Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Some new features

I am introducing a couple of new features today.

The first is the Digg News Service which basically scans blogs for the top sports stories of the day. We will see how that goes and if we like it.

The second thing I did was added a counter at Hair's request to keep track of how many people are visiting. Should be fun to see if how popular we get. Thanks for the idea Dick!

We have been linking with other Pac Ten schools and our opponents, some are starting to reciprocate. The guys that run the Oregon blog seem very nice , same with SC, WSU, SJSU, and UCLA. Still waiting to here from a few others. A new site get's back to us every day, so we will have more content for you to peruse as we open you up to the world of sports blogging.

We also added link's to Dawgman, Malamute, Husky Digest, UDub Dish, and The UW site.

If you notice the ad's are starting to cycle more and are becoming more specific to the keywords created by the stories on the site. Be sure to check them out, the Husky Store seemed to have about every Husky novelty known to man.

4 comments:

hairofthedawg said...

You're welcome. I was going to say that the Digg's articles were dated, but they've picked up the Bomar story since I visited earlier, so better.

I've always enjoyed the stats, although there are a lot of crawlers and bots out there. They get your site publicized, but they seem to visit my pages too frequently and just suck bandwidth. The avatar I use on dawgman is fun too. It's hosted on my site so when someone reads a post of mine, I get a visit from whatever country they live in. Seychelles Islands is the most surprising so far.

I visited the Husky store and you're right...too hard to choose. I'll wait until some night after a few beers.

John Berkowitz said...

We will see how Diis works for a week, when I have time i will try to hook up something better.

hairofthedawg said...

Ranking the pac-10 blogs and others John has linked to, on a scale of 1-10 with ten being highest.

Trojans 4 Good info, but it's mainly what Taft does on the dawgman board, although they do print the entire article instead of providing a link. I'm not sure how legal/ethical that is but it is convenient to have one stop shopping. I clicked on a few random links in the archive and didn't see any original thought or commentary.

Cal 4.5 Similar to SC except they snip the applicable part of the article. No commentary on the front page at least. There was little opinion from the host, at least that I could differentiate. A bit more wide ranging in pursuit of info than SC's

OSU 7 Regularly updated, links to articles, a bit of opinion and occasional commentary. He's enthusiastic but not over the top. Probably a good site on which to engage in "fun" smack talk as he has a sense of humor. Covers baseball as well...didn't take the time to check for basketball.

UO 7.5 Part of this is personal opinion. This is not specifically a UO sports blog. There's a bit of all sports on there, some family stuff, and it appears to heat up during the season as far as sports go. I didn't read it closely, but I like reading about some of the good things that people enjoy in life, even when they're Ducks.

Has a cool "what is it?" post on occasion too. Commentary appears to be mainly family, but they look forward to reading ours prior to Duck week.

UCLA 8.5 Best yet, frequently updated, a nice amount, although fairly biased, commentary and a lot of different opinions. Especially about uniforms...sounds familiar. Nice place, good sense of humor if you're not an SC fan and a lot of information. I didn't look into the archives to check on other sports but they say enough for me to believe that they don't stay quiet for long.

WSU 7 Not much commentary, but I like the way he writes, almost a self-deprecating arrogance. Good sense of humor, editorializes on other sports of interest to those in the NW, and fun, at least for a quick visit.

UA 6 Tough one to grade...sometimes moronic and offensive and on occasion insightful. Pulling them up to the 6 rating is the personal opinion and lively, on some posts, commentary. They've attracted, or pissed off enough, quite a few fans from future opponents and that's a good thing in most cases. I almost took it back down to a 5 because I can't stand the "read more" links. Unless you're really good at writing headlines, avoid that or the rest won't be read.

Stanford .5 From the archive listing it appears you should check about every 6 months for a post. I didn't bother to read the few that were there.

ASU 0 Apparently I don't have permission to access the site. I'll revise this if I ever acquire permission.

UW, judge for yourself. I like it. Needs more commentary aside from idiots like myself but that will likely come with time. I just wonder how long John can keep up with the daily updates. It's not as easy as it seems.

OU 3.5 Appears to be mainly press conferences with no place to comment. It's stuff you wouldn't normally see unless you looked for it but after we play them I wouldn't go back.

FSU 6.5 Lots of opiniions, this guy likes to write, but also a lot of bias. I look in the mirror. Worth a look if you can deal with the obnoxious background until the main page loads.

SJSU .5 It's a myspace page and my version of firefox didn't like it all. Personal preference, but don't bother.

John Berkowitz said...

The guy that runs the Oregon blog is very nice, but there is non football content in there. I picked him because he has the only Oregon blog. I think that the will have a lot of good stuff during the season on the Ducks.

Stanford really doesn't have a blog that I have found. I will keep looking for them and dump the link to the one that has not been updated.

As far as our site goes all we need is a little more commentary from the readers, and judging by the meter 50 people or so are popping by per day to read.

Sports blogging is kind of new, not every school has a blog, so it will be interesting to see what develops in the genre over the next couple of seasons.

As far as content goes I whould have no problem updating it on a daily basis especially with the season starting.

I won't be adding links to articles very often since most of us know where to find them anyway. I will just comment on things and give my feelings as they develop.