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

The other day I was having a hard time getting TweenLite, lightweight and fast tweening engine, to work because I was trying to import the easing functions like this:

import fl.transitions.easing.*;

It turns out that all of the fl packages are specific to the Flash IDE and are not available in the Flex SDK. I’m aware that there are several workarounds to get them to work (here, for instance), but I found that the easiest way to get the easing functions to work is just to substitute the import statement above with the following:

import mx.effects.easing.*;

You will have access to almost all of the same easing functions but you’ll have to check the documentation to make sure of the proper easings.

The National Championship game, on the other hand, was slightly more interesting.  The game was exciting and there were lot of big plays by both teams on both sides of the ball. When it came down to it though, LSU was a much better team. What the National Championship failed to do, in my mind anyway, was to crown a true national champion. Ohio State really hadn’t played anyone. Their only loss was to Illinois, a team that was utterly dismantled by USC in the Rose Bowl. As far as I’m concerned, the Big 10 isn’t a very strong conference and Ohio State’s number one ranking was fairly unwarranted. LSU certainly didn’t play the best team in the nation and therefore I think it’s hard to crown them as the national champions.

I’m not even asking for a playoff since I know it’ll be a long time before we get on. I’d just like to see better match ups in these bowl games. USC vs. Georgia would have been one hell of a game. And any of the two loss teams probably could have provided a much better fight than Ohio State did against LSU. I think with a few small tweaks to the ranking system of the BCS we could all see much better match ups which, until we have a playoff system, would keep me entertained enough to be happy.

USC defeated FSU 2-0 to win the Womens College Cup! Congratulations and Fight On!

I also was accepted into the Vudu Evangelist program which allowed me to acquire a Vudu box at a heavily discounted rate in exchange for, well, evangelizing the product. Vudu is a  product that allows you to both rent and purchase movies and stream them over the internet to your television over a peer to peer network. I’ve heard very good things about the product so I can’t wait to get it hooked up to my TV. If you want to read more about vudu, click here.

To log a message to the console, you just need to call a function like this:

1

VISOR.logger.log('debug', 'this is a debug message');

For more information about VisorLog, check out it’s project page.

Check out a video demo of the site after the jump or sign up now!

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