Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Site Redesign

I'm redesigning elements of the site starting with the 2011 football season.  It shouldn't be noticeable to the naked eye.  I'm a computer programmer by trade and I've decided to incorporate more programming into the site.  The big change is that the site will be more database driven.  Currently the text only pages are database driven, but now the main pages for each week will be retrieved via database.  The conference specific pages may be driven via database as well and may include non-conference road games on a portion of each page.

A few things that I won't be able to do:
  • List TV slots without a game.  For example, I used to be able to list games from the Big 12 and Pac-10 on FSN or Versus without listing a game.  A game would be listed as Big 12 Game or Pac-10 Game.  I won't be able to do that.  To compromise, I may provide a link at the top of each page listing time slots where a conference is tentatively scheduled to air or link a press release, like ESPN's schedule of time slots for a season.
  • Put multiple games in a slot.  When kickoff times are being decided on a six-day basis, I have listed multiple games in a timeslot.  Won't be able to do that.  What I may do is list the game on TV and list all available television outlets without gametimes.  I could list, for example, Florida St. at North Carolina with ACC Network, ESPNU and ABC, but not list a gametime.
  • Shading FBS vs. FCS games as yellow.  Still working on that. Got that one working.
I will continue to list web-only games and I'll be able to list games that have not be picked up for TV or web like I currently do. 

Here's the current test page: http://mattsarzsports.com/2011/week1test.aspx.  The page is still a work in progress.  If you happen to receive an error, there's a good chance I'm doing debugging on the page, so it might be in working order in a few minutes.

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