Locker Pulse Product Blog

While working on The New LockerPulse we discovered a few ways to drastically improve our popular fantasy player news tracking. Rather than wait until the launch of the new site, we decided that these improvements were important enough to release immediately.

One of the most difficult tasks is scouring the news for a mention of a particular player without having a false-positive (say, an article about the Magic’s Dwight Howard and Ryan Anderson being shown only to people who subscribed to Dwight Howard or Ryan Anderson, and not someone who is tracking the Phillies’ Ryan Howard.)

The fixes that we implemented yesterday almost completely eliminate these issues. We applied them retroactively to remove any previous false-positives. We also made a bug fix that should result in a higher volume of stories being shown for your players.

All in all, fantasy player tracking just became a much more useful feature. If you run in to any issues or have any suggestions, let us know in the comments or drop us an email.

On Friday the Florida Marlins unveiled their new stadium, uniforms, and officially changed their name to the Miami Marlins. We’ve updated their name and colors across our site, including on the Miami Marlins page:

We’ve also fixed one of the more annoying bugs for fans who follow a lot of Yahoo Sports news sources. Our system detects duplicate stories by the permanent URL of the story. In almost all cases, there is only one single URL per story, which never changes, and this system works remarkably well. However, Yahoo sometimes uses multiple URLs per story and changes them in their feeds. For instance, a recent story on their hockey blog Puck Daddy entitled Thursday’s Three Stars: First-place Panthers; big Avs rally was posted under the following three URLs:

http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/blog/puck_daddy/post/Thursday-s-Three-Stars-First-place-Panthers-bi?urn=nhl-wp17159

http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/blog/puck_daddy/post/Thursday-8217-s-Three-Stars-First-place-Panthe?urn=nhl-wp17159

http://ca.sports.yahoo.com/nhl/blog/puck_daddy/post/Thursday-s-Three-Stars-First-place-Panthers-bi?urn=nhl-wp17159

Our system detected them as three separate stories and inserted them three times over the course of the day. It can be very distracting to see the same story in your news stream over and over. Because this has been an ongoing problem for Yahoo Sports feeds, we’ve added an extra check for Yahoo stories where we also check for a matching title within the past day and only post if there are no matches. Hopefully from here on out this is no longer an issue. We also now have this functionality available to use on other news sources if similar issues are detected. If you notice anything similar don’t hesitate to leave a comment or drop us an email.