I’ve just rolled out the newest addition to nextgame, located under the “Today” menu item (for the moment anyway – might yet change my mind) you’ll find the “Near Me” page (nearme me page is currently under redevelopment – Jan 21st 2011). What’s it do I hear you ask, well it does two things.
- It shows all the currently select day’s games on a map, so you can see what’s on and where. Click on the map markers to show what game corresponds to what marker. League logos are used on the markers to give you a quick indication of whats on. When you click on a marker you’ll see something like this.
- Secondly, if you’re using a compatible browser such as the latest versions of Firefox, Safari or Chrome then the map will also show you’re current location (if you allow it to) so you can quickly see what’s on around you – it doesn’t work so well down here in Australia, but for those of you in Europe or North America the map should light up like a Christmas tree.
As part of this update I’ve gone through and add geo-location (latitude/longitude) data to almost all of the 570+ venues in nextgame – it took a while, but it was worth it.
Updated Teams Index
I only revised this a month ago, but like I said back then it was just a step towards the “better” update. The teams index is now ajaxified – in simple terms you don’t have to wait for the full list of 670+ teams to load, just select the league you’re interested form the menu on the left hand side and you’ll quickly see the related teams. Easy.
Update Leagues Index
Due to the growing number of leagues I’ve got covered on nextgame the league index was getting a bit lengthy, so I’ve revamped the layout. Hopefully its a little clearer (probably still needs a bit more work) with the “current” seasons shown in bold.
Extra optimisation (the boring bits)
I’ve also made a few changes behind the scenes which should help to speed things up a little. Images and other resources are now served from several different sub-domains which allows most browser to load more files at once – more files at once, means quicker loading. Yay. And I’ve moved all the javascripts to the bottom of the page so that they don’t delay the loading. Double yay.
There were probably other bits and pieces that I tinkered with too, but they’re the main ones. Now, back to preparing all those Aussie sports schedules I said I was working on last month.