If you want to know the value of a fantasy sports league management system, look no further than this blog post about the value of email systems to big search/web firms:

Why email is crucial to Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!

An observation of the Rackspace/Openstack project and what's important for an open source project to succeed. I have no doubt that the tech folks understand the message and the business/marking folks will be offended by it.

Key messages: Community, Technology, & Foundation matter. A lot.

http://dendrobates.rustedhalo.com/2011/03/22/rackspace-openstac/

Don and I attended DrupalCon Chicago this past week and I learned a couple of things that we can use going forward, even if Rails is still our base:

The community trumps all -- smart developers make products better and you can only attract them to a project if the community is strong.

The Minimum Viable Product is a Lean Startup concept that aims to launch a product as soon as possible with the least features necessary to solve a user's problem. The idea is that the sooner a launch begins, the faster feedback from users can circle back to the development team.

Modules

• auction
• add_drop
• content
• draft
• history
• polls
• research
• rules
• scoring
• sit_start
• waivers

Themes

• mobile
• print
• screen

While Core will be the early focus, these modules and themes will be the next framework of features needed to make the system more complete.

Core

• api
• groups
• members
• messaging
• rosters
• stats
• themes
• transactions
• users

We're aiming to abstract many of the core items from the typical League > Team > Player concept. This system might be used for more than sports.Thus, Groups (Leagues), Rosters (Teams), and Members (Players) are used for naming purposes, but they'll serve the same purposes. Users will never see the naming conventions used behind the scenes (in theory).

ESPN.com Boss John Kosner On Yahoo: "I'm More Concerned With The Guy In The Garage"

"[Yahoo! is] worthy competition, but there's no other ESPN. And if you take a look at any sort of fan surveys about other top sports sites, if you look at the surveys that other sports websites do, ESPN is clearly number one. And one of the reasons I believe is that all the different media that ESPN brings including TV, radio, print, the quality of that brand, and sports is just one thing that Yahoo focuses on.

Whew! It's been a while. Two years, in fact. Score is re-calibrating and trying to get back in the game. Don and I are looking to learn Ruby on Rails and we learn best by building things. So, think of fantasy sports systems as our version of standard noob "hello world!" tutorials.

Don and I are Drupal developers and we love the community that built up around the Drupal framework/CMS, so we're going to start by setting up a foundation-- known as "Core" in Drupaland--and then allow for "modules" to add features to the system.

Today, we're going to take a step back at look at the big picture, once again. The reason being that SCORE OS has started talking to another group of "open" folks about uniting forces on the data side and those discussions raised some questions pertaining to the "core technology" that SCORE OS may be built upon. Don and I have been pretty open-minded about the paths we're taking and listening to some new ideas won't hurt a thing.

When Don and I sat down and started the discussion about what code to use, what database to utilize, what code style and models to choose, we focused on two key issues: 1) a lack of resources (time, people, expertise, money) and 2) a desire not to reinvent any wheels. As part of our decision-making, we laid out the various functionalities that we thought any solid Website Management System (WMS) should employ and the features that any solid Fantasy Game System (FGS) should have.

So I had an overwhelming number of people tell me that my color choices were "genius" and "the only colors people should use," and I'm not about to argue with responses like that, right? Unfortunately, I can't find those comments to show you, but just trust me, people loved my work.



The next step, then, is to create an icon for the logo. I have a few rules that I like for logos, which fly right into the face of most logo designs you see nowadays. I prefer logos that retain their quality when enlarged, shrunk, or placed on all types of media (business cards, stationary, clothing, etc). Complicated logos, which are usually pretty cool looking, suffer in form when the functional needs multiply. We want to keep that balance, here.

1. The icon should be strong enough to stand alone without the font/text
2. The icon should be simple enough to stand alone without colors
3. The icon should be scalable enough to the size of a favicon (that little logo that goes with most website tabs and bookmarks)
4. The icon should be easy enough for someone else to create in a graphics program (as in, an open source icon)
5. The icon should be simple enough to be on a baseball cap
6. The icon should be simple enough to be on a football helmet

With those points in mind, I opened up my Photoshop app and started to hack on the following icon, which I am now calling the "StarDrop."