Ask the Experts
We're told that subscriber copies of Fantasy Football Index will be mailed from the printer today (June 21) or tomorrow. (If you haven't ordered yet, do it now! Those orders will be filled as soon as our office copies arrive in Seattle -- middle of next week, we're told.)
Our cover features the same photo of LaDainian Tomlinson that appeared in our "draft quiz" renewal mailer. So all of you LT owners had better trade him now, before the Fantasy Football Index cover jinx strikes.
The big news for this week -- at least to me -- is that our Matchmaker service is a casualty of our new web redesign. Blame spam-robots. The spambots were posting all kinds of horrible advertisements in the Matchmaker, so we paid a bundle to have our programmers add a module that forced you to punch in a code to prove you're a human. But when the programmers redesigned our website, they changed to a system architecture that didn't support the Matchmaker code they wrote only a couple of months before. Argh! We'll revive the Matchmaker service as soon as we can -- probably a month or two down the road.
We're generally pleased with the web redesign. The commenting feature will be great, and we expect that it'll be heavily used. (Prove us right by commenting on this article and telling us what you like about the new site -- and what you hate.) The new website and database architecture should be much faster -- especially on publication dates. We expect to do more and more with customized rankings (and, eventually, with customizable auction values). Our old FileMaker-based architecture was ridiculously slow. We've been assured that the new architecture will ease the login bottlenecks we've suffered in the past.
We have plenty of work to do,, and there are bugs to squash. Here are a few of the problems we intend to tackle in the next couple of weeks:
Mailbag confusion. You can't send a question to Ian Allan's Mailbag unless you're registered and logged in. It's extra-confusing because there isn't even a "sign in to send a question" link. We'll make the login process easier and more obvious next week, when our programmer returns from vacation. But in the meantime, know that you can still send mailbag questions -- you just have to log in first.
Top-navigation confusion. If you click the navigation links at the top for the cheat sheet, depth charts, etc., you get a very confusing error message implying that you haven't bought anything -- even if you have. We'll fix that, too.
Poll results. A poll isn 't much good if you don't know how many people voted. That should be taken care of soon.
Newsblast e-mails. We still haven't re-launched NewsBlast e-mail delivery, even though the sign-up on our front page says otherwise. We hope to get that going in the next week or so.
Newsblast on the web. Our NewsBlast editor can't get Firefox to run on his computer, (the new posting tool requires XUL), so the NewsBlast may be out of commission for a few days, either until he gets it to work on his computer or until we make other arrangements.
Photos. We'd like to add photos to the site. We hope to negotiate pricing with vendors over the next couple of weeks.
Search. We lost our old search functionality in the conversion to the new system. I don't expect that to be restored any time soon. In the meantime, you can search our site by going to Google and typing in your search terms, followed by site:fantasyindex.com. You might Google our site for articles about LaDainian Tomlinson like this:
LaDainian Tomlinson site:fantasyindex.com
Coming soon. We'll post auction values and stat projections in July. My guess is that they'll go up the week of July 9. Those things take forever to format and post. Then there's the Internet Extra, which will go up on the 20th. And the full-blown preseason service starts in earnest on July 30.
Bruce's favorite CD of the Week: Future Clouds and Radar / S/T
A fantastic, ambitious two-CD set of psychedelia-drenched Beatles pop. I can't get this out of my car, except when I move it to my computer or to the CD player in the shower. I think the four-star review in this month's issue of Paste hit the nail on the head: "...stirs in the rollicking circus organ of early Elvis Costello, ELO's mellotron, heavily reverbed guitars and Big Star horns and the acid-damaged musings of Roky Erickson, and then slathers a huge helping of Revolver-era John Lennon on top."
I love power pop and guitar rock. Recent favorites include Sloan, Apples In Stereo, Jason Falkner, Spoon, the Pipettes, the New Pornographers, the Woggles, Little Steven's Underground Garage and any surf rock that drifts through the transom. Have a recommendation? Send it to bruce@fantasyindex.com.
-Bruce Taylor
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