New Front Page

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ST_Lawson
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So, I'm working on a new version of the old front page that I used to have...with things like news, upcoming schedule, etc.
But...I'd like to find out what types of content you'd like to see on the front page. What kinds of news, information, etc.
Let me know and I'll see what I can do to integrate it.
Scott Lawson - Board Admin
Western Illinois University Alum/Fan/Employee
Member of the Marching Leathernecks - 1996-2000
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ST_Lawson
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Nothing? Ok...well, how about I show you what I have currently (still a work in progress, just fyi).
http://www.leathernecknation.net/index_new.php

Things I still plan to do with it:
  • mobile/responsive interface
  • more news sources (currently just pulls from official athletics site)
  • might restructure non-mobile interface into 2-columns rather than 3
  • possibly integrate more social media stuff into it
  • look into any ideas you guys might have for it
So, as I said, it's not done yet, but if there's anything you'd like to see or think might be useful, please let me know.

Oh, and if you go to the page and something looks REALLY off...that probably just means I'm in the process of working on it right then.
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sealhall74
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Looks pretty good to me. My only suggestion would be to add "recent results" from the main athletics site into a new section or merge them into the section for Upcoming Schedule and re-title it.
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ST_Lawson
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sealhall74 wrote: Mon May 08, 2017 9:48 am Looks pretty good to me. My only suggestion would be to add "recent results" from the main athletics site into a new section or merge them into the section for Upcoming Schedule and re-title it.
Done, now I just gotta figure out what to title the section that doesn't take up three lines of text in that space. ;)
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sealhall74
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ST_Lawson wrote: Mon May 08, 2017 9:53 am
sealhall74 wrote: Mon May 08, 2017 9:48 am Looks pretty good to me. My only suggestion would be to add "recent results" from the main athletics site into a new section or merge them into the section for Upcoming Schedule and re-title it.
Done, now I just gotta figure out what to title the section that doesn't take up three lines of text in that space. ;)
If you could add the scores to the result lines that would be beneficial.
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ST_Lawson
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sealhall74 wrote: Mon May 08, 2017 9:57 am
ST_Lawson wrote: Mon May 08, 2017 9:53 am
sealhall74 wrote: Mon May 08, 2017 9:48 am Looks pretty good to me. My only suggestion would be to add "recent results" from the main athletics site into a new section or merge them into the section for Upcoming Schedule and re-title it.
Done, now I just gotta figure out what to title the section that doesn't take up three lines of text in that space. ;)
If you could add the scores to the result lines that would be beneficial.
Yea, I was thinking about that just a minute ago. I'd either have to figure out how to scrape what I get back from the calendar feed for the scores, then pull that out and display it...or find some sports scores api or something. ESPN has one, but I think it'll only cover NCAA basketball and football...I don't think I'd get stuff like soccer, baseball, softball, etc. I'll keep looking into it though.

EDIT - I was able to get it to scrape the scores and replace the W or the L in the titles with the letter and the score. It looks like it's working fine for baseball and softball at this point. Track and Field doesn't really have single "wins" or "losses" generally, so I'll have to wait until later this week to see if they do anything in the feed to designate placement or whatever. As for the rest of the sports, I think it'll probably work with most that have a direct game/match score (football, basketball, soccer), but we'll just have to see how/if it'll work with things like Volleyball (if they list just sets...like 3-1...or something, or if they do scores for all the sets), cross country, swimming/diving, women's tennis, etc.

Currently it displays any games over the last 2 days (technically the previous 48 hours to the time, so if you're looking for something that happened the morning of two days ago, and you're checking in the afternoon, it won't show up), and any future events, up to a total maximum of 15 (so, like...right now there's 5 recent events and 10 upcoming events listed). It's possible that at points during the year, if there's a lot going on, that it could be mostly (or even all) recent events with few (or no) upcoming events. So I may have to tweak what exactly it's showing a bit. But I probably won't know that until next fall when all the fall sports get rolling at once.
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ST_Lawson
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Ok, I think I've got the basic layout and content done, so I went ahead and rolled out the new front page. If you go to leathernecknation.net or click on the title bar, it'll take you there. To get to the forum from there, just click on the forum button in the main menu right below the title bar. Let me know if you have any questions or other ideas.

I've got a backup copy that I'm going to continue to tweak somewhat though, so I can test things out if there's something else you'd like to see.
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sealhall74
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ST, today's softball game not showing up on home page. It does appear in the upcoming games section of athletic site. Do you scrape on demand or rely on some sort of scheduled cache?

