Site Note: Roster Page Fully Functional

Just a quick site note for the start of the day. I setup a roster page for the Florida Marlins active roster. You can access it from the main menu on the top of the page. It contains full biographies and related posts for that particular player. I have also setup an autolinker for posts that contain the names of the players on the roster. The site will autolink directly to the player profile when the name is used in a post.

If you find any errors or have any suggestions for the page, please let me know and I will do my best to fix and implement anything needed.

Enjoy!

Join SporTech on Facebook

You can join the SporTech Facebook page here. Do it. It’s what all the cool kids are doing these days.

Follow SporTech on Twitter

Just a small reminder, you can follow SporTech on twitter and get all updates during games and blog development.

Blog Update: WPtouch Installed/Configured

I’ve had iWPhone installed and running for a while now to provide an ideal interface for viewers of my blog from an Apple iPod Touch or an Apple iPhone. It has always worked well but had a very vanilla like interface. I did some exploring and stumbled across a new hot script called WPtouch which provides a really nice, slick interface for SporTech which allows the site to load alot more smoother than the original theme. The plugin author explains his plugin as follows…

Yes, that’s true for the most part (minus flash support). However, first of all not all blogs are created equal, and some sites don’t translate well in the viewport of the phone. Secondly, many WordPress sites today make heavy use of different javascripts which significantly increase the load time of pages, and drives users on EDGE and even 3G batty. So we’ve come up with WPtouch, a slim, feature-rich, highly-customized ‘theme application’ of which includes an admin interface to let you customize page icons and your logo.

Check out some of the screenshots below of the script in action and grab your copy for your own blog now.

CBS4 Sponsored Ads

Quick blog note. I have partnered up with CBS4 South Florida for an advertising campaign. You will notice on the right sidebar a new advertisement for local South Florida CBS4 Sports Videos. You will now be able to view the CBS4 sports video archive as they appear on the CBS site by clicking the title of the video on the banner.

Some great new videos are available including the amazing 93 old who sunk his 9th hole in one and Mario Chalmers teaching kids to swim.

Enjoy.

We Are Back…Once Again

So I decided to take a major hiatus from the blog and spend some time focusing on my personal life and other things that take up alot of time. Amazingly I just started working on the relaunch of the blog a few days ago and it turned into a complete revamping which I hope you enjoy.

The new layout of the blog allows me to not only contribute to the blog but also have enough time away from the computer for other things such as work and my personal life. I can throw up a major headline which on the blog we are going to call the Top Story. Each team has its own section below the Top Story and the fancy carousel which will rotate stories from the various Sports categories.

I hope you enjoy the new layout and didn’t forget about us! Posting will be more frequent but not as frequent as it was in the past.

If you were still lurking around leave a comment and say hi. If you would like to contribute to SporTech Matter you can also drop a line.

Hope everyones been good.

Photo: Toothpaste for Dinner

Blog Updates — iWPhone Configured

Come on now! You didn’t think after getting my new iPhone I wasn’t going to make some new features available to SporTech Matter via the iPhone now did you? The slick guys over on Content Robot worked on a Wordpress Theme that detects the user agent your browser is using (Safari) and formats the site for iPhone users. Why use this when the Safari browser resizes SporTech Matter anyways?

While the iPhone and iPod touch do an amazing job of displaying web pages the way they were designed to be seen, often visitors want quick access to your website’s content. The “iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme” displays an optimized version of your blog’s content, formatted perfectly to fit the iPhone/iPod touch’s screen - no zooming in to read the content is necessary.

Try it out on your iPhone today or use the online tool iPhoney. Loads nicely on both EDGE and Wi-Fi. Enjoy!

Blog Update — Easy Gravatars

At the suggestion of Ian over on Sox and Dawgs I implemented the new Easy Gravatars plugin for Wordpress. If you remember back in the day I used to have Gravatars enabled on this site but once the Gravatar site started crapping out it started slowing down the comment section of this site. Dougal Campbell redid the gravatar plugin and released it to the Wordpress Plugin Directory yesterday. Since Gravatar was acquired by Automattic the servers will be serving gravatars three times as fast. Just what is a Gravatar?

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

If you do not have a gravatar hop over to the Gravatar Site and sign up for one right away. It’s very easy. You can also sign up for a free gravatar under the comment box in each post. Just enter a password and leave a valid email address with your comment and you will be mailed access to your gravatar account.

Feel free to test your gravatar in the comments of this post.

Enjoy.

Blog Updates — New About Page

I figured this was a long time coming. I put together an About page to explain where this site came from and a little bit about it’s specs. If your interested stop by the About page and read up on the history of SporTech Matter.

The plugin used to create the list of plugins used on this site is by Viper007Bond. You can grab it on his project page.

You can visit the About page whenever you like in the sidebar halfway down the page.

Blog Updates — Aside Matter

You might have noticed a new widget up on the sidebar. If you didn’t move your eyes over to the left and take a look at aSide Matter. Aside Matter is a new feature that allows me to post headlines, without having to put a post on the main page. Allow me to explain. Throughout the day I browse various blogs, newspaper sites and media outlets that have headlines or articles that I find interesting. To dedicate a post to something like “Zach Thomas sits out practice” is a waste of time for me and takes up valuable homepage space where other content can go. However I would still like to relay this information to you, my readers. So why Asides? Wordpress does a good job of explaining Asides…

When you lean towards someone and tell them a little bit of information, you are making an “aside” comment. In blogs, you can do that on your blog by passing on small bits of information to your readers called Asides.

That is essentially what I am doing. I am using PiePalace’s asides plugin called Miniposts to accomplish this. What’s cool about the plugin is it allows me to post these MiniPosts which still act like posts, they are just contained outside the Wordpress Loop. So you can still click on the title of the aside and view the post like you normally would, only they are hidden from the homepage. These Miniposts will still appear in your RSS Reader. You can also feel free (and again it’s highly encouraged) to leave comments on the Miniposts. You will notice after each Minipost a number in brackets. This shows the comment count for each Minipost. Click on the number and feel free to leave a comment.

If you would like to submit your own Minipost of something you find interesting, drop the link to the article in my contact form with the subject Minipost Submission and I will add it to the Aside Matter widget.

I think this will be a great new feature, let me know what you think.