. I’m willing to give Gaim a test ride again, but there doesn’t seem to be much to pull me in. Trillian can be a little slow and clunky, but there are mentions of improvement in the yet-released Trillian 4 on the seldom-updated Trillian blog. Quicker load times and a smaller footprint would be nicer than any new feature I can think of.
MyESPN Hits Beta
MyESPN is here. I think it’ll get a lot of talk because it’s ESPN, it’s customizable and it’s RSS-friendly, but I’ve yet to find another reason why anyone will mention it.
Put simply: it’s a customizable portal, similar (very similar) to My Yahoo!. Outside of a few ESPN-friendly only options, there’s not much more to it (yet?).
I was clued into MyESPN via Reemer, who was expecting something more:
They’ve made some curious decisions, for example, not displaying links to outside sites (they’re one click away). Intentionally making the product less useful is an interesting strategy.
Reemer points to FatMixx, who worked on the project. If you’re as impressed as Reemer is, FatMixx says don’t be quiet:
Based on early feedback, people are happy but a lot of folks have suggestions. Leave feedback. I guarantee that the team is paying attention. Your feedback will shape what we do next and how we make this product even better.
Some thoughts so far:
* During setup I was asked to put in a zipcode to find teams close to me. I don’t think it said “or city”. If so, disregard this: due to the internet, sports tv packages and fantasy leagues many are now fans of teams in cities they’ve never been to. Chances are, they won’t know the zipcode, don’t make them look it up. Yes, I know you can add/edit later, but initial setup should be as easy as possible.
* The scoreboard isn’t sortable. It should be. Leagues and teams in whatever order I want and maybe even a “hide when no games are played” option. Things are collapsable, but having them disappear completely is even better.
* Some sort of feed search would probably be helpful to many.
* Adding a feed is quick and easy, the way it should be.
* An autoplay on/off option on the video module! Thank you to whoever implemented that.
* Having the television module probably seemed like a great idea to promote whatever’s on ESPN, but having one channel at a time in a module is basically useless. This need to be asked when making a “My” page: if this wasn’t automatically on the page already, would anyone add it themselves?
* I don’t use ESPN for any of my fantasy leagues. I’m sure this module is useful for some and just wanted to point that out.
* The team modules are nice, but relatively basic. Links to ESPN pages like schedule and rosters along with the next game listed, news on ESPN (which primarily is ticker stuff you see on other portals) and local links, which could wind up being the bread and butter of this module, but I’m not sure how ESPN will feel about having the one of the better features simply be a collection of external links.
* You can add more customizable pages, which does push it outside of the “just a landing page” type of portal, but it’s not a feature I played around with (because honestly, I’m not looking for a multi-page portal).
So would I use it? Well, I’m not in the market for any portal right now, so no, but if I was, I couldn’t see any feature that would make me switch from a portal like My Yahoo! or even Excite (still the best tv listings) to ESPN. I can add all my RSS feeds to anything now (Y!, Google, AOL, etc…) and the original content doesn’t seem all that original outside of the videos, which are available elsewhere. I’m not sure how much else is going to be added between beta and “true” launch, but without any other big features, it’s just like any other portal with an ESPN Video module.
Meet Blogitron
The concept is simple: blogs meet webring. A little new school and a little old school without too much studying. Van matched the look to that too: Web 2.0-y logo with a CGA-like look. Add yer blog and party like it’s 1986, 1996 and 2006 at the same time.
Crash
Recently I’ve been searching for a more robust backup/redundancy system for my data. Too late - my main external drive crashed last night. I’m currently trying to recover as much as possible. Ack. This is right after I shut down hockeyfights.com for a few hours yesterday tinkering with the server.
“Bad computer day”.
However, the freaking out has led to a crash course and kick in the pants for backup solutions (the Thecus N5200 is currently in my sights). If I can recover some data, have it stay stable for a week (not too much to ask, right?) then I should be set, or so I think.
Update Aug 8 1130am: I have recovered most files from my dead-ish hard drive. Suddenly everything seems better 