Locker Pulse Product Blog

Today we’ve added the ability to use keyboard shortcuts to speed up how quickly you can move from one story to the next. Any time you’re reading news, either on a team page or your My News or My Players when logged in, you can use the “J” key to move down to the previous story or the “K” key to move up to the next story. This feature will be familiar to anyone who has ever used keyboard shortcuts in Google Reader or Gmail.

When we tested this feature it worked for us on all major browsers. If you run in to any issues, or if you have any suggestions for additional keyboard features, definitely leave a comment below or drop us an email.

Today we released one of our most anticipated new features: fantasy sports player tracking. Simply visit the new Fantasy tab, enter in your fantasy team, and we’ll provide you with updates as news happens. You can filter news by league or player on the left nav, just as you can filter by team or source in My News. We’re scanning over 25 of the best fantasy news sites on the web for the absolute latest information.

Here are a few screenshots (click to enlarge):

Add a Fantasy Player

My Fantasy News

Fantasy player tracking also works on mobile LockerPulse. After logging in you’ll see the My Players heading.

You may notice some other improvements throughout the site. We’ve worked hard on improving the speed of the most common actions on the site. We’ve completed a a full javascript overhaul – our new library is smaller and lighter, meaning faster load times for you. We’ve also made other speed improvements across the site. For instance, stories from external sites load much faster in the frame. After logging in, you’ll also notice a new navigation and slicker interface. In addition to fantasy coverage we’ve made it easy to access full schedules, standings, and rosters available for all NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL teams.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, leave a comment below or drop us an email. Good luck with your fantasy teams!

Today we’ve added a bunch of new sports to our coverage. For each sport we scoured the web and found the very best sites, blogs, and newspapers to give you a mix of news on par with the level of coverage that we provide for each individual team.

We’ve added twelve sports to our “Headlines” section. You can access them anywhere on the site by clicking on “Headlines” in the upper left hand corner:

If you’re a registered user, you can now subscribe to your favorite sports just like you subscribe to your favorite teams. Simply head on over to the “Settings” “Manage Sources” tab when logged in and you’ll now see all of the new sports listed under the “Add a Team” dropdown:

And of course, if you haven’t signed up, you should head on over to our registration page to get started. We’ve also released a simpler signup process to make it even easier to pick your favorites and get started quickly and simply.

Two of the more frequent requests we receive from people are “I’m an NBA fan in general and I don’t follow any one team, I just want a lot of good NBA coverage” and “why don’t you have coverage for Soccer/Golf/MMA/NASCAR”. Hopefully this will help people in both camps, as well as other fans looking to supplement their team coverage with some more in depth coverage of their favorite sports.

If we’ve missed any good news sources, or there’s a sport you’d like covered that we didn’t get, please leave us a comment below or drop us an email.

We’re excited to announce that we’ve added college sports to LockerPulse. You can now browse and read NCAA news from our homepage just like you can with any pro team. As a registered user you can add your favorite college teams to your account so that they appear in your news stream, scoreboard, and in your daily newsletter. Over the coming weeks we’ll be expanding coverage by adding more fan blogs, local newspapers, school newspapers, and other sources that capture the passion of college athletics. If you have a favorite news source for your team, we encourage you to let us know by leaving a comment below or by sending us an email.

With our new Headlines Widget you can quickly and easily add the latest headlines for your favorite team to your blog, forum, or website. Try it out today and let us know what you think!

When we launched LockerPulse back in May, access to our mobile site was exclusive to our premium users. However, as mobile visits to our site (and mobile usage across the web in general) has grown, it’s become apparent that we need to do a better job matching our mobile experience with our web experience. Today we launched a revamped mobile site that gives everyone access to news with our without an account, just like our standard site does. Visit m.LockerPulse.com to check it out!

Have you ever overheard a quick mention of a breaking sports story and wanted to know more? Are you curious about the latest injury news for one of your fantasy players? These things happen to us all of the time. Our new real-time sports search engine solves the problem. We return the latest results from the stories in our index and from the conversation on Twitter. Give it a shot by visiting LockerPulse.com/search or by using the Search bar on the left hand side of any page.

We’ve received a lot of positive comments about our high resolution background images. Starting today you can now choose to set your own background image, either from our library of images or by uploading one of your own. Registered users can now find this option in their “Settings” tab.

We’ve also improved how our background images show up on the iPad, although currently we haven’t figured out an effective way to allow you to view your custom backgrounds on the iPad.

Next week we should be rolling out some more exciting features!

Starting this morning all premium account members who are subscribed to get the daily newsletter received a vastly improved newsletter.

The new newsletter has a simplified design, scoreboard with your teams scores from the previous night, and story summaries below the headlines. Originally we weren’t sure how useful the daily newsletter would be, but the positive feedback has been overwhelming. Hopefully by now being able to see at a glance whether your team won last night, and by being able to see a little more than just the headline, we’ll make it easier to follow your teams on a day to day basis when you don’t have time to visit LockerPulse and read the full articles.

Here’s a screenshot of one of the new emails, customized for a NY sports fan (click to enlarge):

If you have any feedback, leave us a comment below or drop us an email.

Side note: if you do receive the daily email, you likely received two this morning. There was an issue with the first one showing the wrong teams, so we fixed it and sent the correct one out around 9 AM. We apologize for any confusion.

We recently received some feedback that the site didn’t display properly on the iPad. The iPad presents several challenges for web designers. In reality, most sites looking to make the most of the iPad should be redesigned from the bottom up with the unique functionality of the device in mind. In the meantime though, we’ve done some modifications to how the site is displayed when the iPad device is detected (see the screenshot below). There are a few minor issues with the background image not displaying correctly when you scroll on long pages, but for the most part the site should be fully functional. Leave us a comment below or drop us an email if you notice any issues and we’ll do our best to address them.