Feel free to look around and email any questions you have to me... but as
a private league, we are closed to all but just the small
circle of friends that have been franchise owners for the last
several years. While the number of owners varies from year to year, there are two of us that
have been involved from the beginning and five that have been around all but two years.
This league started out in 1983 as many have, a few friends wanting to show off their inherent mastery and understanding of the possibilities of NFL players and their teams to score. A friendly league of owners was formed to demonstrate these skills and provide bragging rights, on a weekly basis, during the NFL season.
As for the WEB page, well this all started out as a bunch of files created by hand in 1983 when we started, printed out and mailed to the team owners. During this time the standings were created from the newspaper sports section box scores and a Lotus 123 spreadsheet.
In 1992 a few places were providing online stats for the games each week. Rather that continue the manual stats processing, I wrote an "offline" program using a scripting language (Rexx) to use the online stats provided by QuickStats©. This resolved most off the keystroke type errors created from my doing the stats by hand. I also automated the output so it could be easily printed or emailed to the league owners.
In 1997, with the growing reach of the web and a desire to distribute the commissioner duties over more than one person, we got Jeff to be the "Roster Manager" and deal with line up changes each week while I continued the rest of the commissioner duties. Jeff created a web page to make sure I had the changes anytime I needed them. So, inspired by Jeff's lineup page, I created the first version of this web site. The first pages were generated from the Rexx script used to integrate the stats and the pages were hand copied to the web site.
Between 1997 and 2003, various enhancements and additions were made to the web site's pages and more information and historical data was made available online. However, the same process of offline scripting and then coping pages to the web server was utilized- very cumbersome and manual labor intensive.
In 2003 it was time to modernize and automate the stat processes and site page generation. It was a large undertaking that was conceived of and planned during a June meeting of the First Aura Board of Directors. My friend Jim agreed to help. I selected PHP as the target scripting language and started the rewrite. As the base site came together I assigned the three or four most difficult page conversions to Jim while I grinded out the rest of the more mundane pages. Jim was more familiar with Perl so some of the tools are written in Perl. We added a draft system and automated all the weekly tasks using the files and information from the www.QuickStats.com site. The functional (and free) mySQL database was used to store all the information needed during the season. We created a viable system, including a web based online draft, by the end of August. The draft went smoothly and during the next few years I began adding more and more function.
In 2005 I added SSL to the web site to protect user passwords and ensure each owner's FFL information is kept secure. This was becoming more important as the FFL pages and functions continued to grow.
In 2005-2007 functions were added to make as much information available on the site as possible and to aid in the draft. The additional draft pages were designed to make it both simple and quick during the actual draft each year. As it turns out, these changes laid the foundation for automating the draft. One reason for automating the draft is that many of the owners travel for their work and in some cases they are not available near an internet connection on their travels. With a good automated system, they could set it up and let it draft for them.
In 2008 the Draft Automation was completed and was used by one of the owners during the 2008 draft. After that initial experience in 2008, additional improvements were planned and implemented for 2009's draft automation. I also made available our historical stats (based on our league point allocations) for the previous three years allowing owners to plot player stats and improve their drafting acumen. At the same time, I added a CSV file creation and download for the stats since much of the statistical processing by owners is done using spreadsheets.
In December of 2008 I reworked the layout to modernize it, slim it down some and add CSS for better (IMHO) display of the tables. The table changes provide "freeze frames" (ala Excel) for the table headers. While testing with Opera and Firefox was completed, due to the nature of the table heading locking and affects they create, Firefox and Opera only tolerate these improvements while IE7 embraces them. The side effect is that this site is best viewed using IE7. The only way to make the table locking seamless across browsers (make them all work like IE7) is to use a rather large Java Script that re-renders the table on the user side (in the browser). And there is no use in flaming me about MS vs. The World-- IE7 is the most used browser so I optimized to it. Also, since the world has moved on from 80 character displays, you will find that an absolute minimum screen resolution of 1024x768 is required as well.
So, since this is more fun (for me) than it should be, there will constantly be improvements to be made. I will continue to chronicle them in this log for my own amusement.
I am always looking for
suggestions so please click on "
While browsing the site, keep in mind that the majority of the functions are not available
until you have successfully logged in to the web site.
A little history: