We’ve been working on some exciting features at oCricket. The score have been updated at the back-end to be more robust and you can expect a more powerful API pretty soon. In the meanwhile, we’ve added a Calendar (.ical) for all International Cricket Matches. You can add it to any of your Calendar application (iCal, Outlook, Google Calendar, etc). The link to your WebCal link is in your Profile (check UTILITIES).

Meanwhile, you can continue to invite your friends via your Gmail, Yahoo, Rediff account (more options will be added as we go).

The measurements collected by Amazon CloudWatch provide Auto Scaling with the information needed to run enough Amazon EC2 instances to deal with the traffic load. Auto Scaling updates the Elastic Load Balancing service when new instances are launched or terminated to automatically scale the load-balanced capacity. You can instantiate, configure, and deploy these important system architecture components in seconds.

Read more of the article – New Features for Amazon EC2: Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudWatch.

Read the article in full – Django Best Practices.

We intend to make our seeker equally smart; it will always get the latest Cricketing information for you. It will continue to grow with features, options and many good things.

Just add seeker@ocricket.com as a buddy using GTalk or any Jabber client and have fun. The first thing you can do is of course, type ‘help’.

Check out Amazon Elastic MapReduce.

The app is powered by the user, which means, users suggest a keyword and is voted by other users. Once a keyword becomes hot enough, we track it and is relayed for other users to enjoy the Twitter Experience on a single interface where others can reply there, relayed back to their Twitter timeline. A user can also vote against a keyword and we stop tracking it goes below its hotness level.

Enjoy the Cricket Talk. Tell us what you feel, where can we improve to make your Twitter-Cricket experience a better one. We’re expecting that Cricket Talk will be a way easier way to track Cricket on Twitter and be amongst other Cricket fans across the globe.

So, go ahead and Talk Cricket.

Note: Please keep the keyword suggestion to Cricket related ones (I know you can suggest anything!) And yes, we use Twitter’s brand new OAuth, so you won’t have to disclose your Username/Password to our application.

Read Read World Django as it unfolds the tutorial which examines how best to cope when the Real World intrudes on your carefully designed website.

We’ve just added the ability of users to accumulate RUNS. Runs are like reputations which you can get depending on your activities on oCricket. The more Runs you collect, your reputation and rank grows in the user hierarchy. More Runs also means, you’ve more power like editing someone’s content, voting down a comment, even moderating the contents.

It’s not at all hard to get runs. Most activity on oCricket are accounted for in calculation of runs. Writing an article, uploading a photo or a video, submission of articles, photos or videos from external sites accounts for your runs. Amass enough runs and you can be a demi-god on oCricket.

All contents on oCricket now bears the ability to be voted which will affect their appearance on the oCricket timeline (in the works). Comments can be voted up or down, so can the links, articles, photos or videos. These vote up and down activity adds up to the score of a particular content and in turn affects your runs.

You can also favorite (bookmark) contents on oCricket.

Hope you’ll like the new feature additions, go score higher runs and we’ll surprise you with what you can do with your runs.

But don’t you think it would be cool if you could put live cricket scores on your website/blog too? We have done exactly that. Now you can easily add a simple JavaScript one-liner to your website and get live Cricket scores. Additionally, we also have a Wordpress plugin for all you Wordpress users. Head over to toys.ocricket.com for the details.

We have also made a small change which stops spammers from stealing your Email address from your profile page — your Email address is now shown only to your friends and taken some measures in making your Email completely spam proof (hint: the Email that you see on your profile is an image).

Enjoy, and watch out for some really awesome features in the very near future

The Washington Times has used open source projects for some time now. All of our servers run Ubuntu linux. Our database servers use PostgreSQL. Our web servers use lighttpd and Apache httpd, and memcached. We develop entirely in python, using the django framework. We are obviously strong believers in open source.