Sorry for the short notice, but we have a brief, 30-minute outage planned for tonight, or tomorrow morning depending on where you are: Tuesday, September 25, 12:30am-1:00am EDT. Nothing terribly exciting, I'm afraid, but there will be some more exciting new developments coming next month. Sorry for the inconvenience.
We recently partnered with Prep Sportswear to give you the ability to customize and sell your own apparel on your Website. It will be available for FREE - No minimum order - Bulk order discounts available.
Look for the Sportswear link in your Site Admin admin to customize your apparel.
Please note that the new feature will be automatically turned on. You will see a link for "Sportswear" on your menu. If you do not want to participate, no problem. You can close it at anytime within the Pages section of your Access folder.
eteamz will be temporarily unavailable this coming Thursday, August 9 1am-6am EDT for routine maintenance. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your patience.
eteamz today released some significant enhancements for site administrators. The most critical communication tools for creating and updating your site Welcome Message and News have just become a whole lot easier to use.
Until now, a site admin was able to use the tools to enter simple text, but anything beyond the basics required at least a small understanding of some HTML details. Our PLUS admins did have a tool we call "EZ Mode" that provided tools to aid with some of these extras, but it was not always reliable, or compatible with some of today's newer browsers.
We went out and found a really great WYSIWYG (that's What You See Is What You Get) editor and incorporated it into eteamz. The best part about it is that we're making this new editing tool available to ALL of our admins, whether subscribers or not. If you're like most other eteamz admins, you will probably welcome the chance to stop worrying about putting in those <b> tags, and trying to remember how to make a link work right. You're able to stylize your text (bold, italic, underline), align your text and insert and update links with ease!
For our PLUS subscribers, we have also added several additional tools to help you easily add some real life to your sites. You can choose special fonts and colors for your article, add bullet or numbered lists, insert tables, images, even embedded flash movies for your own slideshows or videos. And of course, PLUS admins will be able to work directly with the HTML for the page to add advanced features like certain scripts or additional tags that can really spruce up your site.
So check it out. Log in to your site, or build a new one today to check out these new features.
At long last, we are getting ready to launch our new login tools for eteamz, and for other sites in our network. We've mentioned this a couple of different times, but here's the deal:
Early Monday morning June 25, between midnight and 6am EDT, eteamz will be undergoing some maintenance to get these new tools in place and ready to go. During this time, you will probably find a message on the home page that the site is unavailable. It may be intermittent, as we don't expect to be offline the entire six hours. We know you all like to get into your sites and the message boards early on Monday, so we expect to be ready for you.
What is going to be new? Logging in to eteamz will be a lot easier! The first time you log in, starting Monday morning, you will be presented with a profile update page, which will give you a chance to review your personal account information and remind you that you will now use the email address associated with your account as the username when you log in to eteamz, and any one of the other sites within the Active Network.
What else... Once you log into eteamz, you will stay logged in until you close your browser. This protects you from any malicious attacks in the event you use eteamz in a public venue. It also allows you to move seamlessly in and out of the admin interface without having to log in each time. One other thing, for those of you that manage multiple eteamz sites, the "Admin" link on your site will take you straight to the admin for that particular site, rather than asking you to choose again.
What will NOT be changing? Most everything else, really. Your sites will be displayed as they always have. The admin interface will work the same. Most of your normal routine on eteamz is unchanged, except for the login.
Now, a little later next week, we will be re-launching the Active.com site, which will be the new home of many of the parts of eteamz not related to your team's site. Things like the sport home pages and the message boards all have new homes, and lots of great new functionality on Active.com. But we'll get into that more next week. First things first. We'll get everyone on this new login and then worry about the new Active.com.
I'm sure some of you will have questions about the new login. If you do, please feel free to send a message to customer support through the eteamz message center.
Some exciting changes are coming to eteamz this month, and they've been a long time coming, I know. We've put months of work into these changes, but that will be a story for another time.
The first change will be mostly unnoticed, as it's entirely behind-the-scenes. This will be a much-needed upgrade to our database (both the hardware and the software). The goal here is, of course, improved performance. More power driving the site means we should be able to handle more traffic and handle it better.
