I'm Brant Tedeschi, a web developer and entrepreneur, from New Jersey with a degree in history from Monmouth University. I've been developing start-ups for the past 6 years and am the founder and lead developer of FantasySP.
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Over the past couple of months I’ve added a lot of new features to FantasySP. More features means more overhead and the chance that the site can slow down. The site is meant to be fast and I want to ensure that it stays that way.
Needless to say, it finally got to a point where I felt the site was noticeably slower and needed to be fixed. In the past week I put new feature development on hold while I addressed optimization and speed issues.
The good news is that there have been numerous improvements to the core infrastructure of the site. The Fantasy Assistant and page loads in general will be much faster now. Many things behind the scenes have been improved upon that will ensure the site stays fast as it continues to grow in popularity.
The new season of fantasy baseball is here and there has been a huge influx of new users and plenty of bugs to squash these past two weeks. I have been feverishly working to improve multiple aspects of the site to handle the additional users and additional features.
Many of you have emailed me to provide feedback about bugs and features that you would like improved. I am reading ALL of it and have been implementing many of your suggestions.
What you see below is just a small list of improvements that have been completed since the start of April:
Start/Sit tool, various accuracy fixes for scheduled matchups.
Start/Sit tool, user can now specify the start of his fantasy week: Sun-Mon or Sun-Sat.
Accuracy fix for player stats to compare this years stats to last years stats. Previously the average and on base percentages were slightly off.
Fantasy Assistant & Trade Analyzer, refreshed design for the player popup windows. It is now cleaner, brighter, and easier to read with red buttons for navigation.
Fantasy Assistant, there have been numerous improvements to ratings and analysis for players. Waiver wire suggestions have undergone many updates to further increase their accuracy. Most notable have been category based waiver wire suggestions. If you were unimpressed before, then I highly suggest taking another look at the revised suggestions.
CBS App Updates & League Updates, There have been a LOT of new users who bought CBS apps and synced new fantasy leagues to the FantasySP website. I spent the past week refining the update process in order to handle the additional workload. The update process is finally up to speed and everyone’s leagues should be updating on time and consistently from this point on. Sorry!
Various behind the scenes optimizations have been done so things load faster. Things like the fantasy assistant and Start/Sit tools load a lot faster.
Progress has been made with trade suggestions, but it is still not ready for prime time. Stay tuned for the official release later this month.
Many of you are about to enter the playoffs in your NBA fantasy leagues. I wanted to make sure you had the best experience possible come playoff time with the fantasy assistant. A new category has been added: “Free Throw Percentage”. All other category based waiver wire suggestions for the NBA have improved accuracy.
Best of luck in the playoffs! And please do join a fantasy baseball league this summer!
A major update just went live on the Fantasy Assistant involving position based analysis. I wanted to take a minute to talk about why it’s important and what it means down the line.
NBA position based analysis
As of today, version 1.0 of position based analysis is live on the site. Expect lots of improvements moving forward, but for now your screen should look similar to the screenshot to the right.
To see position based on analysis in the fantasy assistant, simply select any fantasy team. (the green button)
The picture you see on the right is based off my fantasy basketball team as of March 13th 2013. My team is broken down into Guards, Forwards, and Centers.
Each sport will have their own unique positional breakdowns. Baseball and football will show six total categories. Hockey will show four.
Position Colors
Each position is associated with a color: green, orange, or red. Ideally it would be great to see that I am strong in all of my positions and all of them in green. However, there are no green colors shown because there is no position that my team is performing exceptionally well in. In fact, my team is performing terribly in the forwards position and I rank dead last. (I suppose that’s what happens when Kevin Love goes down with an injury.)
Blue Graph
The second thing you’ll notice is the blue line underneath each ranking. The blue line shows how that position rating has changed over time. Each day we calculate position based analysis for your team and every other synced team in your league.
Ideally you would like to see the graph trending upwards. A graph trending upwards means that your ratings are increasing. In my particular case it looks as though all of my position ratings are going down. Needless to say I am in some serious trouble here.
As you may or may not know, we already provide team by team analysis based on starting lineup and full roster. With the addition of position based analysis we are now able to show you key areas on your team that need improvement. You can also browse to other teams in your league to see their strong and weak spots.
The Future
This new feature is ONLY available to paying members of the site (or our CBSSports app). If you are interested in trying out the fantasy assistant then sign up now for a free 7 day trial.
Position based analysis is an important step towards a new feature that is coming later this month. I can’t reveal what it is quite yet, but I will say that it is the most requested feature by our users. I decided to break things down into two separate updates because position based analysis is awesome in its own right.
