toomanydaves

An initial idea…

Posted on September 3rd, 2006 by davelms.
Categories: Ideas.

Sad, I know. I was sat in a field along with 65,000 other people (it was Leeds Festival at Bramham Park actually) trying to find out the latest score for the Nuneaton vs Scarborough football game.

A bit of history: Scarborough are my hometown football club. I watched my first game in 1982 and have been a fan ever since. We’ve had our ups and our downs. We’re currently on a bit of a down, hence my predicament. We’ve slipped from Division 3 down to the Conference and down again into the Conference North.

The history hints a little at the problem. None of the sports websites cover score alerts for Conference North. You can get Half Time and Full Time results, but, well, as any football fan knows, it’s not the same! You want to know the score that exact second.

There’s an excellent forum for Scarborough Football Club (Surfing Seadog) that has a lot of fans. The good thing about it is, there’s always a running commentary from the game. So you can visit the forum and within 5 or 10 minutes of something happening you know you can read about it.

So what’s my problem? Well, I just wanted to be able to get quickly at the score without having to read the forum. Especially on a mobile phone. Selfish I know. I wanted to get it in WML format for a start, lightweight as possible, quick to download, no problems!

So I got to work. The results can be seen at awayend.co.uk/scarborough/ and having engaged in initial conversations with the Surfing Seadog web admin my next step is to try and get volunteers on board. Hopefully, the principle is EVERYONE WINS. I intend to create dynamic images and other display formats so that people can view the score instantly. I’ve also set up an RSS feed so people can subscribe to score alerts.

Once finished, I shall wander around other Conference North clubs and see if it’s of any use to them.

Oh, and it’s free. All my sites are.

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