As a result of messing with the database, though, we will have to take the site offline for a short time. We're planning on a four-hour window from 12am to 4am EDT, June 13, 2007. Studies show that most people aren't using eteamz at that time of night, so you probably won't even notice. So we apologize that we have to shut off eteamz for a little while, but it is our expectation that you will notice an improvement in performance.
Coming later this month, we have a couple more changes, which will be much more noticeable. There will be changes to the way you log in - we think much more straightforward than today, and your login will work for other Active Network sites. Then the new Active.com will be launched with a whole new set of community features like message boards and announcements, site and event search, video and all kinds of great content. More details will be coming soon about this as it gets closer, so stay tuned.
Our crack eteamz customer support team gets dozens of emails from members every day with suggestions for enhancements, improvements and new features to eteamz. More often than not, these are all outstanding ideas, some very creative and unique, others very practical. These suggestions are what have made eteamz what it is today, as just about every feature ever added to eteamz came from member requests.
But what happens to all these great ideas after you've shared with us? These ideas begin their journey at the inboxes of Ericha and the support staff. The staff then log each suggestion into a tracking system which I review on a daily basis. I try to keep things somewhat organized, maybe by the area of eteamz that would be affected. So I might group all the suggestions that have to do with the calendar functions and have another group for any suggestions about rosters, etc...
There's a little bit of magic involved here (hey, some things have to remain a secret, right?). But basically, I look at the groups of suggestions with a team of developers and marketers and business strategists and all that. We essentially prioritize the groups of enhancements onto a product roadmap and decide when we can get to all of the great ideas.
We get far more great ideas than we can handle all at once, so we try to pick out the ones we think will have the best impact for the most people, or will be needed at a particular time. We won't always get to everything right away, but we don't ever delete your suggestions, either.
So, the details of the whole process are a little more formal than that, but I hope you get the idea. Rest assured that not only does every suggestion get noticed immediately, it is always considered for our next release. Keep 'em coming!
eteamz will undergo a little bit of maintenance tomorrow morning, April 11, 2007 from 2am to 7am EDT. During this time some may see an interruption of some services, specifically related to the Collect Fees, Donations and Fundraising portions of the admin. Most of the rest of eteamz should remain unaffected during this time. We apologize for any inconvenience, and thank you for your patience.
You may have heard about the Active.com Relaunch, coming this Spring. Among the many great new features coming with this launch is a single login account and user profile across eteamz and Active.com. This is a perfect opportunity for us to roll out a new feature that has been requested by many of you: unique member nicknames. Your nickname, or display name, is how you will be known in the eteamz and Active.com communities, and is shown along with all your message board posts and your user profile.
This change is coming very soon for eteamz members, and rather than choose nicknames for everyone, we wanted to give you a chance to stake your claim to your own unique nickname. Most of you probably already have a unique nickname, so this will be easy for you. All you need to do is go to your member profile page and update your profile with the nickname you’ve already chosen. If someone else beat you to it, or if the nickname you have doesn’t work (only letters, numbers and the underscore (“_”) are allowed), you can choose a new nickname.
After Thursday, March 15, 2007, any eteamz member that has not selected a new, unique nickname will have one assigned. We’ll try our best to make it similar to your current nickname, but we may have to do some special tricks to make it unique among our more than 3 million active members. The sooner you get to it, the better chance you have of being the only “Mike” or “Coach” on eteamz. And if you don’t feel like doing this for yourself, then please consider doing it for the eteamz customer support staff, cause they’re going to have to go through all the leftover accounts by hand, and they’ll get no dessert until they’re done!
As I foretold in my last post, we released a new and improved process for creating an eteamz site. This new process makes it significantly faster and easier to get a new site up and running. Some specific features of this new process:
Go ahead and give it a try! Create a new eteamz site. Let us know what you think of this process as we are always looking for ways to make it easier for you to get a great Web site for your team.
My little desk calendar is just about out of interesting factoids to share so it must be the end of the year. This is a time when we all take a moment to review the past year and look forward to what's to come. Well we at eteamz are no exception, so I thought I'd share my reflections and resolutions with all of you.
