As you may well have noticed, apart from the discussion board, the Rugbyheads site as a whole has been suffering from some neglect in the last couple of years.
This is mainly due to the fact that family and work have had to take priority for me in the last few years, and similarly for the other RH founders (DH, Wobbly, SG), but there was also a healthy helping of apathy involved too!
Well for me the family and work pressures are still there (earlier this year I became a fulltime house dad for my two sons, and cut back my work life from fulltime to that of a late night contractor) but the apathy seems to have got the boot because I actually got inspired to revamp the site.
I started working on this in January with the aim of getting it out by early in the Super 14 season. Yeah right. Well as they say, good things take time so hopefully this revamp is better late than never!
Anyway, here is what has changed.
1) The style of the site has had a spruce up and been brought into the 21st century in terms of HTML compliance (which probably doesn't mean much to most of you!).
2) The focus of the old site was, a bunch of rugby fans can write some crap about rugby and people who have nothing better to do with their time can read it. Oh and we have a discussion board, woo hoo.
Over time the discussion board has taken on a real live of it's own, largely thanks to the contributions of guys like Stipe and EW, while activity on the rest of the site has died off (although at least Geeves tried to keep it alive this season!).
In recognizing this I decided to try and re-build the site to allow the community of regulars that use the discussion board to contribute to the entire site.
In web terms this is very web 2.0, providing tools for the users of a web site to build something cool together. Given my day job is a company called Eurekster.com, which builds tools to let users build their own search engines (like the one on the front page of the rugbyheads site) I have learnt a thing or two about this sort of stuff in the past few years so I thought it would be cool to apply some of the ideas to Rugbyheads.
It's all about providing tools that let us all share and contribute info about this game we love. I know we can do that via the discussion board but there is a lot of info that needs to be more structure than a thread of discussion.
Info like: Game Schedules and Results, and Team profiles and team history.
At the core of the new site is a database of rugby matches, and a database of rugby teams. Both of which are based on the Rugbycomp Database (cheers DB, you rock!) but I have extended them somewhat to make them more general purpose.
The basic idea is that all users can help to maintain these databases. So if you see that a game is missing from the schedule, you can easily add it, if you know some more details about a teams history, you can edit it.
Obviously we need some controls on who can edit things, and the plan will be to initially just give a few people edit access, but eventually I can see us using the discussion board status as a way to decide who can edit what.
The system keeps a log of any changes that are made so that we can roll back a change if it's not seen as useful.
This concept is common in wikis, the best example of which is
www.wikipedia.com. (which I expect many of you have heard of)
3) Rugby news section
This is the single most interesting new feature. On the front page of the new site there is a box titled "What people are saying around the web".
This lists links to articles and discussion board threads that I have tagged as being related to particular games in the Games database.
The process of tagging these articles is as simple as adding a little link to your web browser and then when you are reading a rugby related article on another site (eg: xtra) you just hit the "Share with Rugbyheads" link and it will pop up a little window that lets you tag what team and/or game the article is related to and what type of article it is. eg: a match report, or a discussion board thread, or an image gallery, or game stats, etc.
The idea is that as we all come across interesting rugby news around the web we can easily share it, and at the same time tag it as being related to a particular rugby team or game.
If enough of us contribute (or the ones that do are prolific enough) then we will all be able to just use the rugbyheads site to keep up with the latest rugby news.
At present the share link isn't publically available but I hope to get that ironed out in the next week or so and get a few of you giving it a test drive.
We will probably add a "thumbs up"/"thumbs down" type of rating system to this too so you can rate an article as crap or good. (kind of like sites like Digg.com do for tech news).
I will also make available an RSS feed of this aggregation of rugby news pretty soon too. If you don't know what RSS is then this won't mean much to you, yet, but if you do then you will know that this should rock!
4) the Teams section.
Currently this just lets you view the matches in the database for a given team (that also must exist in the DB) but eventually I hope the team page might include a blurb about the teams history, links to the teams official site, and history of their performance in particular competitions.
In addition it will include all the news items that have been shared that relate to that team.
5) the Games section
This is essentially a game schedule. It currently has all the games that Pdeb has in the Rugbycomp system but the plan is to open it up to allow keen members to add other games to the schedule that are currently in there. This might include historical games or RWC qualifiers etc that most people ignore.
The key thing this section does is links to the details page for a particular game. eg:
The recent SA vs NZ game in wellingtonOn the game detail page you can see the key details (scores, location, date etc) and then below that any news items in the system that have been associated with this game.
I think you will agree this is pretty cool. Imagine next Monday being able to go to one page and see all the details about the 2nd Bledisloe game plus links to a lot of articles about the game from all over the web.
Shit, it's 12:20am. That's enough on this for now!
I'll add some more to this thread in the morning.
I'm keen to hear what you guys all think and also about any glitches you might find in the new site, there are bound to be stacks.
Let's try and keep all this discussion in this thread for now and as we expand on the ideas and new features we can spin those off into new threads.
Welcome to the new Rugbyheads, similar to the old RH but hopefully a lot less crap!
Cheers, Jules
