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In A Different League
NonLeagueNews24 has rapidly become the UK’s leading website for non-league football. The site was launched in August last year and covers the English National League System from the Blue Square Premier League down. We developed a bespoke content management system which provides the writing team with tools to publish news and match reports. The system also provides their panel of regular columnists with blogging tools. New content is automatically “tweeted” to social media site Twitter.
The site provides up to the minute fixtures and results, with a live “vidiprinter” on match days which pushes goal alerts and match updates out to the visitor’s browser in realtime. The vidiprinter functionality is based on the Meteor server, a persistent streaming HTTP (or “Comet”) server. The site consumes live data from a number of sources including XML feeds from a third party content provider, text messages from club officials via an SMS API, and manual input using the content management system.
The site currently attracts around 25,000 unique visitors a month.
WordPress Schema
WordPress is a pretty cool blogging application, and the current version 2.7 is leap ahead from the old version I was used to using. It made sense to use the functionality provided by WordPress to drive the back end of the blog on our website, but in order to fully integrate it into the rest of the site we built the public-facing front end from scratch. During the development, the newer version of WordPress was released, so at the last minute prior to lanch we had to refactor the code to work with the revised database structure implemented in WordPress 2.7.
In order to make life simpler, and as an aid to getting my head around the project, I drew out the the WordPress database schema using OmniGraffle - a wonderful tool for producing elegant diagrams and flowcharts very quickly. Having the database schema laid out on a sheet of paper for reference during the development was a real help. The table and column names were always to hand and joining tables was breeze with all the relationships clearly identified.
You can download the PDF of the WordPress v2.7 schema diagram here.
Recursive tree-like patterns in Flash
On the Twelfth Day of Christmas my truelove said to me, “Take down the Christmas decorations!” So we did. Our Flash Christmas greeting has been replaced with something a little more experimental - a Flash application which draws a randomised tree-like pattern in response to a user-click. [Edit: The Flash application can now be found on the Labs page]
Whilst pondering what to post on our Home page once the festivities were over, I got to thinking about the Christmas tree element of the greeting. The tree comprised a sequence of simple timeline-based animations, which Dan created using the tweening tools built in to Flash. I thought it would be quite cool to have a tree that was generated programmatically, based on a few predetermined rules. I’ve been interested in Flash and generative art for a while, and this isn’t the first time I’ve thought about developing something to draw tree-like patterns, although I haven’t really followed it through until now.
Clicking anywhere on the canvas will “plant” a tree at the corresponding position. The trunk of the tree is a single branch, which self-generates additional branches as it approaches maturity. Each branch recursively calls the same code. As the number of branches increases, so does the number of calculations and screen updates required, and the Flash Player soon starts to labour under the load. In order to prevent the application from grinding to a halt, branches will only generate offshoots if their final length is above a certain threshold. I also set a limit to the number of generations permitted.
The parameters took a bit of tweaking to get something that didn’t look too dense, too spindly, too sparse or just plain freaky! On the whole I think the application does a pretty good job of rendering an organic-looking tree, despite the fact that it is all done with straight lines.
Oh, and here’s wishing you all a happy and prosperous New Year.
Subscribe »Why Do We have A Blog?
There are several very good reasons why we have incorporated a blog into our web site. It’s relatively simple to do after all.
- A blog is great tool for quickly adding new content to a web site. We chose WordPress, and its ease of use means we are more likely to keep updating the site on a regular basis, whenever one of us has ten minutes to spare.
- Visitors like fresh content. Keeping the site updated will encourage people to come back again and again. It all helps when building an online presence and winning customer mindshare.
- Search engines like fresh content too. As long as we keep it relevant it all counts towards ratings.
- We’re creative types, and blogging is form of self-expression. When we’ve got something to say it won’t do to bottle it up.
- We’re good at what we do, and blogging about it is way of proving it to the world.
It all makes sense doesn’t it. Perhaps you should have a blog on your web site. Don’t think about it for too long though - give us a call…