This year I developed the Hoops Bracket Challenge game for SIKids.com. Much of the game reused elements of the bracket game I produced last year for SI.com, but there were improvements made along the way. I was especially happy with the interface for filling out your bracket which used a css / javascript “sliding window” technique. The game was converted from Oracle to MySQL which was not much of an issue using Ruby on Rails database migrations.

Now if I could only pick games. I didn’t do so well selecting my picks for this year’s tournament.

43. @bikeride: Brent Soderberg from BikeRide.com provides live race updates and news about bicycling events and cycling in general.

I don’t know how much I contribute to the world of pro cycling, but I was also responsible for setting up the @espn_cycling feed (#36) when I worked at ESPN, and I also originally registered the @velonews account (#34) and had it updating with their RSS feed until recently when VeloNews took over managing the account. So, I guess I can take some credit for getting the world of cycling using the service.

I am not Lance Lance Armstrong, but I have taken his photo.

It is really pretty amazing to see how the world of pro cycling, and the bike industry has adopted the use of Twitter in the past few months. I’ve had a Twitter account for nearly 2 years now, and there have been some others within the cycling world who have been using Twitter for a long time, but after the biggest name in the sport, Lance Armstrong, became a power user of the micro blogging service (he now has over 200,000 followers), it really took off in the pro cycling world.

In response to the Mashable post, Joel Price, who works in new media for the San Diego Chargers tweeted “Twitter is saving professional Cycling … other sports should take notice”. And then after Scott Zagarino replied the “You’d think other sports would get the hint?”, Joel replied ” some will, mainstream sports will treat it more like a broadcast medium and miss the point. At least at first.”

This has been my experience working within the mainstream sports media. When a new medium comes along the first response is to try to figure out how to spam the service with content instead of understanding what social media is. Social Media’s power is in joining the conversation, not interupting the conversation.

Why has pro cycling done such a great job of adopting Twitter? I think one reason is that compared to “stadium” sports, pro cycling is a “mobile” sport that takes place out on the open roads, and a service like Twitter that can easily be updated from mobile devices seems like a perfect fit for telling part of the story.

This was evident in the recent Amgen Tour of California stage race. The first few days of the race when weather caused issues for live TV coverage, Twitter users were being kept more up to date on what was happening in the race than the television announcers on Versus. Team managers, mechanics, and staff were tweeting race updates from the team cars, and fans were taking and posting Twitpics from the side of the road.

Can other sports benefit from Twitter? Absolutely. The NBA’s Shaquille O’Neal has more followers than Lance Armstrong (it is close), and you can follow ESPN, or many teams like the San Diego Chargers (thanks to Joel). The biggest power of twitter, and other social media tools, is the ability to connect directly to the people who are interested in what you are doing (including fans, and potential customers), and have a conversation with them.

I still think there is something unique to the sport of pro cycling with competitions that last multiple days, in places all over the world, where you can’t get the whole story from television, and that makes a medium like Twitter more suited to it. Also, major American sports are used to being covered by all the mainstream media, while cycling being more of a niche sport is more open to alternative forms of media to promote itself.

Also See
Carton Reid maintains a list of Bike Trade Tweeters
CyclingUSA Blog: My new blog on American Pro Cycling

ActsAsFlinn and Myself talking to the guys from ThoughtBot

Some of the best things I took away from the conference were to focus on testing, and push to improve the process of the product cycle where I work. I also got a lot out of watching the guys from ThoughtBot talk about refactoring code. They had a lot of good tips.

Nick Quaranto (pictured on the left in the photo above) did a great job live blogging the conference and took notes with all the sessions.

Matt Bauer did a talk about Berkeley DB and used a cycling related application he is working on called Pedal Brain for some of the examples. I talked to him briefly about it, and I am excited to see what comes of it. Hopefully I can help beta test!

More photos on flickr

Peoples State Forest, Connecticut

Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts

Green River Covered Bridge in Vermont

Green River Vermont

Nepaug Resevoir, Burlington, Connecticut

Franklin Land Trust in Massachusetts

More fall photos

The interface is laid out using absolute positioning, and uses javascript to set hidden form fields when a user clicks on the option they pick to win, an then updates the css class to set the background image on the element to indicate which option is selected. With this application I built some admin pages where the producer of the Dan Patrick show can enter the matchups and set the winners. The designer at SI cuts logos or images to go with each matchup, so there are input fields for the image URLs as well.

This is a pretty simple game that could be reskinned to let users pick any type of matchups. Our Sports Technologies web site has been updated recently.

I used a sliding window effect where a div with smaller dimensions set to overflow hidden wrap a div with a greater height and width. After the user saves a region via Ajax, I used the scriptaculous Effect.Move function to animate the screen moving to the next region.

Some of the challenges I was faced in this application included clearing out downstream picks if you changed a team in a earlier round that you had advancing farther down the bracket, and displaying pick percentages for each team at each round as you are making picks.

