MyBrackets - A New NFL and College Football Pick ‘Em Site
Last year I created a site called shackbrackets as an attempt to build a simple online sporting game. I found that games like fantasy football were too complicated and time consuming for my tastes. I liked the idea of a simple pick ‘em game and was unhappy with some of the implementations out there. ESPN.com’s game, for instance, only had a limited number of college football games to choose from where as I wanted to pick every single game. I also had a grand vision to have pick ‘em games from every single sport and have a meta game where the person with the most points from all them games would win a large prize. I sat down and programmed the site in PHP and a whole bunch of people (well around 100) signed up and played. I was pretty happy with how everything turned out.
A few months ago, I decided to rewrite the site and re-brand it as well. I had originally bought the domain to create a march madness bracket game for the community at shacknews but didn’t have the time to build a site before the championship began. This time around, I wanted the site to be more generic and appeal to a wider audience so I could perhaps make more money from ad revenue and thus give out bigger prizes. I re-wrote the site, using Ruby on Rails this time, and focused on just football (since a post-mortem from last year reveild that those were the games most people were interested in anyway).
Some new features this year:
- Revamped Team News Pages: The news pages grab news from all over the internet now and also aggregates video from a variety of different sites as well. Check it out!
- Personalized homepage: You can now add a team as one of your favorite teams. When you do so, you’ll get a personalized homepage with the news and videos from all of your favorite teams at a url like http://adam.mybrackets.net. (this is still under development).
- College Football now only has games from the AP top 25. People complained that there were too many games for college football so now there will be at most 25 games a week. To add a level of difficulty the picks will be based on the spread. If you pick the team that is favored you are picking on them to beat the spread. Otherwise pick the other underdog.
- I’m thinking about adding the ability to create groups and adding friend to make it kind of a social networking app since it wouldn’t take very long to do
That about covers the changes for this year so go ahead and sign up now! http://www.mybrackets.net