[leaguevine-developers] This week in leaguevine-developers (4/16/2012)

[Mark Liu]

1. New site is up!

2. Future of playwithlv.com

3. AUDL stats

4. Leaguevine scripts

5. Leaguevine-Ultistats Issues Tracker

6. What we're working on now

1.

Last Tuesday we launched the new version of Leaguevine! This includes the API, and ultistats.leaguevine.com. With this new launch, players can now take stats at the fields for their teams. We still haven't issued a formal announcement, but we'll post some stuff on our blog soon about the changes. 

If you'd like to use your apps in production, just point them to leaguevine instead of playwithlv.com and everything should work as it usually does. One thing to keep in mind is that the new version of leaguevine uses SSL so the URL will start with Https rather than Http.

2.

Having playwithlv.com as a development version of the site where you all can enter in dummy data has been really useful. It turns out this is really useful to people who want to practice entering stats for their games before their games actually happen. Because of this, we are going to keep playwithlv.com up and running. We had originally planned to just have playwithlv up until this stats launch, but we're seeing so many uses for it, we'll continue to keep hosting it.

However, to keep playwithlv.com useful as a development branch for experimentation, the data on the site needs to reflect the real Leaguevine data somewhat closely. Refreshing this data every month simply isn't good enough. Thus, we are changing our policy on when we are refreshing the data on playwithlv. From now on, the data on playwithlv.com may be refreshed at any time without warning. It will likely be refreshed once a week or so. Because of this new policy, it is important that you do not enter any data onto playwithlv that is important or would be annoying to lose. If you need to enter a bunch of dummy data to play around with, please automate it using scripts that create it through our API.

For things that cannot be automated through the API, such as creating new apps, we will copy these over for you automatically so you do not lose them.

3.

This past weekend the AUDL was supposed to take stats at all their games, resulting in the first ever real-time box scores for Ultimate. Sadly, this didn't happen. I've been talking to Josh Moore and some of the team stat/score keepers about this, and we hope to have everyone on the same page by next week. Everyone was given all the information on how to take stats and was supposedly on board, but it seems as if the teams were simply not yet buying into the importance of real-time stats in their league.

We heard from one team that had been fully planning on taking stats that they were surprised by the large crowd (1600 instead of an expected 450), and they said they needed all the extra bodies to help with other things. Hopefully week 2 will go better.

There might still be some stats coming out of week 1, as some teams have video coverage and are planning on taking stats based on that. We'll see, though, and I'm not getting my hopes up. The video coverage was pretty low resolution and from those camera angles it would be hard to see who is on the line each point.

4.

Chris Schaffner has been busy building some stuff on top of the Leaguevine API. He just recently put some good stuff online. Please go watch this repo and follow him on github!

https://github.com/cschaffner/leaguevine

5.

Now is a great time to get involved with Leaguevine-Ultistats. We realize some of you who originally planned to contribute became intimidated or overwhelmed by how rapidly the code base was changing over the last couple months, but things are really starting to become stable. We are also making good use of the issue tracker for this repo and are trying to be consistent about breaking things up into discrete tasks. If you wish to work on something, simply find an issue where no one is assigned yet. Here is the tracker:

https://github.com/leaguevine/leaguevine-ultistats/issues?sort=updated&direction=desc&state=open

6.

Now that the new version of Leaguevine is launched and Ultistats is working, you're probably wondering what we're working on. The next few weeks will be a mix of bug fixes, usability improvements, and performance enhancements. There are very few features we plan to implement, and all of those are so small you could basically just call them usability improvements. If you want to hunt for bugs, now is a great time to do so, as there are probably plenty.

Thanks everyone for your support over the past several months as we evolved and debugged this API. There were plenty of growing pains (and there will surely be more) so it means a ton to me that you've stuck with us and supported us through all this. I know you're all going to build some amazing things and we're honored to be part of it.

-Mark

[Ben Murphy]

Mark & Team,

I am playing with the Mechanix and will hopefully be able to help
coordinate stats for our home opener this Sunday. I think we may also
be getting a copy of the video from the Bluegrass Revolution of our
game Saturday and we should be able to do our stats from that given
our knowledge of the personnel on our own team. Can you provide me
with the person on the Mechanix that has been given the stats
information and/or send it to me as well so I can coordinate with
them?

