When and where did you come from?
SporTech Matter was formed in February 2006 with the idea that there was not enough die hard local coverage from fans besides the Miami Herald blogs and the Sun-Sentinel blogs. I chose to go after every local team as my love for South Florida Sports is not set to one team. While it’s hard to be a South Florida Sports fan, it’s nice to know I can go to Dolphin Stadium in December and not have to freeze my ass off. I don’t claim to be a journalist, nor do I claim to even know what I’m talking about half the time. I do however have an opinion and whether you agree with me or not I would love to know yours!
COMMENTING IS ALWAYS WELCOMED ON SPORTECH MATTER AND HIGHLY ENCOURAGED.
Sign up for a SporTech user acount by following this link. Say logged in to comment frequently and easily. Feel free to also grab a free Gravatar to personalize your comments. If you have any questions do not hesitate to ask.
Just what the hell is SporTech Matter?
SporTech Matter’s name was derived after spending a long time locked in my room without any interruptions. Sport = The Sports end of this blog covering the Florida Marlins, Florida Panthers, Miami Dolphins and Miami Heat. Tech = The random bits of tech news (since I’m a computer geek) that I find on the net that I think you would enjoy and benefit from. Brilliant huh?
What makes you so much better than any other local sports site?
One of the things that makes SporTech stand out from other Sports Blogs is the high end scripts and plugins that bring you the best, top of the line user experience. These features range from ajax scripts, photo galleries using lightbox and tons of audio and video to bring our local teams right into your house or office.
Just what runs this badass site?
Blog Platform: Wordpress 2.3.1
PHP: 4.3.2
SQL: 4.1.22
Gallery: Flickr
Media Center Credits: MLB, NBA, NHL, NFL, YouTube, UnCutVideo, DailyMotion, ESPN
Photo Credits: Yahoo, AP, Getty Images, Google
Fantasy Sports: Yahoo
These are the plugins and scripts being used on SporTech Matter to bring you the best user experience.
| Plugin | Author | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Akismet | Matt Mullenweg | Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin. |
| Audio player | Martin Laine | Highly configurable single track mp3 player. |
| Brian’s Image Tools | Brian Meidell | Gives you an extra toolbar under quicktags, with the option to add an image that is justified left, right or center with a caption. |
| Chunk Urls for WordPress | whoo | This plugin shorten urls in comments so that they won’t break your site. |
| Clutter-Free | Mark Jaquith | Allows authors to hide portions of the WordPress interface that you seldom use. |
| CoolPlayer | andot | this plugin allow you add any type of media into your blog. |
| Easy Gravatars | Dougal Campbell | Add Gravatars to your comments, without requiring any modifications to your theme files. Just activate, and you’re done! |
| Enhanced Simple Spoiler | ]V[orlock Zernebock | Add show/hide text enclosed within |
| Exec-PHP | Sören Weber | Executes <?php ?> code in your posts, pages and text widgets. |
| Favicon Manager | Digital Ramble | Adds your favicon to your headers and/or rss feeds. |
| Feed List | Bill Rawlinson | Displays any ATOM or RSS feed in your blog. |
| Feedburner Feed Replacement | Steve Smith | Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while letting through some important User-Agents. |
| FlickrPictoBrowser | Kumara Sastry | A filter for WordPress that displays flickr slideshows via pictobrowser (based on slideshare plugin by Koen Verhaeghe, http://blog.anabelamor.be) |
| Gravatar Signup | Mark Jaquith | Allows commenters to sign up for a gravatar by clicking a checkbox and filling in a desired password |
| IImage Browser | Martin Chlupáč | This plugin adds an “IImage Browser” button to the Quicktags area which opens an image browser to select from all previously uploaded images and add the appropriate code to the post. |
| LMB^Box Comment Quicktags | Thomas Montague | Inserts a quicktag toolbar in the blog comment form. |
| Lightbox 2 | Rupert Morris | Used to overlay images on the current page. Lightbox JS v2.2 by Lokesh Dhakar. |
| Maintenance Mode | Michael Woehrer | Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end. |
| MiniPosts2 | Morgan Doocy and e | An approach to “asides”, or small posts. Allows you to mark entries as “mini” posts and handle them differently than normal posts. |
| Post Updated | Kaf Oseo | Display notice/date/time of when a post was last updated. |
| Quote Comment | Viper007Bond | Creates a function that outputs a link that allows commenters to click it and quote the selected comment. |
| ShareThis Classic | ShareThis and Crowd Favorite (crowdfavorite.com) | Let your visitors share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites. Questions on configuration, etc.? Make sure to read the README. |
| Similar Posts | Rob Marsh, SJ | Displays a list of posts similar to the current one by comparing the way they use words. Instructions and help online. |
| Simple Trackback Validation | Michael Woehrer | Eliminates spam trackbacks by (1) checking if the IP address of the trackback sender is equal to the IP address of the webserver the trackback URL is referring to and (2) by retrieving the web page located at the URL used in the trackback and checking if the page contains a link to your blog. |
| Slickr Gallery | Rupert Morris | This plugin shows your Flickr photos on your Wordpress site and allows you to easily add your Flickr photos to your posts. It requires a Lightbox plugin to work properly. |
| Slickr Widget | Rupert Morris | Adds a sidebar widget that shows your recent Flickr photos. Requires a Lightbox plugin to work properly. |
| Subscribe To Comments | Mark Jaquith | Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. Based on version 1 from Scriptygoddess |
| Viper’s Plugins Used | Viper007Bond | Allows you to display alphabetically what plugins you have enabled on your blog in either a table or unordered list. Also allows you to set custom descriptions for the plugins in the output. |
| WP AJAX Edit Comments | Ronald Huereca | Allows you and your users to edit their comments inline. Admin and editors can edit all comments. |
| WP-ContactForm | Douglas Karr | WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you. It can be implemented on a page or a post. It currently works with WordPress 2.0+. The plugin was originally developed by Ryan Duff but has been modified by Doug Karr to require a challenge question and response to fight spam as well as some other features. |
| WP-Footnotes | Simon Elvery | Allows a user to easily add footnotes to a post. |
| WP-Polls | Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan | Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page. WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers. |
| WP-Polls Widget | Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan | Adds a Poll Widget to display single or multiple polls from WP-Polls Plugin. You will need to activate WP-Polls first. |
| WP-Print | Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan | Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page. |
| WP-ServerInfo | Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan | Display your host’s server PHP and MYSQL information (integrated into WordPress Admin Style) on your WordPress dashboard. |
| WordPress Mobile Edition | Alex King | Show a mobile view of the post/page if the visitor is on a known mobile device. |
| iMP Download | Hardi P | Download manager for wordpress user featuring download count, force download, quicktag, members only, widgets, etc. Integrated with search engine to find your downloads easily and pagination on download list. |
| iWPhone | ContentRobot | A plugin and theme for WordPress that automatically reformats your blog’s content for optimized viewing on Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch. |
| mobileadmin | Jared Bangs and Dan Cameron | Gives a mobile-friendly admin UI to browsers by user agent, using a plugin architecture. Includes support for iPhone/iPod-Touch. |
| pjw-wp-phpmailer-nosender | Peter Westwood | Unset the sender on PHPMailer |
| wordTube | Alex Rabe | This plugin creates your personal YouTube plugin for wordpress. |
| wp-Table | Alex Rabe | This plugin is a simple table manager. I didn’t find anything in the web which creates the same result, for my purpose. |