2006 was a pretty steady year for eteamz, on the outside. That doesn't mean there weren't any important changes.
And that was just some of the stuff you could see. There was quite a bit going on here behind the scenes at eteamz. Of course we launched this blog to give you an idea of some of those things. We added several new staff at important positions. We did some back-end technology work to improve overall performance. We did some internal re-organization to help improve our own efficiency. And I can't tell you how many times I've moved offices.
So what will 2007 hold for eteamz? Of course no one can say for sure what's to come - and if you all knew, what would be the fun in that? :) I can say, though, that where 2006 was a pretty steady year, 2007 will be a year of change for eteamz. All good changes, we hope.
There will undoubtedly be much more to come in 2007, so stay tuned for all the details. While there will be some great changes coming this year, some things will definitely not change. eteamz will continue to be THE place for low-cost, easy to build, team sports web sites. eteamz, together with our parent company the Active Network, will continue to be home to the largest and very best participatory sports community in the world. We'll continue to provide outstanding support and service to our rapidly growing membership. And we will continue to listen to the needs and desires of our members and fans.
So, from all of us at eteamz, we close out another great year and wish you all a safe, successfull, and Happy New Year!
As some of you may know, eteamz sites provide tools for managing and tracking player stats for certain sports. Historically, we've had stats for baseball and softball, basketball, soccer, and hockey. Today, we have made a few critical updates to some existing stats and added stats for two major sports: football and lacrosse.
Baseball/Softball
Hockey
Soccer
Lacrosse
Football
So please check out these new and updated stats. These have all been requested by members over the years and, as always, if you have ideas for more stats or more sports, please let us know. You can access the stats by logging in to your site admin and clicking the "Scores" link under "Schedules." Just add a roster for one of the stats-enabled sports and get some games on the schedule and off you go!
Actually, a couple of things look different. You may have noticed that eteamz made a few changes today and I wanted to say a few things about them.
First and foremost, the eteamz home page looks a little different. Some things remain the same: pretty much everything from the main navigation menus and up. We wanted to leave this so that those visitors that use those menus to get right to what they're looking for can still do so. With the rest of the page, we wanted to focus more on our web sites than we have been recently. After all, we're approaching 3 million teams that have been represented on eteamz sites so it's something that people come here looking for.
Couple things that aren't on the home page anymore are direct links to the Message Boards, Tournament Finder and the top sports pages. But fear not! Like I said, we left the navigation menu as is, so you can get to the message boards through the "Community" menu and the sports are still listed in the drop-down as well. Also, we added a sort of quick search tool where you can easily do a simple search for eteamz sites, tournaments or announcements.
Something else that was added today was a feature for our community members. All of the member-generated content (on the boards, in announcements, etc...) is unmoderated because the eteamz community has always been able to kind of police itself. Today, we've added a tool for members to do that even better. Any piece of member-generated content now has a "Report Abuse" link so members can more easily alert eteamz staff to content that the community feels violates the eteamz terms of use, or the spirit of the community.
As always, we'd love to hear all your feedback about these changes, or anything else going on with eteamz. If you have specific support-related questions, please continue to use the support forums on the site.
Hope everyone has a happy Thanksgiving and enjoys the long weekend next week. We've got a few more changes coming before the end of the year, so check back with the blog often to stay up to date with what's going on.
As many of you know, the two most popular Web browsers available today (Microsoft's Internet Explorer and The Mozilla Foundation's Firefox) have recently released new versions. I won't bother to get into a discussion (or more likely a rant) about the browser war. As far as eteamz goes, it's not much of a war with nearly 92% of all page views going to IE.
For now, most people are still using the "old" version of IE so, for the time being, we'll continue to focus the majority of our support on that browser. However, we encourage our users to upgrade to the newest versions of both browsers. You pioneers will be able to help us identify and fix any anomolies that may appear.
eteamz will continue to support the most commonly used browsers and we'll try to make sure that, during this transition time, we quickly address any issues that arise. We, and all future IE 7 and Firefox 2 users, thank you!