For my Pickem game, I ended up going with the NCAA site to generate my schedules and bring in scores. That after first trying to get it from ESPN, then the conference sites. Still had to go out to the conference site to scrape the box score stats for the StatPick game. Now everything is ALMOST 100% automated. It only took me four years to get ir right. LOL

Still desire to embed Pickem here to rack up some ad revenue?
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ST_Lawson
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sealhall74 wrote: Thu May 11, 2017 7:10 am ST, today's softball game not showing up on home page. It does appear in the upcoming games section of athletic site. Do you scrape on demand or rely on some sort of scheduled cache?

For my Pickem game, I ended up going with the NCAA site to generate my schedules and bring in scores. That after first trying to get it from ESPN, then the conference sites. Still had to go out to the conference site to scrape the box score stats for the StatPick game. Now everything is ALMOST 100% automated. It only took me four years to get ir right. LOL

Still desire to embed Pickem here to rack up some ad revenue?
Softball game/calendar - yea, the way it works is that I'm using Google Calendar to pull in the calendar feed from athletics. Every 10 minutes I've got a php script that hits up the Google Calendar API and gets the relevant events. I throw the returned JSON of events in a flat text file, which is read from and organized for displaying whenever the actual front page gets loaded. That way I'm only loading the file from the local server rather than hitting up google each time the page loads (for those who aren't so technically inclined, it means the page loads faster, especially if there's any issue with connecting to Google).
The problem is, apparently Google Calendar only refreshes the feed like once a day, so when I'm hitting them up for the data, I'm only getting their most recent update of it, which apparently doesn't (yet) include today's softball game. That's not normally an issue during regular seasons, but in playoffs and stuff, it may not show upcoming games if they've just been scheduled in the last half day or so. I'm going to have to take a look at how the feed comes directly from athletics and see if I can parse that out. Assuming I can do that, I can still do the caching on my end but it may take me a bit to get figured out though.

As for embedding the Pickem game...yup, I'd love to embed it on a page that we can control a little better (and get some extra ad revenue for the site out of it). If you want to send me google's embed code for the form (you can send it to scott@leathernecknation.net) I'll get it put on a page and we can start figuring out how to make it work.

Thanks.
Scott Lawson - Board Admin
Western Illinois University Alum/Fan/Employee
Member of the Marching Leathernecks - 1996-2000
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sealhall74
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Joined: Fri Apr 18, 2014 1:18 pm
Location: Wherever, Windblows

ST_Lawson wrote: Thu May 11, 2017 8:36 am
sealhall74 wrote: Thu May 11, 2017 7:10 am ST, today's softball game not showing up on home page. It does appear in the upcoming games section of athletic site. Do you scrape on demand or rely on some sort of scheduled cache?

For my Pickem game, I ended up going with the NCAA site to generate my schedules and bring in scores. That after first trying to get it from ESPN, then the conference sites. Still had to go out to the conference site to scrape the box score stats for the StatPick game. Now everything is ALMOST 100% automated. It only took me four years to get ir right. LOL

Still desire to embed Pickem here to rack up some ad revenue?
Softball game/calendar - yea, the way it works is that I'm using Google Calendar to pull in the calendar feed from athletics. Every 10 minutes I've got a php script that hits up the Google Calendar API and gets the relevant events. I throw the returned JSON of events in a flat text file, which is read from and organized for displaying whenever the actual front page gets loaded. That way I'm only loading the file from the local server rather than hitting up google each time the page loads (for those who aren't so technically inclined, it means the page loads faster, especially if there's any issue with connecting to Google).
The problem is, apparently Google Calendar only refreshes the feed like once a day, so when I'm hitting them up for the data, I'm only getting their most recent update of it, which apparently doesn't (yet) include today's softball game. That's not normally an issue during regular seasons, but in playoffs and stuff, it may not show upcoming games if they've just been scheduled in the last half day or so. I'm going to have to take a look at how the feed comes directly from athletics and see if I can parse that out. Assuming I can do that, I can still do the caching on my end but it may take me a bit to get figured out though.

As for embedding the Pickem game...yup, I'd love to embed it on a page that we can control a little better (and get some extra ad revenue for the site out of it). If you want to send me google's embed code for the form (you can send it to scott@leathernecknation.net) I'll get it put on a page and we can start figuring out how to make it work.

Thanks.
Will get you the embed stuff. Also, you know about this little Google sheet magic, right? Put the following formula in a sheet cell and you can import any html TABLE. They also have a way to import XML (=IMPORTXML(URL, query)). I am not too good at that one but I have used it.

=IMPORTHTML("http://www.goleathernecks.com/calendar. ... ,"table",3)

Did not want that to turn into a link, but you get the idea
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