Rangerfans.com

Sunday morning brought the spring training preview in the Dallas Morning News’ sports section. After reading that over a nice omlette at breakfast, I then took to working on my site.
In the paper was the spring training roster. I went through the Uniform Number History section of my site and brought each number up to speed with the spring training assignments for 2006. The Rangers site also listed the non roster invites (which the DMN did not), so I’ve got everyone, except for the odd extra coaches who I usually have to find out right when spring training starts, as they’re generally not listed anywhere ahead of time. Also, some of the season staff (Bobby Jones for one) don’t have assigned uniform numbers on the Rangers site yet, and things like the bullpen catcher aren’t listed, either.
I also went through and did my 2006 Schedule pages. I normally would have them done by now, as the 2006 schedule has been known for awhile. However, I’ve been trying to think of a new way to do the schedules for 2006 that more involves my blogging software here, but I’ve been unable to come up with a really good automatic way, so I’ll probably just end up doing it the same way unless I can think of something (that works) between now and when games actually start in March.
Speaking of the schedule pages, I also have decided that I’m not going to go backwards (meaning from the 1999 through 2005 season archives I have here) and update the pages with the new menu look. There’s an absolutely incredible number of pages there – roughly 200 per season over the 7 seasons in the archives). I’m not planning on spending THAT much time on the site. Manually updating roughly 1,400 pages is a lot of work considering they rarely get looked at (even by me).
Also, don’t forget about my Yahoo fantasy league if you’re a regular site visitor. There’s details about it here. Thanks for visiting!

When I was constructing the pages for the new site layout, I hit upon my downloads page. It’s rather out of date, and hasn’t been seriously updated in years. However…
I did realize that I had several TV commercials there from 1998 & 1999 as mpg files. THrough the magic of Google, their new Google Video service allows you to send them video files, and they’ll host them for you. They also allow you to stream them to your own site and you don’t have to cover any of the bandwith.
That’s what the Ben Grieve commercial I posted the other day was. This story contains streaming versions of all of these TV ads that I sent to Google. The Google Video player requires you to have the flash plugin active (which just about every modern browser does now). You could in theory play them all simulteanously, but I wouldn’t advise that. :)
I really wish I had the old Molly ads on tape, but I don’t – the Rusty Greer “I am Pillow Man” one was great, as was the one where Molly was playing videogames on the Jumbotron with someone (McLemore maybe?).
If you liked any of these, please use the comments field and leave a comment on them. Thanks.

[Read more…]

If you were reading my news updates via an RSS feed, you will need to regrab the rss file location. The reason is that the location of the rss file(s) has changed. The old ones are gone. Here are the locations for the new ones:
Atom: https://www.rangerfans.com/atom.xml
RSS 1.0: https://www.rangerfans.com/index.rdf
RSS 2.0: https://www.rangerfans.com/index.xml

Well, as you’ve seen, I’ve implemented a new site look. I’ve taken away the frames look that has been here forever, and replaced it with a frameless version. I did this for a couple of reasons. As I have moved so much of the site into MovableType blogging software, the need for a framed menu became less important. The old menu on the left side is now on the right side. It will be there on every page (once everything is properly coded, which it isn’t yet). Furthermore, some sections of the site haven’t been updated yet, and navigation might look odd. These include the seat selector, and old schedule archives. As the old schedule archive comprise roughly 1,400 pages (that’s 7 seasons at roughly 200 updates per season), I might just leave them alone and go forward – need to think about that, as updating all those pages will be a boatload of work, and the old schedule archives aren’t looked at very much at all anyway.
Another reason for this is that I’ve been having some serious problems getting Google to crawl my site since I went to rangerfans.com from rangers.siegler.net, and according to docs at Google, this should help.
Finally, now that I’ve removed the black menu on the left, I find tha an all white background is somewhat harsh on my eyes. It’s like the black that was there before was a nice contrast, keeping all the white in check. I’ll probably need to play further and pick a new background colour instead of all white.
Do you have any thoughts on this? Anyone even reading this site anymore? :)

Yes, I’m still here. I have been paying attention to the transactions and news since my last update. I’ve just been taking a break until Spring Training actually starts.
I’ll start up with regular updates again at that point.
You might also see some odd posts in the next few days, as I’m trying to work out the formatting for the 2006 season, as I want to move my game updates into the software that I’m doing the rest of the site in.