Author: Brant Tedeschi

This week I’ve been working on the sister project for FantasySP called Player Careers.  It has come along quite nicely and I am very excited, but is not ready for any type of official public release.  I predict that it will be finished sometime in May.  In the meantime, FantasySP will get mainly bug fixes.

Onto this weeks notes:

• Fix for Yahoo transaction accuracy. Sometimes a transaction would be assigned to the wrong team. (thanks wtapppp)
• Removed the “!” in the welcome email to prevent spam assignment.
• Changed color for “Select My Team” to blue because users could not find out where to click when it was Green.

The major takeaway from this weeks release notes is to make learning about FantasySP easier than ever.  A feature overview page or “tour” page was necessarily for new and existing users to fully understand what the site is all about.  I encourage everyone to take a look.  The User Panel has undergone big changes as well.  The “more” dropdown with additional menus is gone.  It is now listed as “Sync Settings Membership”.  A floating help button is to the immediate right in-case anyone has questions.

Now the complete list:

• I dropped Amazon SES.  Entire site now uses MailJet for email analytics.  It’s nice to finally be able to see open rates and click tracking.
• Added Notice for IE7 users that their browser is not supported and needs to be upgraded to use the Fantasy Assistant.
• Added new ranking metrics for pitchers including WHIP, Wins, and Saves.
• Fix for email setting links in daily newsletter.
• Added line-up status to mobile website.
• Implemented Feature Overview
• Implemented new Help floater.
• Fix for Fantasy Assistant help drowndown boxes not expanding.

Most of the updates this week focuses on baseball.  More specifically, the Fantasy Assistant.  The most noteworthy feature this week is the addition of support for AL/NL only baseball leagues.  Waiver wire suggestions now recommend league specific players if the site detects that it should. Here are the rest of this weeks changes:

• NEW! Fantasy Assistant pitching  waiver wire suggestions has walks, holds, and saves in their own separate columns.
• NEW! Fantasy Assistant now supports NL/AL only leagues and automatically recognizes them. Waiver Wire suggestions are then limited to the type of league you have.
• Improvements to how the Fantasy Assistant comes up with waiver wire suggestions.
• Removed message about accuracy from waiver wire suggestions.
• FIX for Howie Kendrick stats
• FIX for accuracy of batting average, slugging %, and on base.
• Mobile site updated to show new baseball stats.
• RSS feed for users fixed.
• NEW! Design for new “feature tour” page completed.

It’s officially fantasy baseball season!  There are major improvements to baseball stats and features this week.  Some of which aren’t completely finished, but are worth mentioning.

Fantasy baseball waiver wire suggestions via the Fantasy Assistant are live!  This has been a few weeks in the making, and I am super excited to get it out the door.  Keep in mind that only a week of the baseball season has gone by and that is hardly enough data to go on.  Expect waiver wire recommendations to improve as the season progresses.

There are new baseball stat categories including: slugging percentage, on base percentage, and onbase plus slugging (OPS).  The player ratings for hitters have been enhanced to include these categories to help evaluate players.  These are BIG changes that don’t come too often, so expect to see tweaks to player ratings as the season continues.

More changes will come to the Fantasy Assistant’s accuracy and statistical categories that are presented to you.  I will personally be using it quite a bit and will make sure it is up to par.

Onto the complete list:

• NEW! Logged out users will see a red navbar up top. This is to make newcomers to the site aware that we have awesome features and it’s worth their time. (Logged in users will also see this in the future).
• Amazon SES now handles most of the emails that get sent out. Weekly emails are the last to be migrated over.
• Graceful fallback for foxsports player ids have been added (incase something breaks, it won’t totally break).
• FIX for the Miami Marlins.
• FIX for CBSSports syncing, more specifically league names with odd characters.
• FIX for Yahoo DL/IR spot from not being correctly recognized.
• Baseball data is now cached for a shorter amount of time.
• Site structural fix that no one cares about but me.
• FIX for top mlb players.
• FIX for player trend emails from sending duplicates (sorry folks).
• FIX for yahoo league transaction accuracy, sometimes another league might show up.
• FIX for team rating graph from showing up broken or with the wrong data.
• NEW! Additional player rating categories added for hitters, which meant a LOT testing, number crunching, and new types of data to sift through.
• NEW! Fantasy Assistant improvements with the ability to add more than 5 categories for waiver wire suggestions.
• NEW! Player Stat boxes now show slugging percentage, runs, and stolen bases.