To solve the first issue I set a javacript array that included all the match ids and match position (top or bottom) that were downstream of every match, and when a user clicks a team to select the pick I checked if the opponent in that match was already selected in a position down the bracket and cleared it out.

To dynamically display the pick percentages as you move a team, I printed out a javascript array (actually a JSON object) that listed every team id, and an hash of each percentage ar each round when the page is loaded. Then when the user clickes on a team to advance it, I cloned the innerHTML of the div they were selecting and replaced the innerHTML of the percentage div with the percentage of that team for the next round.

After all the work I put into this, it’s too bad that the interface is only viewable for four days to the users until the game locks before the tournament begins. Hopefully we will make use of the code for next year’s bracket or some other fantasy games we build in the future.

2007 was a year of change for me. Two of the biggest events that happened in my life were changing jobs in July and then turning 40 years old in October.

I had worked at ESPN for over 7 years, and in late 2006 began working in the Community group which I really liked. If you visit ESPN.com now, you can see some of the things I had a hand in creating. I was responsible for the development of the Conversation Pages that were launched early in 2007, and are now linked up off of just about every page of he site. I also had a hand in the development of the Fan Profiles that are now part of ESPN.com. Whenever you update your ESPN Fan Profile settings, you can think of me.

Mid-year it was decided that the Community Group would be moved to Los Angeles. That wasn’t something I was interested in doing, so the other option was go back to doing the same type of work that I had been doing at ESPN for 7 years, or move my family back to Seattle and work on site registration. I wasn’t ready to move back yet. I’ve grown to like where I live in Connecticut. I have a great cycling club to ride with, good friends, and a nice community to raise a family in.

It turned out that Sports Technologies, the creators of FanNation.com had a job opening, and their office in Collinsville is only 1.5 miles from my house. I had been learning Ruby on Rails, so this was really a perfect fit for me. I made the decision to leave ESPN and start at Sports Technologies at the end of July. The first project I did for FanNation was the redesign of the Fantasy Sports section, and recently I developed the Bowl Pick’em game.

With a busy spring at work, then the job change mid summer, one thing that suffered this year was the number of miles I put on my bike. I did end up getting a tandem bike in the spring at the Benidorm Bikes sale, and was able to do a few memorable tandem rides with my girls. I didn’t do many organized rides or races in 2007.

I did just one of the races in the Pleasant Valley Time Trial Series and put in a slow time. I did a great 75 mile club ride on Memorial day weekend, but I really struggled on the hills. I did another long ride into the Northwest corner of Connecticut and over Mt. Washington into Massachusetts, hitting a lot of dirt roads on my cyclocross bike. One goal I had was to do the D2R2 at the end of August, and I completed the ride, but again I struggled on the hills in the high heat and humidity. In the fall I helped out again at my clubs annual bike race at Winding Trails.

We had some memorable family times in 2007. Melinda’s parents came out to visit in February and we went to visit West Point and the FDR Mansion and Presidential Library. We did overnight trips to Maine, Boston and New York. For our vacation in July we went to DisneyWorld and used our Disney discount for the last time.

In the fall Skylar and Annika took tennis lessons, so I enjoyed taking them to practice once a week. In October my mom, my sister Shauna and her family came out to visit for my 40th birthday. We went to visit Plymouth, Massachusetts, and also spent a beautiful fall day picking apples and pumpkins here in Connecticut.

For my 40th birthday Melinda threw me a surprise party! My neighbors, and friends came dressed in 80s themed outfits. It was a lot of fun.

I guess turning 40 was the motivation to get a head start on my goals for 2008. One of those goals is to focus on my health, lose weight and have a good cycling season this coming year. At the beginning of October I tipped the scales at 230 lbs! I spent most of my 30s battling my weight, so I am determined to make some long term changes. I began changing my diet to focus on eating healthy foods, and making time to ride my bike and exersize.

As of today, I am down to 206 lbs., which is about the lightest I have been in over 10 years. I still have a ways to go. My goal is to get down to under 180 lbs., which is what I used to weight in the early 1990s when I was a Cat 1 road racer. I am half way to that goal, so I am well on my way.

I signed up for the Battenkill-Roubaix Road Race on April 19th, so I’d like to get to my goal weight by then, but I also want to do some other races in the coming year.

I started rebuilding my web site bikeride.com in Ruby on Rails, and my goal is the re-launch the site in Rails in 2008. I’m not going to sacrifice time riding my bike, but I am making progress on the site, and should have something ready to launch in a few months time.

Another goal I have this year is to get my home office organized. I’ve started by relocating my desk last month, and I’ve started going through old filing cabinets and decluttering. I’ve shredded about 6 garbage bags of old files so far. I got a label maker for Christmas, and I am going crazy with it.

Another goal is to spend more quality time with my family doing activities together. We plan to go ice skating soon.

I feel like I’ve got a head start on 2008, and I think it is going to be a great year. I’ve got a job I love, I am getting in shape, and I am getting organized.