Dudspuds Blog

Now that we’ve quietly launched Dudspuds, I hope to gather feedback from initial users of the system. For anyone who has tried out the marketplace, feel free to post your thoughts, comments and suggestions to this blog entry. Here are the questions I would like answers to…

Dudspuds Feedback Questions

• Did you find any helpful content?
• Does the value justify the price?
• Is paying per article an appealing concept, and how so?
• Would you use the site again? If so, for what?
• Would you recommend it to friends?
• Any other likes/dislikes/suggestions, etc?

I will update this list with more questions, as they arise.

Here’s our first ever incentive program, starting today.

• Sign-up Bonus
• Applies to all new sign-ups at Dudspuds.com
• $2 is automatically deposited into your account
• You can spend the $2 on any articles you want

We’ve done the math, you can buy roughly 8 articles with the two bucks (based on $0.25 average price).  This allows you, as a fantasy sports player, to try out the marketplace before using your own money.  The first group of articles are on the house, and we’re happy to offer them.

Just create an account and spend like a rock star.

Don’t forget to rate articles you read by clicking the stars on the article page (1 = “worthless” to  5 =  “very useful”).  The ratings are important as they tell others what’s good, and what stinks, and they tell the system what kind of articles you like.

We need feedback, so give us your thoughts at: info [at] dudspuds.com or post in the comments on this blog entry.

Now that we’re in full swing with our first two publishers, we’d like to announce a major milestone. The Dudspuds marketplace now offers over 60 premium articles per week, with the average price of $0.24 each.

Bumps in the Road

There were a good number of performance problems with the publisher tools that required several coding iterations. This was primarily around very long articles, and when you tried loading them - the system would crap out. Well - we’ve solved all these issues and now you can load articles as long as you want (although we haven’t tried one that is the length of Encyclopedia Britannica). To further speed things up, we added some clever link processing that can automatically associate players and teams to your articles.

Moving forward, I intend to pursue more publishers to increase the number of premium articles offered each week. This will include publishers that do content for fantasy baseball, in preparation for next season.

In addition, I am going to put the word out to friends (and friends of friends) that the marketplace is open for business, and please give it a try. I’m cooking up a bonus program that will give new customers free money when they setup an account and fund it with a few bucks. I plan to introduce this program next week, and will post about it.

More Features to Come

On another note - expect to start seeing new features on the customer facing screens. Some of the things on the slate include…

• Daily e-mail to consumers with new articles for sale
• More efficient search results listing
• Improved placement of star ratings

Today, we’ve released a new feature called the Publisher Profile. It shows more information about our publisher, including the company name, logo, website synopsis and their most recently published articles. You can access the publisher profile by clicking on the publishers logo.

Here are the profiles of our current publishers:

• Rotowire.com
• FootballGuys.com

Soon, we’ll show more publisher information, such as:

• Total articles published
• Average articles published per week/day
• Average rating received on their articles

This type of information will help you qualify the publisher better when deciding which articles to purchase. I welcome feedback on other types of information that would assist consumers in making a purchase decision.

This has been a maintenance week, it seems. One of those weeks where it feels like you’re not getting too much done, but you really are.

Here are the highlights.

It’s the Tables, Stupid!

There was major problem posting articles with large and numerous html tables. In fact, would take a vacation while working on these tables! I discovered this working with content from FootballGuys.com - they include good number of data tables in some of their articles.

The issue was resolved, and we’re back at it. It was a problem with the HTML sanitizer — and how it was processing the articles. For anyone interested – the HTML sanitizer removes HTML tags from the article, so the system can accurately count the number of words. It’s important, otherwise you wouldn’t know how long the article is that you’re buying.

Another problem came up with these articles involving the WYSIWYG editor (TinyMCE). After you “Save” article, the editor likes to massage the HTML to make sure it’s not malformed. This occurs right before the article is sent to the server. With lots of tables in the article – the “massaging” may take a while and the browser may pop up warnings that say things like “Script is taking a long time”, or “Do you want to continue running this script?”. Since we’re stuck with this issue (for security reasons) – just let the browser finish running the script… Thats the easiest. Firefox seems to go much faster than Internet Explorer. This only applies to large articles with lots of tables - most folks won’t even notice it.

Rotobowl League Update

There’s a reason I started Dudspuds… It’s because I’m terrible at fantasy football. So bad, in fact, that I’m last place in my Rotobowl league this year (out of 12 teams). Even worse, I’m #289 of #348 overall. Ouch. Now – in my defense, I’ve had the misfortune of injuries, bad luck, under performing players, poor drafting and a lack of preparation to deal with…. My goal is to finish somewhere in the middle – which will require that I win the rest of my games. If I win in coming weeks, I’ll be sure to mention it. Otherwise, there will be no more talk about the Rotobowl until next year. Now, off to read the Week 9 Cheatsheets, and Week 9 Player Matchups.

New York Tech Meetup - Tuesday

Seeing that New York City is a stones throw away, I’ll be attending the New York Tech Meetup on November 6th. Not sure what to expect… other than to see some cool technologies, and chat with like-minded folks. It’s a big group (~400) – so it’s probably done in lecture style, with power points and static demo’s. I may try to present Dudspuds to the group in coming months. We’ll see.

Weekly Updates to become Individual Posts

I’ve been debating on whether I keep this weekly update format, or I do individual blog posts. I’ve decided to do individual posts for a handful of reasons…

• Each post can be more in depth
• Posts are easier to find when searching (or when being searched or indexed by Google, Yahoo, etc)
• Posts can be linked to directly, since they cover one topic

I’ll reserve the periodic updates for special occasions, or when I haven’t updated the Blog for a long while. (this should never happen, of course)