Those of you that have an eteamz site may be familiar with a feature called MessageCast. This is a tool that allows you to send text-to-speech phone messages to your entire team all at once. It's a great way to remind your team that there's a practice tomorrow or quickly let people know that there is a last minute schedule change. You don't have to sit down and spend half an hour calling everyone - MessageCast sends the message within minutes.
If you haven't tried it before, now is the perfect time to get started because T-Mobile is sponsoring a giveaway. Anyone with an eteamz site can log in to the admin and click on the "MessageCast" folder. You'll get some info about what MessageCast is and can choose to get started with a $5 credit! If you've already started using MessageCast, no worries - you are eligible for the credit, too.
As a special thank you to our PLUS subscribers, you can get an additional $5 credit for a total of $10 to spend on MessageCast calls. If you don't already have an eteamz site, get started now.
Some of you may know that November is National Novel Writing Month (sometimes known as "NaNoWriMo," or just "NaNo" for short). I learned of this fantastic idea last year when I came upon it searching the web and thinking about writing. And it means pretty much what it sounds like - take a month to write a novel, which they define as 50,000 words. Doesn't have to be perfect, doesn't have to be pretty, doesn't have to make sense - just write and write and write some more.
I gave it a try, but I'm sorry to say that I got to about 7,500 words and had to give up. But this year, I'm determined. At the very least, I'll beat my previous total, but if you've followed some of my posts here you might think I've got it in the bag.
One of the only ways to complete a novel in a month is with a lot of support. Folks get together for a "write-in" where they meet at a coffeehouse or someplace and just challenge each other to write about a certain topic or just cram as much writing into 15 minutes as possible or whatever. Having everyone together in a group is a surprisingly good motivating factor.
So what in the world does this have to do with eteamz? eteamz is a perfect place to build a website for a sports team, since that's really been the primary purpose. But eteamz is pretty flexible and you can do a lot of things with it. There's no reason why you can't use eteamz really for any group activity where you want to communicate, post information, create a schedule, have your own message board, post photos, etc....
NaNoWriMo is a great excuse to get involved with a writing group, and what better headquarters for your group than eteamz? Of all the dozens of sports eteamz offers, I don't believe writing is one of them... yet. But build a site and choose "Other" as your sport and off you go! Publish your calendar with your scheduled write-ins. Set up a message board to chat with your group. Post the latest news and photos from your recent write-ins. Heck, you can even publish your novel when it's done!
Well, the first day is almost over, so I better get to it. I really do hope you check it out and give it a try. I see new ways to use eteamz almost every day and thought I'd share this one with you. Good luck to everyone in November.
WC:427
First of all, Happy Halloween to all the ghouls and goblins out there in eteamz land. Hope everyone has a happy, fun, spooky and safe holiday.
Big Congratulations to the winners of the 5th annual eteamz Spooky Site Contest. The winners earned a free year subscription of eteamz PLUS. Be sure to check out these awesomely spooky sites and leave a comment in their guestbook.
eteamz underwent some minor maintenance this morning that I wanted to share with you. Back in the beginning of the year, we added several enhancements to the calendar/scheduling functions for member sites. One of those enhancements created the opportunity to add images to calendar, game and practice events, the way that images can be attached to news articles or locations. In some situations, some members were having difficulty removing images from those events after the event had ended. That issue has been addressed, and should no longer present an obstacle.
Another change that was made this morning was to the Web Address change process. eteamz PLUS members can change their site's URL at any time by clicking the "Site Appearance" folder in the admin interface and choosing "Web Address." Previously, this change could have taken up to 48 hours. But we have made some hardware upgrades that now allow us to make this change almost instantly. Some very large sites may still take up to 10 minutes, but that's still a savings of 47 hours and 50 minutes!
We have a couple more enhancements coming as the year winds down. There will be changes to the home page, the community boards, the site building process and to the site admin interface.
Once again, Happy Halloween! See you on eteamz.
Every few months, you probably take your car to a mechanic for some routine maintenance: change the oil, check the levels of various fluids, check the pressure in the tires, etc... When you take the car home you probably don't really notice much of a difference, but you know that if you don't keep up with it, you're asking for something to go wrong (and if you're like me, the bad things happen at the worst possible time).
