I’m always wondering why more companies don’t help bloggers do their thing. It’s in their best interests, after all, because more people talking about your content or products and more people using your services ends up being good business. Of course, I work at such a company and I can actually address this issue directly, if only for one vertical.

So, today marks the first release of a prototype tool for bloggers who blog about sports. This isn’t a finished product yet, and I’m hesitant to get it out because it’s not polished, but you know what? I want the feedback. So, if you’re a blogger, here’s what I have. Give it a try and let me know what you think. If there’s interest, we’ll get a finished product built and

Basically, I have a small app which will pump out scoring alerts for different sports. So far, I have NBA and NFL ready to go. For each app, there are programmed notifications for key events. In the NBA version, I’m just using clock time. Alerts will be queued for games that cross 12 minute, 8 minutes, 4 minute, and end of quarter boundaries. I’ll be improving the logic as I refine the application. The NFL version will queue alerts every time a quarter starts or ends, plus on any scoring event.

Here’s a demo for what they will look like:

The video is fuzzy because of the encoding (it actually looked worse on YouTube). It also is quite small compared to the web page. It looks huge on the video because I had to make the window small to fit it in the Google Video size limits. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like on my monitor:

If you are interested in trying it out, all you need to do is add this script tag to your blog, anywhere on the page:

This is a prototype tool and as such may stop working, may break your layout, or may just generally be problematic. I hope not, though. Let me know if you find any bugs. Oh, and even the ID attribute above is important. Please leave the entire tag intact when you add it to your blog or site.

I haven’t tested the NFL one, but will be tomorrow during games. Feel free to change NBA above to NFL tomorrow to see it work. It won’t do anything tonight, since there are no games and also because I’m not running the process to generate the updates.

Currently, you can only have one or the other on your page at a time. This is just a limitation for the prototype. You will be able to choose more configurable alerts in the final product, assuming there’s enough interest to build one. Of course, let me know what features you’d like to see and I’ll see what I can do.

If you aren’t interested in this product, that’s OK. Let me know what tools you’d like to see. I have several I’ve built for use here on FatMixx that I’m cleaning up for release. These include plugins for WordPress to make the task of writing about sports easier. They’re basically versions of the tools we offer our own editors and writers, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t have them, too.

(P.S. I feel like I should say that this isn’t the finest app ever built and unlike many things that ESPN does, it doesn’t quite have that flair and polish. It will, but I want to get this conversation started. As they say, release early, release often. I want to make sure we can get feedback before we build something perfect for us, but useless for you.)

For those of you that were shut out of Google Analytics when I posted my review a while back, you can now try out the service. Google Analytics has reopened registration and you can sign up now along with AdWords.

I’ve been ramping up some of my evening coding activities to get my brain thinking about interesting problems. Even at a place as dynamic as ESPN.com, the work can get pretty mundane. A good chunk of what you do is pretty typical day-to-day maintenance, bug fixing, and application development. Sometimes, you have a lot of time to innovate (e.g. RSS, RealTime, etc.) and other times, you’re just working on getting the next sport up with improvements and upgrades (so to speak). Beyond all of that, I made a goal of coding outside of work every day and this fits in well with that.

So, I’ve been playing around with tagging implementation and other interesting tech at home. What I’m finding, though, is that I’ve been spoiled by Eclipse and XCode… I depend a lot more on IDEs to seamlessly switch between languages and databases. At work, I’m in Java mode with a big commercial database while at home I’m working with PHP and MySQL. I used to be happy with just Vi and a shell. Now, I find myself hitting autocomplete shortcuts on all my IDEs. I use Eclipse primarily for Java and Vi for SQL. I’ve been using SubEthaEdit at home for PHP and SQL. SubEtha is pretty good, actually, but I’ve found that I miss the ability to execute SQL directly from my editor (most of the big commercial databases offer that in their included tools now). It’s really not a problem except when I’m trying to tune queries, iteratively tweaking and running until it is as fast as I can get it.

So, I’ve been looking for an IDE. You may have noticed it in the random del.icio.us posts since I’ve been bookmarking the tools. I checked out the following tools:

• Advenio’s SQLGrinder
• NaviCat
• SQL4x Manager J
• Aqua Data Studio

The criteria I had was pretty simple. I need to be able to edit SQL, run queries from inside the IDE, and it should be low cost/free. I also would prefer that the tool is keyboard friendly, so shortcuts to run/check syntax/etc would be great. For low price, I was hoping to be around $50 or less, considering some of the tools are nearly $100 or more. Finally, being able to connect to MS SQL Server, Oracle, and MySQL from the same tool was another big bonus. Oh, and I’m on OS X.

I had trouble getting SQL4x to connect and run on Tiger. I also had trouble with another program not listed above which I left off for other reasons. Of the programs on the list above, I ended up going with, well, none of them. I ended up finding a project called PHPEclipse which looks pretty promising. My buddy Pat suggested I look for an extension to Eclipse, since I already like it and several free or low cost items popped up. This was the one I chose. PHPEclipse has a SQL plugin, Quantum DB, and a PHP editing component. I’m not sure if I’ll end up using the PHP component, but it’s nice that it’s there.

I ended up on this one primarily because of price. It’s free. I also liked that I could get to most any type of DB that had a JDBC driver (which is to say, nearly ALL of them). I can run and view results from inside Eclipse, satisfying that requirement as well.

The runner up was SQLGrinder. It needs a bit of polish, but at ~$50 it’s a decent price for the value. It connects to MS SQL Server, even if you need Active Directory/Windows authentication. Oracle works too. It has some nice features, like Snapshots of query results, and even allows you to see input parameters for stored procedures.

My absolute favorite tool was the NaviCat package, a MySQL only tool that is pretty comprehensive. It’s cross platform and is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It has the most complete development environment, including built in support for adding users, looking at query plans, and internal management for saving query files and results. It also includes other tools for backups of your MySQL databases and includes support, of course, for proprietary MySQL extensions to SQL. I’m actually tempted to spring for it, as the Mac OS X version is $99, but I’ll wait until I can legally write it off as a tax expense (or I win $100 or whatever).

I’ll try and post an update after working with PHPEclipse for a few more days.