Dudspuds Blog

Okay - so we’re nearly a week late with this update, but we saved it for what we think is exciting news!

Publisher Progress…

FootballGuys.com is now on board. These guys create tons of content every week for hardcore fantasy football fans. Their articles will be available individually within the marketplace starting this week (Week 8).

Our goal is to sign up 5 large publishers before we begin marketing the site to an extended audience of fantasy sports players. We’re taking a slow and steady approach to ramping up the site — to make sure all the kinks are worked out, and so we have some breathing room to respond to user and publisher feedback.

You can easily see all articles available from FootballGuys by searching for “footballguys”.

More Enhancements

We have made a couple of important enhancements.

1. Flexible pricing - Publishers can now set the price of an article from FREE ($0.00) to any desired amount, with $0.01 increments. Previously, publishers could only price articles in common denominations of US currency. (i.e. $0.05, $0.10, $0.25, $0.50, $0.75, $1.00, etc..) This opens up many possibilities for listing and selling articles of varying length.
2. Printer-friendly views - Now, when someone buys and prints an article, the site uses a stylesheet that is designed for printers. This means that unnecessary things are turned off in the printed page — such as navigation, footers and the search bar. The result is a much more readable printed page. It’s not an earth shattering enhancement, but worth noting.

That wraps it up for this week’s update.

I wanted to take a closer look at the Dudspuds home page to provide some insight into its form and function. In addition, this will capture how the site looks today, so I can look back in a year or two (over a beer, no doubt) and see how it’s changed. So lets get started.

Here’s the current home page, as of the date of this post.

I’ll briefly go through each of the main areas.

Create Account

You can do several things without an account…

• Search for articles
• Preview articles (meaning you can read the synopsis and see more details about the article, including the price)
• See new and popular articles
• Use RSS feeds to see new or popular articles in your favorite RSS reader (such as My Yahoo or Google Reader)

With an account, you can do even more fun stuff…

• Buy articles to read
• Build a watch list of players and teams, so Dudspuds knows which articles you are probably interested in
• See a customized homepage with relevant articles (based on your watch list)
• Get an RSS feed of relevant articles
• Receive e-mails with relevant articles

Main navigation

We tried to keep this simple.

• Home - Returns to the home page
• New - Shows new articles in the last 24 hours, 3 days, 7 days or 30 days.
• Popular - Shows popular articles in the last 24 hours, 3 days, 7 days or 30 days. Popular articles are those with user ratings.
• Search - allows you to search for articles.

Main Article List

This is the article thats for sale.

• Date - When the article was published
• Title - The title of the article. I like titles that are short, sweet and to the point.
• Synopsis - Describes what the article is about.
• Publisher Logo - Shows who wrote and published this article. Above the logo, you can see how long ago it was published.
• Ratings - Shows the number of ratings with the average rating received. The more stars, the better.
• Price - This is how much the article costs, in USD.

Short List

This is an abbreviated list of either New or Popular articles, along with the average rating and price.

Search

Pretty simple… enter any keyword, first name, last name, team or publisher and you’ll get a list of matching articles. The best matches will be on top.

New, Popular and Watch List Articles

There are three lists of articles that you’ll see… Luckily all these lists use the same format.

• New Articles - Anytime a publisher loads a new article is loaded into Dudspuds, it shows up immediately in this list. When you choose a bigger time frame, more articles show up.
• Popular Articles - As articles receive ratings, they become part of the popular list. We do some magic here to make sure an article with one rating of 5 stars doesn’t show up above an article with thirty-seven ratings averaging 4.7 stars.
• Watch List Articles - After you build a watch list, the system shows articles that match. The newest articles will be on top, so if you check the site 22 times a day, you’ll easily find the new stuff. The home page shows articles matching your watch list, if you have one.

Wrap-up

As the home page evolves, it will be interesting to see how the features information change. Based on feedback from pilot users, I’ve already got a list of improvements started. Maybe I’ll do a review of the watch list next… we’ll see.

The fourth weekly update for Dudspuds.  Man - time flies!

We have some major enhancements to talk about this week.  I’ve been implementing features that will speed up article loads.  This will help our publishers, who have tons of content that must find its way to Dudspuds quickly and consistently, every day.  Dudspuds won’t get very far if it’s a pain in the ass to load articles.

Publishing Articles in Dudspuds

Before I talk about the specific enhancements to the publisher tools, lets briefly review the steps to publishing an article at Dudspuds.  I’ll write a detailed post about this in the near future.

