You thought I’d forgotten about TwitterLeague didn’t you?? Well I have been working every evening for the past few weeks working on a complete site refresh and adding a bunch of new features!

Site refresh
The idea behind the refresh was to bring forward some of the XHTML I had been using and overall reduce the amount of XHTML being used, whilst keeping the same content.

The content therefore has stayed the same, apart from when I have written about new features and updated the about/help pages.

Leagues
You might have noticed that the leagues look a bit different. This is partly to match the refresh and partly to modernise the the leagues work. Personally I love the way the leagues look now, but I would say that wouldn’t I! The old league embed code still looks looks the same, the new embed code has the new look.

New features
Where do I start? There are new features all over the place. But I can split them down into two major sections.

Leagues:

• New look leagues
• Order by more data than just followers:
  • following
  • updates
  • ratio
  • signup date
  • alphabetical
• New look “view league” page (example)
• Customisable embed code
• Customisable “view league” page

API

• Made into an API instead of “league XML feed”
• More data in the leagues API
• Ordering method so you can create an interactive league
• Full API documentation

True OAuth integration
I now have a better understanding of OAuth and because of that I have made the integration with the site a lot better and is now much, much more reliable. You can “Sign in with Twitter” and it will take you to the Twitter.com site, let you login and then say you give TwitterLeague access to your account, you will then be taken back to TwitterLeague and into you “My Account” section. This happens evening if you have never had an account with TwitterLeague before.

Sponsorship opportunities
Because of the new format it opens the way for sponsorship of pages and slots like the home page “featured league” section and the “collection” page. At the moment these are sites that I know, have interest in or am involved with. Call it lame self-promotion! If you want to sponsor a section please contact me using the contact page.

Overall I think the site has come along in leaps and bounds. But without you, the people who use TwitterLeague, the site would be nothing.

If you have any feedback please put it into the Feedback Forum.

Thanks

Ollie

You might have seen my blog post a month or so ago stressing the fact that I do not store any users details like username and passwords. I only store a user ID that Twitter can use to recognise who you are.

But now I have taken it a step further and used a system that Twitter is testing called OAuth. OAuth allows you to give applications access to you account, but you don’t have to type in your username or password. What happens is you click the new “Login” button will take you back to Twitter where you can grant access for TwitterLeague to get your UserID.

So it should make users feel happier about using TwitterLeague.

P.S. At the time of writing this Twitter.com has had quite a few Fail Whales which might cause you to get an error message.

It is finally here. 7 days after I started this project, it is now time for launch. Obviously there will be the odd bug or two so please use the contact form to report these.

The site started off quite small but has grown in features to include ideas that only came into my head yesterday and the day before. Including the XML feed for each league.

The best thing to do is log in and check it out. As the site is in beta you do need an invite code so follow twitter.com/ollieparsley and you will probably get one.

Thanks

Ollie

So it is tradition with sites I develop to write a post entitled “the first post”. Although I am sure that there are others out there that do the same.

Well the idea popped into my head a few days ago after looking at a site that does something with Twitter follower counts and widgets etc. That’s when the concept for TwitterLeague popped into my head.

To me I do my sites for me and then want other people to use it and see what they think.

At the moment all the domain names and subdomains are being activated, there is a MySql database ready for data to be input. I am pretty familiar with the Twitter API, which is key to this project.

Subscribe to the RSS feed for updates! There is also a Twitter account you can follow. Unfortunately Twitter doesn’t allow the word “twitter” in their usernames so I had to make the username “TwitLeague”.

Twitter.com/twitleague

Thanks

Ollie