I happened to notice a URL I hadn’t seen before in my referral data, so gave it a look. It’s a site called SquadInfo and is a news aggregator which searches for Premiership news from Google, Yahoo, and BBC Sport as well as YouTube, Yahoo Images/Pictures and Google Blogsearch. You can limit the search by club as well. I give them two thumbs up for site design as it is very clean, flexible, and easy to use. You can hide given boxes or expand them to include excerpts. Only disconcerting thing is the lack of ANY ‘About’ information, i.e. will this be a commercial service soon (it says ‘Beta’ but so do tons of other sites, some of which stay in Beta forever), who runs it, etc. The WHOIS info is just from their webhost in Chicago. What would make this service top notch would be an aggregated RSS feed of the various news sources, both for Premiership and per club (hint, hint).
But overall, a neat site. Especially for a webhead like me – I found the design very well done.
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October 9th, 2006 at 10:09 pm
I found your page in squadinfo’s referral data and thought I better drop a note to answer some of your questions and to say thanks for your comments and feedback.
The first release of the site went up just over a week ago and onthepitch.org is the first site on the internet to link to it. There’s no ‘About’ section yet as I just haven’t got around to doing it. The site will be in Beta until a few issues with the validity of data have been sorted out and a few new features have been added. There’s certainly no plans to commercialise the service, however, depending on traffic and hosting costs I may be forced to put an ad or two up in time.
The site was primarily built to help me pick my fantasy football team each week. As I found that I was spending time searching the various news aggregators to find out if a particular player would be playing. So I thought I’d put all that info into the one place.
I’ll put some thought into getting that aggregated RSS feed together, after I get the About section done.
Thanks again for your comments!
October 9th, 2006 at 11:30 pm
Thanks for the info Badey! Great work!