You may have noticed a relative lack of updating to this site recently. Here’s a little story about most of the reason behind that.
I Like Fantasy Football
- I play fantasy football
- A lot
- 7 leagues last year
- Massive withdrawal in February
League Management – Commissionering
- I’ve used several different sites to manage fantasy leagues over the years, from paper and pen in the mid 90’s to a PC-based product that offered downloadable stats in the late 90’s to CBS Sportsline in the early 00’s and finally to my
- fantasyleague.com
the last few seasons.
- myfantasyleague.com is my favorite site to use because it offers the most usefulness to the geeky side of me (customizable layouts, etc
- Two years ago, I created a website specifically to house the history and stats of my league — PFFL. (interesting side note — that was the start of waymorefunner and also my first foray into coding anything on the web
- Last year, I taught myself PHP and built a very functional database-driven maintenance and reporting capability (example) for tracking league records, history and so on
MFL opens up XML feeds
- Back in February, myfantasyleague announced a new feature in the hopes that people would develop some addons/plugins to the extend their core product
- At the time, I really only viewed this as something that would save me time in updating my site at waymorefunner
- Then, this guy Sam went and created mfladdons.com
- His goal was to assemble a team to offer a set of addon features for myfantasyleague leagues that would (a) enhance the MFL product, (b) without competing with it, and (c) maybe make a little bit of money someday
- He asked me to join up with the effort, and maybe to work on a league history/records app similar to what I had built at my site
- I said yes
And THAT is precisely how I’ve been spending most of my free time.
I’m actually excited about it. I mean, I’ve never truly developed an application for “mass” distribution before, so the newness of the experience is totally fun. (of course, I worry a little about things like “dealing with support questions” and “maintaining an application that other people are depending on” — but then I remember that we can just call it a Beta release and tell people to not get into a tizzy — of course, that won’t stop everyone — so then I think about how I just need to be smart and make sure it works)
It’s also something I know I can totally do — and that at least some people (even if we’re talking like, only 30) are going to truly enjoy. And that will make me feel very warm and fuzzy inside.
So, anyway, that’s a story about my little side project.
I’ve even got some ideas about things I would build AFTER releasing this piece, but I’m not going to mention those because I don’t want to build the expectations of anyone out there who might happen across this post. Plus, I am going to need some time to actually prepare for my own fantasy drafts, right?