Locker Pulse Product Blog

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.

As you can see from the image above, we’ve added the Winnipeg Jets back in to the NHL, replacing the Atlanta Thrashers. We’ve also transitioned the sources to Winnipeg blogs and newspapers from their Atlanta counterparts.

For college sports, we’ve done the following:

• Moved Colorado from the Big 12 to the Pac-12.
• Added Utah to the Pac-12.
• Moved Nebraska from the Big 12 to the Big Ten.
• Added TCU in anticipation for their move to the Big East in 2012

If you’re a fan of these teams let us know if we’ve missed any good news sources by leaving a comment below or dropping us an email.

Today we added a few more background images for registered users. There are now two images available for each sport. You can change your background image in the Settings tab (found by clicking the gear symbol in the upper-right) after logging in. If you’re looking for something different, you can always upload your own custom image instead. We’ve also changed the default image to basketball from the football image to signify the change in season. Once the nice weather hits we’ll make the switch over to baseball!

Without a doubt one of the most difficult parts of getting LockerPulse off the ground was finding the news sources. News breaks for each team and each league in a variety of different ways, from official team/league/player sites, to newspapers, beat-writers, and even fan bloggers. Over the next month our team will be adding and removing sources from all 122 professional sports teams, in an effort to provide you with your news the second it happens directly from the source who breaks it. We realize that it will be impossible for us to do this completely on our own. Many people have already written us suggesting sites that we’re missing. We will be ramping up our efforts throughout the site to make it more known that we’d like you to let us know what we’re missing. If you have a suggestion for us, please don’t hesitate to contact us. You can click the “Feedback” link under the “More” tab on any page, leave a comment below, or email us at

If you’re using LockerPulse in Internet Explorer 7 or 8, you’ve probably noticed the following “upsell” to Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox on the sidebar:

Why? Quite simply, because those browsers are ahead of Internet Explorer in a lot of ways. They are faster and more feature filled, which in turn allows us to build a better web application.

An example is the reader page. In Firefox, you’ll see that the story jumps off the page on top of a partially transparent background (click to enlarge):

Whereas, on Internet Explorer we had to modify the experience quite a bit to make it functional:

The good news is that the IE team is catching up to the rest of the web browsing world and with the release of IE9 we should see some drastic improvements.

What about IE6? We’ve had a few people comment on this. We do not support Internet Explorer versions 6 or lower. If you arrive on the site you’ll see the following message:

That pretty much says it all. IE6 is dwindling in market share, presents even more design/functionality problems than IE7/IE8, and has been responsible from some serious security leaks. Many other sites like YouTube also do not support IE6. In the coming months you’ll begin to see less and less support as developers turn their focus towards building cutting edge web applications for the masses and away from supporting a dying technology. Like much of the developer community, we feel that IE6 was great in it’s hey in the early 2000′s, but we’re ready to see it retired.

One of the most frequent questions we’ve received in our first week is “where are the college teams?” It was the one comment we were almost certain we’d hear a lot…and with good reason. They type of serious sports fans who like LockerPulse almost always follow their favorite college teams just as closely as their favorite pro teams. Leaving colleges out was one of the unfortunate concessions we made to avoid delaying our launch. We wanted to get the site in the hands of users as soon as possible.

That said, the college news is coming soon. We’re in the process of researching which schools to support. I’ve received a ton of great feedback already with suggestions from alumni of schools such as Georgetown and Virginia Tech. If you are a college sports fan, please email us at or leave a comment below letting us know your favorite teams and favorite blogs, newspapers, and sites you read to keep up with those teams. The more help we have from our community, the less time our staff needs to spend researching and the sooner we’ll be able to roll out an awesome college sports news experience to our users.