LockerPulse Product Blog

Announcements, New Features, Tips, and More

Getting Ready For Windows 8: Pinning LockerPulse in Internet Explorer

Posted on October 23, 2012 by Adam

In preparation for next week’s launch of Windows 8 we’ve released a few improvements to help integrate LockerPulse with Internet Explorer and Windows.

In Windows 7 and Windows 8, you can now pin LockerPulse to your taskbar so that you can launch LockerPulse like a native Windows application.

The next time you log in to your LockerPulse account in Internet Explorer, you’ll notice a prompt:

LockerPulse IE Pin Notification

Simply drag the icon to your taskbar:

LockerPulse Pinning to Windows Taskbar

Now, you can launch LockerPulse from the taskbar like a native application. You’ll notice that it opens in a LockerPulse-themed version of Internet Explorer:

By right clicking on the LockerPulse icon you’ll be able to quickly access the most popular sections of your account with just one click:

In Windows 8, you can pin the LockerPulse tile right to your Windows 8 Start Screen:

LockerPulse Pinned to a Windows 8 Tile

There is a lot more that we can do with Windows 8 in the future, such as notifying you of new stories right in the tile. For now though, this is a great simple way to integrate LockerPulse into your existing Windows environment so that it’s even simpler and quicker to get your news!

As always, leave feedback, questions, and suggestions in the comments below.

New at LockerPulse: NFL.com Video, Improved Filtering, Fixed Standings, Google+, and More

Posted on September 17, 2012 by Adam

We’ve recently made several notable improvements to LockerPulse. In case you’ve missed any of them, here’s a quick summary.

NFL.com Videos

Videos now include highlights and other video content from NFL.com. If you follow a NFL team you should already be seeing the highlights in your My News as long as you haven’t specifically unsubscribed to video updates. You can also see these videos by visiting your Video page.

NFL Videos on LockerPulse

“More News” Available When Filtered

The More News button to browse older stories is now at the bottom of all filtered news in addition to your main My News section. This way if you fall behind on a specific team or source, you can go as far back as 30 days by just clicking More News. Stories older than 30 days can be viewed in our Archives.

Complete Standings

NCAA and EPL standings have been updated to work for their new seasons. We also added GB (games back) to MLB and NBA standings, which was missing due to an oversight on our part. As of today all standings should be accurate, and should stay up to date on a daily basis.

Share to Google+

We’ve added a Google+ button at the bottom of every story so that you can now share stories to your Google+ account in addition to Twitter and Facebook. This was a common request from our users.

New Teams

The Brooklyn Nets have been added to the NBA, and new EPL members Reading, Southampton, and West Ham United have been added to our soccer coverage. We will be expanding our sources for the new EPL teams within the next few days so that coverage matches the variety of the rest of the teams in the league.

Custom Publisher Icons

We’ve added the ability for our publishers to have custom icons displayed next to their stories to help their content stand out. If you’re a publisher, be sure to contact us to have your icon added.

The New LockerPulse Has Arrived!

Posted on May 26, 2012 by Adam

The all new LockerPulse is officially here! If you already have an account, you can log in and take it for a spin. If you don’t have an account yet, head over to our registration page and pick out your favorite teams to get started.

Here’s a full list of what’s new in this version:

HTML5 Responsive design, meaning the same site dynamically adjusts to work great on everything from smartphones up to large high resolution desktop monitors
- Support for nearly every device, including iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets, and all popular browsers for desktops and laptops
- Installable web apps for iOS and Android
- Separate custom responsive designs for the sports news application, informational pages (like the home page, login page, and this blog), and for error pages
Improved speed
- Fewer files for your browser to load
- Compressed and cached files for the files that you do have to load
- Usage of AJAX + HTML5 PushState to only change the contents on the page that change when loading new pages
- CSS sprites to consolidate images wherever possible
- Switched from the script.aculo.us javascript library to the lighter, more powerful jQuery
- We score an A on 22 of the 23 criteria that YSlow uses to determine high performance web sites
Improved fantasy player tracking
- More players available
- Player pages for all players so you can quickly check any player we’re tracking without following them in your account
- Vastly improved accuracy at determining which players are mentioned in a story
Video highlights for your teams right in your news stream. You can unsubscribe/subscribe just like any other news source
Soccer coverage for all 19 MLS teams and all 20 English Premier League 2011 – 2012 members
We’ve added 20 new NCAA teams, including frequently requested schools like Boise State, SMU, and BYU
Schedules, rosters, and standings are available for all teams in all leagues
A new Daily Newsletter designed to provide you with schedules of upcoming games for your teams, scores, and fantasy news, in addition to your daily news
A single banner system at the top of every page that shows tips, site news, and advertisements such as sports-related product suggestions and tickets
An entirely new signup process
Many more small improvements intended to improve your user experience

We’ve also removed a few features in this version:

The “What’s Hot” page of popular stories
Commenting on stories, along with the “Discussion” page
There are no longer ads at the bottom of every story
Overlays are gone. All stories and links within stories open in a new browser tab/window

We want to thank you all for your patience this morning during our down time, as well as for all of the feedback we’ve received since our inception. We’ve listened to everything you’ve had to say and we’ve used it to create what we hope is an even better LockerPulse for you. If you have any questions, comments, or feedback leave a comment below or drop us an email.

Update on Roster, Schedule, and Standings Data

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Adam

A quick update to our last post. NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL rosters, standings, and schedules are now up to date and should continue to be accurate. If you notice any mistakes or bugs please leave a comment or drop us an email. We’ll be working on NCAA and Soccer rosters, standings, and schedules for the upcoming release of the new LockerPulse, which is only a few weeks away! More to come on that shortly.

Improving our Roster, Schedule, and Standings Data

Posted on April 27, 2012 by Adam

Some of you may have noticed that our rosters, schedules, and standings have been increasingly inaccurate lately. Unfortunately our data provider FanFeedr has shut down their service and has not been fixing any of the bugs that we have reported. Over the coming days we will be working on a transition to a new service that will be much more accurate and up to date. During this time you may notice that some of this data doesn’t display correctly. Once we’re finished we will post an update.

Improved Fantasy Player Tracking

Posted on February 21, 2012 by Adam

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.

Fantasy Player Tracking Just in Time for Football!

Posted on September 10, 2011 by Adam

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!

Improving the Team Info Tab

Posted on July 2, 2011 by Adam

We’ve launched a nice, albeit minor, improvement to the Team Info tab. Your team’s full schedule and standings are now available at a quick glance. This is just the beginning of us better integrating things such as scores, schedules, standings, tickets, etc that are complementary to your sports news reading. We hope to improve your LockerPulse experience by giving you all of the supplemental information that you need right at your finger tips.

Also, special thanks to the team at FanFeedr. Our schedules and standings are powered by their fantastic developer API.

Enjoy the Holiday weekend everyone!

Now With More Sports!

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Adam

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’ve Added College Sports Just in Time for March Madness!

Posted on March 12, 2011 by Adam

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.

← Older posts