Author: Brant Tedeschi

The good/bad news is that I no longer have a day job and can dedicate all of my time to FantasySP for the next few months. I plan to take it easy this week so my brain can recharge. (It’s tough working a full-time job and a side project 7 days a week for nearly a year)  What I will say is that there is nothing quite like working on your own project and making all the decisions.   I just got done planning the next few weeks of development for the site.    I am incredibly excited to get to work on them and show you guys ideas that I have been cooking up.

I will leave you to this weeks release notes:

• Player Alert emails now show proper threshold of low, medium, or high
• Major NFL.com syncing fix
• Forum has been killed due to lack of usage and spam
• jquery has been updated to 1.7
• New Relic server monitoring just went live and has been installed
• backend stat tracking has been updated

This week’s release notes are mostly fixes for various issues that cropped up over the past week.  However, before I get to those I’d like to mention how FantasySP is doing in terms of traffic.

Not too long ago I made mention that FantasySP had its largest traffic day ever in September.  Well, this has been surpassed several times in October.  In fact, in the past 30 days FantasySP has received nearly 750,000 pageviews.  That is about 100,000 more than last year during the same period of time.  Mind you, this is without the NBA season even starting.  Indeed, this is a historic month for FantasySP.  I’d like to thank you guys for using the site and spreading the word to your friends.  It truly means a lot and I value all of the feedback I get.

Now, onto this weeks release notes:

• Fixed Manual Imports of rosters where the site did not grab their position and team correctly. (thanks wtapppp)
• Fixed a source for accurate news collection (twice!)
• Players no longer show up as listed on IR when searching for them.
• The Winnipeg Jets are an NHL team, DUH. (thanks for pointing it out Scott)
• Related stories on columns are now more prominent and more informative.

Happy Halloween all.  This weeks release notes involve many critical bug fixes and a few tweaks to Player Alerts.  This marks the first week that Player Alerts have been live.  The accuracy has been tweaked throughout the week, but overall I am quite pleased.  So, onto the full release notes:

• NHL scoring data was screwed up and has been fixed.
• I’ve created a way to better handle scoring data screwups from now on. Should make my life easier.
• NHL depth charts have been tweaked
• Major bug to syncing fantasy leagues has been fixed
• Depth chart accuracy check has been put into place for ALL sports, and should work smoothly for the coming months
• ESPN NHL transactions have been fixed.  Previously no data was being collected.  All leagues should be working 100% now.
• Vaclav Prospal scoring data has been added, thanks Henry.
• Player Alerts email cooldown period reduced to 12, down from 24.  This means that you can be alerted of a new player alert 12hrs after the previous one.  24 hours seemed to be too long because an injury report could be announced within that timeframe and you’d miss it.
• Player Alerts are now sent from “FantasySP” instead of my name. As my wife pointed out, people might have no idea who I am.  However, replying to the Player Alert still comes to me.

Things are pretty exciting around FantasySP right about now.  There have been major releases lately, including Fantasy Transactions and now Player Alerts.  Please do read those blog posts announcing each feature in its full detail.  Player Alerts took up most of my time this week as the feature is very involved and something that is continuing to be fine-tuned.

In a nutshell, Player Alerts send an email to anyone who is tracking a player who just had major news announced that you NEED to know about.  It is powered by our Fantasy Spotlight feature and is very accurate at deciding when a player is currently trending.  The email that gets sent out has been designed specifically for this feature and I absolutely love its simplicity and readability.  Please email me feedback about the feature and if it has been helpful thus far.  In fact, I might even email some of you guys and get your opinions.

Another somewhat significant change this week are on a single player story page.  I removed the in-line advertisements and replaced them with 3 more relevant stories about that story and player.  Most people arrive on FantasySP through these pages, and I wanted to make sure they get more news on their first pageview.

Longtime fans of FantasySP might have noticed quite a few visual tweaks in their user panel.  Things were getting a bit cluttered in the user panel and it was long overdue for a visual overhaul.  So what I decided to do was separate your fantasy information from everything else.  “my” now encapsulates your News, Players, Teams, and Transactions. The area now feels more clean and concise while adding a bit more spacing.

Let’s have a look:

Now what about these Fantasy Transactions? Transactions are now collected for EVERY league that you have synced including CBSSports, ESPN, Yahoo!, and NFL.com.  Fantasy Transactions support MLB, NBA, NFL, and NHL leagues.    The minute you sync a league, we collect the entire season’s worth of transactions (except for NFL.com, sorry!).  To date the site has collected about 250,000 fantasy transactions since this feature went live just a few weeks ago.

Here are two screenshots that illustrate the usefulness of the feature.  I am currently in two fantasy leagues, an NFL.com league and a CBSSports league:

As you can see, it works just like listing Teams.  Each league has its own box that can be minimized or maximized and your “favorite” league is always shown first.  Then simply click “next” or “prev” to loop through transactions.  If you want to ensure that your transactions are up to the minute then click the “update” button so the site can grab the latest moves.

Anyone who is in multiple fantasy leagues can appreciate the usefulness of this feature.  It can be quite frustrating going from league to league trying to keep up on the latest transactions.  The more leagues you are in, the more of a pain in the ass it can be.  Now you don’t have to bother wasting time.  Log into FantasySP and it’s all neatly organized and collected for you.

Right now mobile FantasySP does not have transactions quite yet, but it is coming soon.  Also, keep in mind that this feature is ending its “beta” status very soon.  In the next week or two, this feature will have limited functionality unless you pay to upgrade your membership. However, all new signups will be able to use it for two weeks to see if it’s worth the upgrade.

With Player Alerts and Fantasy Transactions, you can clearly see that FantasySP is dedicated to becoming the ultimate fantasy resource.