Sports Blog Nation is a network of fan blogs and websites, dedicated to extensive and entertaining coverage of nearly every major team and sport in the world. Over the past few years SBN has grown from a simple network of websites into the premier place to go for sports news and coverage on the internet.
One of the biggest advantages SBN has over other sites is the incredible technical team running things behind the scenes and giving all of us the cleanest, easiest and downright most badass format for writing and interacting with other fans. Over the past year, we have seen the website transition to the incredible SBN 2.0, which boasts an auto-updating comment technology unlike any other found on the web. The tech team has worked tirelessly the past few months as more and more blogs are brought into the network. It's also incredible how open the higher ups are to constructive criticism of various changes and aspects of the platform, and how quickly the tech team responds to any problems we might have.
This morning, SB Nation unleashed a brand new wave of upgrades across the network. These updates are the latest in a line of changes SBN has covertly made over the past month, and put us far above any competitors on the web.
Follow the jump for a breakdown of the changes.
Hat tip to Pension Plan Puppets for putting together this mini tutorial.
Yahoo! Sports Partnership
The first change happened around a month ago and was something I've already mentioned: the partnership with Yahoo! Sports. On the Dallas Stars page on Yahoo! you can find a link to the latest stories here on DBD, as well a section for DBD on any player or news page on Yahoo!.
SI.com News Feed
Last week, SI.com started using SBN websites in their news feed for each team page. Check out the Stars page here.
Associated Press Photos
You may have noticed an AP photo next to this last night's post after the game. SBN has licensed Associated Press photos for every sport, every team and we now have these photos available for legal use on our websites. For example, check out all photos associated with last night's game.
Player Pages
The format has changed (if you guys ever bothered to look there before which apparently no one did hence the change) from bland to grand. Here's Mike Ribeiro's page. It aggregates all of the posts tagged with his name from across the SBN megaverse along with any relevant FanShots and FanPosts. Included is a scouting report (apparently some of these are pretty funny so consider yourselves warned) and a transaction/injury history. You can also get an RSS feed of that page. That was put in place just for Wrap.
Team Pages
Here's the Dallas Stars page and as you can see it's got all of the stories, fanposts, and fanshots aggregated as well as the schedule, roster, stats, standings, injuries, last game and next game.
Event Pages
These are the pages for each individual game. When you see the score widget if you click 'complete coverage' that is the page you will be taken to see. Practice with this one:
There you'll see everything that was written or posted about a particular game from both sites. It also has that day's scoreboard so you can check out the other games.
What About Us?
Basically, all that this means for you guys is that you get to visit a much better site. Hopefully you'll enjoy this latest round of upgrades. One thing that this does allow is for anything that you guys write or post to be seen by a lot more eyeballs. In order to ensure that everyone gets the most out of these pages there are three important things that we all have to do with regard to tagging posts.
Apparently Photoshop isn't one of the upgrades....
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If the fanpost/fanshot/post you are writing is directly related to a game, whether it's a picture that you took, a quotation from Ron Wilson berating a player, or your thoughts on the game, click 'attach event'. Once you get in there you'll see the list of all of the games divided into upcoming and completed. Select the appropriate game.
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If you are tagging a post with a team's name then type it into the 'Teams' section and not the 'tags' line at the top.
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Same with players' names. There is auto-complete on the names in case you aren't sure how to spell it properly. It's important that you do it this way and not in the 'tags' line because that ensures that everything gets linked to the appropriate page.
The 'tags' line can be used for past players, management, and humour but it's important that the teams and current players be tagged properly. Thanks for your help on this one.
Anyway, the platform is ever evolving (for the better we hope!) and the tech team is ridiculously good but if you encounter any bugs or issues fire an e-mail off to support@sbnation.com with as much detail as possible including your browser so they can fix it ASAP.
Big thanks to the team of Jim Bankoff (CEO), Tyler Bleszinski (Founder), Kyle Ragsdale, Trei Brundrett, Ryan Gantz, Chris Haines, Jessica Jacobs, Michael Lovitt, and Pablo Mercado.