Thanks,
Ben

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[Mark Liu]

Hey Ben,

Great, thanks for helping out with that! I'll send you the contact's email in private. As for the information we sent to the team stat takers last week, I've copied and pasted it here:

Who we (Leaguevine) are 

We are an internet startup company focused on driving online engagement around sports. We want to build fan bases for players who otherwise wouldn't have any exposure. The first sport we are targeting is Ultimate because we care deeply about growing the fan base and because we are very familiar with the landscape. We have spent the last few months building a system for recording Ultimate statistics from mobile devices. Our site is http://leaguevine.com.

How the stats system will work

At each game, one person will generate real-time stats for the game by recording the play-by-play using a smartphone or tablet. Each play on the field (e.g. completed pass, dropped disc, etc.) corresponds to a tap on the screen. This play by play will be sent to the Leaguevine servers over 3G/4G/wifi instantly so people at home can see the play-by-play. The Leaguevine servers then also calculate statistics from this play-by-play. These statistics are the things you would expect for Ultimate including Goals thrown, Goals Caught, Turnovers and Drops. 

People following from home will view these statistics in real-time. People at the event or who are away from their computers can view the stats from their mobile devices.

How the stats will be integrated with the AUDL

We understand that you would like to these stats to help you generate additional traffic (and hopefully sales) to your websites. Because of this, we have built embeddable web widgets that you can copy and paste onto your site. Each widget shows a set of stats for a certain game or player. To have these stats from your own site, you can just copy and paste the iFrame code.

Leaguevine will host all of the data and you will have the option of embedding it on your site. Further, our site has a public API that allows developers to access game results and statistics and perform interesting analysis on them. If your web developer is interested in using this data directly rather than using our widgets, please have this person contact me (ma...@leaguevine.com).

We are not charging you anything to use our stats software or web widgets for this inaugural season. We see this as a great marketing opportunity for us and hope you will help promote our site to your fans and followers. 

Stat taker responsibilities

During the games, you will need to designate two people to take stats - One will actually tap the player names on a smartphone and the other will simply assist with identifying the players on the field. Only one of these pairs of stat takers is needed. In other words, only ONE of the two teams should take stats at a game. If both teams record the events, duplicate events will be created and will cause problems with the stat calculations. Please discuss with the other team who will be responsible for recording stats.

All stats will be recorded using our mobile web app called Leaguevine-Ultistats. There is nothing to download. You can just open it in your smartphone browser by navigating to ultistats.leaguevine.com. You will need an account (it's free) to begin taking stats for your team, so please create one at leaguevine.com.

Practicing with dummy data

The interface for recording events should be straight forward, but we encourage you to give it a try before the game starts so you can get used to it. In order to facilitate this, we've cloned our site onto a "dummy" URL where it won't matter if you record false data. This dummy site is located at playwithlv.com and you can find the AUDL page at: http://www.playwithlv.com/seasons/20059/audl-2012/teams/

To create dummy data on playwithlv you can visit the app at http://ultistats.playwithlv.com and record statistics as if it were a real game. Anything created on this domain is subject to deletion at any point, so please do all your real stat recording at ultistats.leaguevine.com.

Current Limitations of the app

This Leaguevine-Ultistats app is still extremely young and is still missing some features. The most noticeable feature it is missing is that it does not have a working "Undo" button. For the first couple of games, you will not be able to undo events using your mobile phone if you entered things in wrong.

To compensate for this current shortcoming, we have built and are improving upon our web interface for editing the play-by-play. If you mess anything up, you are free to go to the "play-by-play" tab on leaguevine.com of any game and make the corrections you need.

Viewing the stats and widgets on Leaguevine

To see the real-time box scores on Leaguevine or see what widgets are available for you to embed, please visit the following pages we created for the AUDL:

• The AUDL's stat leaderboard page: https://www.leaguevine.com/seasons/20059/audl-2012/
• Links to all of the team pages: https://www.leaguevine.com/seasons/20059/audl-2012/teams/

Troubleshooting

We will be sitting at our computers for every minute of this first weekend of games, ready to troubleshoot any problems. Hopefully it all goes smoothly, but if there are any issues, please don't hesitate to contact me by email or even phone. My email is ma...@leaguevine.com and my cell number is 630-738-9280.

Good luck launching your season this weekend. We are really rooting for this League to succeed and believe you are off to an amazing start. Thanks for letting us be a part of it.

[Christian Schaffner]

Hi guys

I've been restructuring my code a bit and switched to a new repository:
https://github.com/cschaffner/windmill

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Best,
Chris