BallHype Blog

If you’re an active user, you may have already received a message in your email or Ballhype Inbox telling you that someone commented on your post or that sadly, your game picks ranking just went down by -3. We now have notifications capability for a number of different events: when someone comments on one of your stories, when you receive a Ballhype private message, when someone leaves a sticky note, when someone else comments on a story that you commented on, and how your game picks made out.

To avoid clogging your email (although if you use Yahoo, who cares!!), we’re providing multiple options for each type of event, including no notification at all. I won’t go into it all here; check out the options and change the default settings by clicking the Notification Preferences link next to your avatar in your profile sidebar box.

We made two updates to the site last night for your viewing pleasure: 1) we posted the first Ballhype Demo, and 2) added support for embedded YouTube and Google Video.

The demo was made with Camtasia which I have to say is a huge upgrade from what I was previously using. I’ve wanted to get a demo posted for a couple of weeks now, but with all of the changes we’ve been implementing on the site (user profile sidebar, locale filter, sport navigation in the header, to name a few), I kept putting it off. Even last night I ended up splicing extra clips in because the demo was getting outdated even as I was working on it. No time for a code freeze around here.

As soon as Jason deployed the YouTube video support, they removed the SNL Peyton Manning clip from YouTube, so the first usage of this feature kind of bit the dust. But already today there are several more on the site.

The site will be up but we’ll be taking a break this evening to attend the Warriors-Wizards game at the Oracle Arena tonight, joining a contingent from the Golden State of Mind community. Thanks to the efforts of the GSoM guys, we’ll have a chance to get in early and watch the warm-ups from courtside, and meet other local basketball fans. We’re even going to use the opportunity to give away our first Ballhype tchotchke!

If we lived in Detroit, we’d sign up for the Need4Sheed/Detroit Bad Boys Blogfest. It’s very cool that offline connections are happening among the sports blogging community. Ballhype is just getting started but in the future we hope Ballhype will help make more of these kinds of events easier to organize.

Update: It was a fantastic game!

Ballhype was taken down for about 30 minutes tonight while we moved the site to a new dedicated server. Those of you who have been using the site should see a small performance boost the next time you log in. The move also gives us the ability to support many more concurrent users—a capability that we hope to need for the upcoming public launch.

We actually got quite a bit of mileage out of our $15/month shared hosting plan. Here are a few quick stats on the data that was moved:

• 1434 blogs actively monitored
• 68,868 blog posts downloaded and analyzed
• 8,926 stories posted
• 8,637 players, teams, and other sports entities entered
• 1,407 game picks submitted

And, despite the preponderance of basketball bloggers participating in the beta, the most popular story on the old server was Baseball America’s Top 100 2007 Prospects. Everyone likes a list.

As a couple of you have brilliantly suggested, we’ve launched Groups on Ballhype. Users can create groups and invite friends or other users on Ballhype that have shared interests, for example everyone who has picked the Boston Celtics as a favorite team. Groups can be designated public or private or in-between.

As the number of users on Ballhype grows, Groups is one way to keep it fun and personal, like joining a fraternity at a Big Ten school. You’ll be able to watch what other members of your group are hyping and submitting, compete over rankings on game picks, get together for beer, or whatever. (We don’t supply the beer.)

We’re technically still in closed beta, but the old-timers will notice that there are a bunch of new users on the site. We’ve begun issuing beta invites en masse so that we can start testing more of the community features and site performance. If you’d like more beta invites to pass along to your friends, let us know.

Site updates:
- One of the more noticeable changes on the site is the new voting widget. Thanks to Kris for coming up with the cool and very distinctive new design.
- In the customization widget, you can now select individual favorite tags so that top stories about only Barry Bonds will appear on your home page instead of top stories about all of your favorites.
- A couple of you asked that we improve the tag finder feature. It’s now easier to select among the search results.
- Lots of bug fixes, mostly identified by beta testers. Mac users are likely still having a hard time using the site in Safari. Sorry about that… we are going to get a Mac for testing purposes but for now if you’re using Mac OSX use Firefox. Thanks louismg for the catch and workaround. UPDATE: thanks to Dave’s bug fix, Safari support has been reinstated.

Keep the suggestions coming! We’re hard at work on some really fun stuff - hope to have it ready in a few days so check back.

… we hope. Jason’s pre-Ballhype projects (lowpost, striketwo, and faircatch) got a shout-out today from Dan Shanoff and Jamie Mottram’s Top Twenty Most Influential Sports Bloggers. As Howie noted, Jason is in good company.