The Tools Of Ignorance
All The News That's Fit To Click
by Tom Hamilton
The great American observationalist Jerry Seinfeld once stated that "It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day just exactly fits in the newspaper." Before the internet, baseball fans had to rely heavily on printed and broadcast media in order to find information about their favorite team and players. Increasingly, niche media outlets are filling these gaps with information that newspapers could never completely provide given their physical limitations. A lot of information about baseball is readily available via your computer and the internet but now the problem of finding and accumulating it has moved to the forefront. Everyone has their favorite sites but visiting each of them individually can be very time consuming. In an effort to simplify this, as well as introduce a few sites that some people may not be familiar with, I have added a new feature to Nearlygod Baseball.
You can now create customizable news boxes on the right side of the front page. These will allow you to keep up to date with news about your favorite teams, updates from popular baseball websites, or just baseball in general. If you have cookies enabled in your browser, any changes that you make will still be there the next time that you visit the home page.
When you first visit the site, you should see two default boxes that were there before the change however they now look different. One is the description of the site and the other is the "What's New" box which will notify you of any changes or additions that have been made to the site. Clicking on an item within the box will load the updated page.
The next default box displays the last ten messages that have been posted in the Nearlygod Baseball forum. This should save time since you will now be able to tell if anything has been added to the site as well as the forum without having to jump around to different pages. Click on any of these items to go directly to the new post.
The last default box is the general news feed from MLB.com. As with all of the news boxes, if you click on any of the news items, it will take you directly to the story, and in this case, to Major League Baseball's official site.
You may have noticed that if you move your mouse over the title bar of a news box, it will show several controls on the right side of the bar. The first control is a down arrow. Clicking this will open up a configuration panel that will show you the URL of the news feed that is being displayed in the box. It will also allow you to change the number of news items that should be displayed, the size of the news box, and the interval between automatic updates. If you leave the front page open you will see the items in the boxes update as new stories become available. By default, the box will check the source sites for updates every 10 minutes but you can adjust this setting, if you get impatient. After you have saved your settings for a news box, you can hide the configuration panel by clicking on the up arrow.
The next control is represented by a refresh icon. You can manually poll the source site for updates by clicking here. The next control is the close icon which, unsurprisingly, closes the news box. On the left side of the title bar is an arrow that, when clicked, will contract or expand the box. This will allow you to see only the boxes that you want at any given time. This will also come in handy when moving the boxes around.
Speaking of moving the boxes, all of them can be rearranged by simply clicking and dragging the title bar up and down along the right side of the page. Placing your favorite news sites at the top will make them easily visible every time that you visit the site.
Now comes the best part... adding new boxes. Above the news boxes, you will see a drop down menu that lists many different sources. The first few include general baseball news feeds from MLB.com, ESPN, and CBS Sportsline, just to name a few. Popular baseball websites such as Baseball Prospectus and The Hardball Times are also available. Fantasy fans can also select news feeds from Rotowire and Rotoworld. Finally, each team has multiple news feeds to choose from so keeping up with your favorite teams will no longer require visits to each of their individual pages.
Once you have selected a feed, you can now choose how many items you want displayed in the box. The last option lets you specify how large the box will be. If you select a number of lines greater that the number of items that the source provides, you will have blank space at the bottom. On the other hand, choosing less lines than you have items will leave you with a smaller box which you would then need to scroll through to read. The choice is yours. Remember, once the box has been created, you can change these options to better fit your needs. After you press the "Add" button, your new box should be displayed above the others. You can now rearrange them as needed.
The last control at the top of the column is the "Reset to defaults" link. Clicking here will delete all of your boxes and rebuild the default boxes described above. There is no warning when you do this so be careful or you may lose any of the boxes that you have painstakingly created.
I will be adding new boxes as I come across them so check frequently and feel free to check out some of the ones that you have never heard of before. You may find something of interest that never would have been found in a newspaper.
Next time on The Tools Of Ignorance (as promised previously):
An in depth look at the Custom Stat Filters, how to use them, and some interesting findings that they've revealed. Such as, which switch hitter had the most home runs in the 90's?