Every year I go into this crazy programming mode getting ready for little league. There’s some thing I see that I think, “Hey I can automate that!” Three years ago it was the Boundary Checker. Just enter your address and it would use google maps to tell you if you fell inside the Tempe South Little League Boundary. Last year it was my draft application. A stand alone web page that sorted players for the draft. I loaned it to one coach this year and of course it crashed (sigh), but it was a nifty bit of code. Based on Tiddlywiki – a stand alone wiki app, the Draft Tool could even save itself to your hard drive. But to update it for each years draft you needed to be a programmer. Not very user friendly.
This year was the biggest project I’ve undertaken yet. I created a wordpress plugin to allow coaches to log into our website and reserve their fields. A combination of jQuery based Javascript and wordpress php libraries, it’s a pretty slick application, if I do say so myself. I just hope it works. I’ve tested it, but there’s nothing like users to tell you what you did wrong. If we get through this season without too much heart burn, I’ll turn it loose to the WordPress community. Usually though these things aren’t all that useful because they are so specific to the league you run. As soon as you try to make it generic, that’s when it stops being a hobby and it turns into a real job.
But the main reason I wrote, this is I discovered (through one of my favorite websites lifehacker) an extremely cool tool called Jing. (see jingproject.com). This little screen capture tool runs on the PC or Mac and it not only lets you grab screens and annotate them – you can also grab Flash movies of you using a program and add audio as well. This let me create a small video of how to actually use my new reservation tool. And it only took like 2 minutes. It’s hard to believe the “free” stuff that’s available these days. It certainly helps guys like me give back to the communities we love so much. I could never have done this stuff for Tempe if not for WordPress, jQuery, Google, Jing and I’m sure many other projects and teams I’ve forgotten about.
I can’t wait for the season to start. This is going to be fun.
It’s amazing the free stuff on the internet
Posted by Scott
on February 18, 2010
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