Locker Pulse Product Blog

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!

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!

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.

Yesterday we released a big design revamp on the site. We’ve also fixed a few bugs and made some features more usable. I could go on and on about everything we did, but it’s much easier to see (and way more fun!) if you just visit the home page and start poking around. If you’ve got an account, log in and check out how much smoother the experience is. And if you don’t, sign up for a 30-day free trial and see what you’re missing!

One of the things we noticed with new visitors interested in trying out our Premium Account was that they weren’t willing to sign up for the PayPal subscription. While the subscription was free for the first 30 days and users could cancel at any time prior to that without getting charged, it seemed as if there was a barrier to signing up because people didn’t want to commit to any type of subscription just after finding our site, and understandably so. What we did was get rid of all of the reasons not to try LockerPulse. We’re 100% confident that you’ll fall in love with it just like we have. Now when you register, you’re immediately taken to set up your teams. No PayPal subscription. No billing information. If, after 30 days, you like what we’re doing here you will have the option of signing up for a $3.99/month subscription. If not, you will have gotten a full month of usage without entering any personal information beyond an email address. Now there’s no excuses – give it a shot and sign up today!

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.

Today we released our first major update to the site. You’ll notice that our homepage changed drastically.

Here’s the old version (click to enlarge)

And here’s the new version:

To really appreciate the difference, you’ll have to play around on the site a bit

We want to especially thank everyone who has taken the time to write us feedback in the past few weeks. These improvements are a direct result of what we heard from all of our users.

Have a great Holiday Weekend everyone!