Changes

We made a few small changes:

• You no longer have to be logged in to add a sports site. Frankly, we'd rather lower the barriers to entering data and deal with a little spam.
• There is now a help window that pops up the first time you visit the site (or after you clear your cookies). There is also a link that brings it up on demand.

The idea is just to make things more obvious to new users. We had some feedback that people didn't really know what to do when they got to the site.

Finally

We finally rolled out the last couple of features for the "alpha" release: filters and protected site creation.

The filter is a simple map control that allows you to, well, apply a filter to the map. Currently, you can filter by features and distance from a location. We're open to additional criteria, but these seemed like the most useful to start.

Although we originally wanted the barrier to enter new sites to be as low as possible, we got a few spammy additions, so you now have to be logged in to enter a new site. Searching for information is still anonymous. We may eventually allow new sites to be entered anonymously again and queue them up for review, but for now we're going with the login.

Oh yeah, we also changed the icon for the "active" site (that is, the last site you clicked on). Frankly, it's still ugly, but we wanted it to be more distinct. Icon design isn't as easy as it looks, but we'll keep trying.

Please let us know what you think via blog comments or the feedback link on sportsity.com.

Latest and Greatest

We rolled out some improvements to the location-based filtering that should improve both reliability of results and performance. When you zoom or move on the map, Sportsity recalculates which places fit in the current map view. We tried a few approaches, most of which, frankly, sucked, and finally settled on a decent bounding-box algorithm. We're also using a cool library called ClusterMarker that helps to manage the display of markers when they overlap.

The next feature we're looking to release is advanced filtering so that you can view only those places that are relevant to your interests. This will mark the beginnings of personalization, allowing your profile to drive a better user experience. There are some challenges with filtering due to the limitations of Google App Engine, so we're spending some time trying to make sure we can offer a good feature-set without sacrificing performance.

So it begins...

Welcome to the Sportsity.com blog. We will be soft-launching Sportsity in the next few days with a basic feature set. We'd like to get the site out there and get as much feedback as possible as we plan the product roadmap.

We'll put some posts up soon about the thinking behind the product and some of the technology decisions that we've made along the way.

Please feel free to leave comments here or use the feedback link on the main web site. Thanks for stopping by.