A Web application is really no different. eteamz requires routine maintenance just like your car does. But the good news for you is that you don't have to take your eteamz site in because we handle all of the maintenance ourselves. Most of the time, you wouldn't even notice that we've made changes under the hood.
Of course, where car manufacturers can build new cars, once they build them they're pretty much hands off. With eteamz we're doing both parts, building in new features and enhancements AND doing the maintenance. Our challenge is to find the right balance between those two tasks. In the last couple of months, for instance, we've done some new features (the eteamz albumz Shutterfly integration) and some maintenance (moving servers to newer/faster network and some tightening up of the code on the eteamz home page).
In the next couple of months, we'll continue to try to balance the new features with the hidden stuff. And most importantly, I'll be keeping you up to date on what we're working on as it comes up. So, the next time you take your car in for an oil change, think of us here getting our hands dirty under the hood of eteamz.
Now that we're getting this blog thing going, I thought I'd put a post together about my experience with eteamz. We all have a story, and while many of them are probably pretty similar, I bet there are as many or more that are unique.
My story begins on a warm, late summer afternoon in Southern California. The sky was a clear blue, the ocean breeze kept the fresh air flowing, and the grass was green for my first practice as a fall ball coach. I played baseball growing up - I was on some good teams and some lousy teams. I got a chance at most positions but liked pitching and third base the most. It just so happened that a friend of mine has a son of baseball age and he needed a helping hand, so I was only too glad to hop on board.
Knowing that much of my life experience has been spent on Web development and not coaching baseball, I thought I would use my skills to help the team however I could while learning the ropes. I contacted my Internet Service Provider and found I could get a small amount of disk space on their web servers for a site of my own.
I had that sudden panic that comes from staring at a blank screen as I tried to decide where to start, but then I just buckled down and tried to get creative. I tried to think of what the layout should be, what links I might need, how I could incorporate the team colors, where to put photos - all the good stuff. After a couple of days, I had put together a nice little site. Of course, then there was a schedule change, so I had to go get the files from the FTP server, make the changes and reupload to the server. It was at this point that I realized this wasn't the most practical solution if I wanted to make updates to this site, which was kind of the point. But, it was what I had.
So I decided I'd take a break from that and go see what I could learn about coaching. I did a few Web searches and started to notice quite a few links to eteamz. I first came upon the coaching Tips and Drills for baseball. There were some really good ideas in there that I made note to try at the next practice. Then I found the message boards and saw coaches chatting about, well, coaching. Soon enough, I found that I could get a free Web site for my team and I thought I'd check it out.
Before I knew it, I had built a site on eteamz that was about 100x better than what I had just spent a weekend on. It already had the nice layout and pages for everything I needed and updating it did not involve FTP servers, which is always a win. Needless to say, my orignial site was quickly forgotten and eteamz was the new home of my team.
I was fortunate enough to find a job here and I couldn't have been more excited to work on a product that I already knew. Of course, once I got here and started digging in, I learned so much more that has made me even more passionate about eteamz. Now, several seasons later, I'm still here, I'm still coaching, and I still have my team's site on eteamz. My current Fall team is the White Sox. I don't generally do anything too fancy with my site, but I like to write up game summaries after each game. The parents tell me that they, and the kids, love to read their names in bold letters highlighting the good things they did that week.
So that's my story. I'm sure many of our members have fascinating stories, and I'd love to hear them, if anyone wants to share.
First of all, let me welcome you to the new eteamz blog! Let’s get right to the most important question – what is this? This blog is going to be your window into the inner workings of eteamz and the people that make it go. Not only will you learn a little bit about who we are, but you’ll hear and see some of the things we’re all working on.
I'm David Schwartz, Product Manager for eteamz. I’m responsible for keeping track of all the things that are going on with eteamz and figuring out what comes next. I’ll be using this blog to give you a peek at what’s coming down the line, maybe ask for feedback and opinions, and just generally share some thoughts about how things are going.
We'll continue to use the eteamz support boards to post critical information, but we want this to become your home for information about what's going on with eteamz. Support questions will continue to be addressed on those boards, through the message center and via email.
Alright then, let the games begin...
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