1. Login to Dudspuds
2. Go to My Account
3. Go to Publisher Tools (assuming your a publisher)
4. Click “Add Article”
5. Fill in the title, synopsis and other details
6. Set your price (or Free, if you’re feeling generous)
7. Enter the text of your article
8. Save it
9. Add related players
10. Add related teams

TEN STEPS.  Damn.  Seems like a lot.  I bet it takes more to list an item on eBay (that’s a blog post for another day).  Here’s a quick run-down.  Steps 1-4 are simply navigating the website. Step 5 is important - you want an effective title and synopsis, since this is what people read when finding and deciding to buy your article.  Step 6 is real easy - set the price LOW.  Step 7 & 8 are a simple copy/paste, since you probably already have the article written in MS Word, OpenOffice Writer, or in HTML.  Steps 9 and 10 are the biggies.  Linking players and teams is important because it tells Dudspuds specifically what is related to this article.  These links will determine who’s watch list, and RSS feeds the article shows up on.

So that’s it!  If you’ve already written the article, it shouldn’t take more than 1 minute to load it and link players and teams.  Obviously, if you mention 13 players and 6 teams, it will take longer to load.  My goal was to get the load time down to 15 seconds or less - no matter how many players or teams are mentioned.  Now, on to the enhancements…

Publisher Tool Enhancements

AJAX to the rescue!  The first enhancement involves finding the player or team you want to link to your article.  We now have a handy auto-complete box that you can use to search…  Here’s what it looks like:

Now, you can simply type the name, and select from the drop-down.  This is pretty fast. Trust me, I’ve used it extensively.

The second enhancement scans through your article and looks for any important links (typically player names and teams that are hyperlinked)…  It then presents you with several options prior to completing the article:

1. Automatically link the player(s) to the article (saving you from doing it manually)
2. Automatically link the team(s) to the article (again, saving you from doing it manually)
3. Automatically replace your hyperlinks to point to the Dudspuds search results for that term.
   • This is valuable if your current hyperlinks point to premium content that is behind subscription content.  If hypher links point to stats pages, player profile pages, or other publically available pages — you can just leave them be.

This feature requires that you have a hypertext link around the players and teams mentioned in your article.  Come to think of it, I should also support the use of a <span> tag around the player or team name.  This would work the same as a link without having a link. I made a note of this.

So now, steps 9 and 10 above are combined into a single step that does the work automatically.

Content Bandwagon

My next focus is to ensure that fresh new content is being loaded every day from our publishers.  This means I’ll be doing most of the article loading.  Eventually, publishers will be loading articles themselves (assuming we find some success here at Dudspuds). Or even better, articles will be automatically fed into the marketplace.

After the content is flowing every day, I’ll start bringing in more beta users.  I expect to make a good number of improvements to the home page view — taking better advantage of the watch lists, and presenting content in a more condensed, and relevant format.

I have a handful of things to talk about in this week’s update.

Site Improvements

The reason for soft launching Dudspuds was to allow for many iterations of improvements before going mainstream. Here’s what we’ve done this last week…

• Publishing Tool Improvements
  • Linking players and teams to articles is now faster. After linking, you return to the player/team entry form instead of the article view.  While this improvement saves you several clicks, there is still room for improvement here.
  • You can now auto-link highlighted text within an article to Dudspuds search results.  (ie.  highlight “brett favre”, click the auto-link button and it creates a link to search results for brett favre)  This is a handy way to highlight player names in your articles, and also helpful for readers if they decide they want to see more articles about a particular player or team.  Even with this improvement, it can still be a hassle if you’re linking 10 to 15 players within an article.  Next iteration, this will be done automatically, based on the players and teams you’ve linked to the article.
  • Added a “Publish” toggle link to the article listing.  This makes it faster to toggle articles between “Published” and “Not Published”.  This is common when pre-loading articles before you publish them, or if you decide to take an article down.  When looking at the article listing, you click the link, and the “publish” status will change accordingly.
• Viewing and Searching Articles
  • Added the article date above the title.
  • Improved the article preview page, hopefully making more clear that the article is for sale.
  • New articles are displayed on the home page for everyone.  If you have a watch list defined, you’ll see articles matching entries on your watch list.
  • Confirmation messages are now more noticable.

Tradeshow

I will be attending the Sports Media and Technology Show on November 13-14, 2007, in New York City.  Agenda: listening, networking and decide if Dudspuds should exhibit at this show in 2008.

Pilot Users and Feedback

With the first batch of articles in the system and a handful of pilot users, I’ve started collecting some great user feedback.  It’s amazing how helpful users are when you take the time to listen.  I’m keeping a log of enhancement requests that will eventually make it onto this blog, as they’re implemented.  There’s plenty of work ahead.