We’re at 60+ premium articles per week!
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
New Feature : Publisher Profile
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:
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.
Dudspuds Weekly Update #6
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)
Dudspuds Weekly Update #5
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.
- 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.
- 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.
How It Works - Dudspuds Home Page
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.