Well that didn’t take long.
When I talked about our coverage plans for this year, I said that we often can see ten articles per day on the site during the season.
Yesterday was the first day of the minor league season, and sure enough, we had ten articles go up on the site.
Our Morning Report. A weekly column from Matt Gajtka. The season preview for the West Virginia Power. The overall season preview. A featured article on Steven Brault by Alan Saunders. The return of the Prospect Watch, and the Pirates’ Live Discussion.
Those were all planned, and a few roster moves padded the stats to get us to double digits.
I don’t expect things to tone down going forward. The new site design was for the purpose of being able to handle such days on a regular basis, and it kept things in order on the home page yesterday.
We’ll be back at it today with more.
We Want To Hear From You
One of the things you guys have asked for has been a better arena for discussion on the site. That includes weekly chats, and a place to talk about the games.
We’ve done chats in the past, and you guys wanted it to be a regular thing. That will now be a regular thing on Friday afternoons. And since today is Friday, you can join me later today for a Q&A on the site.
Alan and Matt are handling the MLB coverage on the site, and one of the things they wanted to do this year was to have a live game discussion with writers interacting with our readers. We’ve been trying that out this week with the home games, and the response so far has been good for the unannounced feature.
One of the things I love about this site is the discussion. You go anywhere else, and the discussion quickly degrades to one of the same two or three topics, either complaining about ownership/management, complaining about specific moves that are two or three years old, and so on.
You don’t see that here. Those topics are brought up, but more often than not, good baseball discussion wins out. We have smart baseball discussion here, with readers who actually want to engage in the subject matter, whether that’s a mechanical adjustment for a pitcher, the development of a lower-level player, or the progress of a young player in the big leagues. Most importantly, the wide range of topics we discuss here don’t get whittled down to the same two or three arguments on a daily basis.
I like that, and we want more of it. So join us in the weekly chat. Join us in the game discussions. Join us in the Prospect Watch (when we get the live feature working). And feel free to chime in on any other article.
Site Updates
We’ve been making a lot of changes and fixes to the site over the last week or two. There’s the new site design. The app returned. We added a new security certificate. We fixed the app after the new certificate broke it for a few days. And then there’s a bunch of stuff you don’t see behind the scenes.
The key things for this week:
**The app is good to go. If it’s not working for you, check for an update in the store.
**If you ordered a paperback copy of the book, they printed last week and shipped at the end of the week. Most were arriving yesterday or today.
**The next fix will be to update the live stats and box scores on the Prospect Watch. The code for the Prospect Watch still doesn’t work in the app, but that’s a longer term fix. App users will still get the summary for now, but won’t have the stats yet (unless you use your mobile browser).
Sponsorship Info
We’re looking to add some sponsors to the site this year. We’ve got two corporate level sponsorships available, along with smaller sponsorships for individual article features and categories. Email tim@piratesprospects.com if you own a business and would like to partner alongside our coverage.
