NYI Fan Central Update

New York Islander Fan Central | 8/20/2008 06:51:00 AM | | |




Some changes at NYI Fan Central.

As always I'm always trying to upgrade this blog to bring more information and features to it for everyone.

I announce these changes sometimes so everyone knows where to find new features here along with things they may have been moved because some folks may may come here just to find links to other sites.

For the remainder of the summer up until training camp begins the new brighter page look will we be third jersey (home white) version of this blog.

So what's next?

* I have been bulking up sidebar with some links to some Independent Islander Fan Sites, many links are included. My requirement for listing folks here are regular hockey updates and no profanity from your site.

If interested please send an e-mail.

* We now have a Hockey Database (hockeydb.com) player finder widget from their excellent site added to the NHL Trades/Transactions/Free Agent Signings section which will now be a permanent fixture here so we can follow player transactions, not just trade deadline days or July 1st.

* Faceoff.com has a feeder of sorts showing it's latest update which is now listed below the picture link to that site.

* I found something that has an RSS feed for the Sound Tigers, the Ct Post does not have exclusive Sound Tiger rss feeds for Mr Fornabaio so where stuck and I asked him enough about that last year which is beyond his control.

* I also added back in the Sound Tigers live scoreboard widget which will have live game scores and the schedule. If AHL.com comes up with something better I'll go with that but it seems no one in North America has created anything for live game AHL updates to put on a blog, but the Utah Grizzlies are offering a toobar for computers which will not be here because it's not for blogs.

* When the Isles announce their new blog box members I will add them all to the current feeder for it regardless if I am part of the blog box moving forward.

* I pulled the Isles rotonews widget for the summer because there was just not enough updates for it, however I did add a new one for the entire NHL in the media section toward the bottom of the blog because they only reference information from newspapers and do all the teams. The specific Isles widget will return to the sidebar along with NHL scoreboards, standings when camp opens along with our classic look.

* I moved the Daily News, Times and Post feeds below Newsday up from the bottom of the blog, there are too many sites down there now to keep them buried despite how terrible a job their editors do providing our club coverage. If anyone remembers a very old movie called Walking Tall (Joe Don Baker Version) the scene where he puts the judges chambers in the men's room was kind of where I decided to put the Post, Times and News for year one of this blog in our media section given the decisions of their editors with regard to our team.

* I'm working on a fix for not having a message board this season that used to have Mr Prospects outstanding game by game prospect updates for all of us but for now I have added a link to the prospect coverage section that includes Newspaper Coverage for all Junior leagues in North America, I also found a link that can reference most prospect boxscores in North America.

What's in the works/under consideration as a solution is a brand new widget like the one we have now for the local writers, Islanders website updates and the separate one for the blog box updates.

This new one will be the most involved of all because it will have every RSS feed from every North American/College paper that covers a specific club where an Islander prospect plays. I'm not sure how many of those papers link up to their hockey teams that way and depending on how this goes will determine if I do it or not because many small town/college papers do not have specific rss feeds for hockey, Tsn does not even have it for hockey coverage so it's a long shot but if I that local paper has an feed we can get their game coverage so we have more information.

Linking to the major league sites (OHL, WHL, QMJHL) will give us league wide updates but that cannot be narrowed down to specific Islander prospects, I will also include this in these feeders.

What I will do for sure and have almost finished behind the scenes is locating links for our prospects that linking to their latest games or team boxscores so you can visit here and follow what they are doing, some leagues do game by game player breakdown, others do not (QMJHL) or you have to go to the boxscore sections.

I'm not sure if I can do this for the European prospects but first things first.

I will never have the time to go from page to page and put together a digest of weekly/daily game summaries as Mr Prospects does so well. I think that's an element of coverage our fans need.

Anyway that's what's up around here, this is one of my pre-scheduled vacation blogs on the timer.

Updated Wednesday:
I spoke for about twenty minutes on Tuesday afternoon with Professional Hockey Writers Association President Kevin Allen as we discussed briefly the process for joining the association and a lot of hockey-media related subjects. It was very classy of him to go out of his way like that to return my call and was a pleasure to speak with and taught me a lot in that short time.

I will have more on this in a few days.