OT: My NBA side-project, Recapp'd

Post #1 » by **Kohanz** » Thu Feb 12, 2015 2:33 pm

Sorry for the OT post, but hopefully I'll make it interesting enough so that you don't consider it spam. I've been working on a website in my free time that basically uses NBA play-by-play to try to automate creating game summaries. I wanted something that I could use to check in the morning, at-a-glance, to see what exciting things happened league wide. Something faster than having to watch highlights, read recaps, and browse boxscores.

I have only shared it in a few very small communities thus far - this is the first time that I've opened it up to a larger audience (crosses fingers that server will handle load). So without further ado, I present Recapp'd

It's a work in progress, so I'd love your feedback on it. Check out the game summary for last night's Raptors game and you can see quite quickly that Lou was the only Raptor who really had a good night. Demar didn't have a great night, but shows up somewhat green largely by virtue of hitting the game winner.

On this page, you see all the different badges that are currently being awarded. I have a lot more badge ideas in the works, but have to be careful to strike a balance between information that's important and relevant and not cluttering up the UI with too many badges.

It may not be obvious, but mouse-over the badges (or tap them on your phone) to get more information about that "achievement".

I'm considering adding embedded highlights for particularly notable plays (e.g. game winning or tying shots) and also a visual indication of the game flow (a la popcornmachine.net).

I'd love to hear from you whether you find this site useful or interesting (or not), suggestions to make it even better, and if you like it, I would really appreciate any Twitter love (https://twitter.com/recappd) you can spare.

UPDATE:

I added video highlights - check it out: http://recappd.com/games/2015/11/18

Post #2 » by **Kohanz** » Thu Feb 12, 2015 2:41 pm

Just to add: I'm not really a web developer or designer (as you can tell). The design needs work, particularly on mobile.

Also, here's some gratuitous feedback I got from a C-list NBA celebrity (who am I kidding, I'm a big fan):

[tweet]https://twitter.com/jeskeets/status/562636945546018819[/tweet]

MoMoneyMoProbs · Post #3 » by **MoMoneyMoProbs** » Thu Feb 12, 2015 3:14 pm

Definitely an interesting take on the current boxscore and gives its a different feel to it.

Though I do agree the site/layout need to be cleaned up more. I'm not a developer, nor do I play one on tv, but I know a few guys who may be able to help you with this if interested. If you want to talk, give me a shout and I'll see if the guys I know would be interested.

djsunyc · Post #4 » by **djsunyc** » Thu Feb 12, 2015 3:15 pm

awesome - congrats.

TorontoSlaptors · Post #5 » by **TorontoSlaptors** » Thu Feb 12, 2015 3:33 pm

Great potential! I agree the layout is a bit too simplistic, but definitely a good twist on boxscores! Keep it up!

Post #6 » by **Kohanz** » Thu Feb 12, 2015 3:38 pm

MoMoneyMoProbs wrote:Definitely an interesting take on the current boxscore and gives its a different feel to it.

Thanks! Here's some Raptor-related trivia: Lou Williams leads the league in buzzer beaters (that are not game winners or game-tying shots).

MoMoneyMoProbs wrote:Though I do agree the site/layout need to be cleaned up more. I'm not a developer, nor do I play one on tv, but I know a few guys who may be able to help you with this if interested. If you want to talk, give me a shout and I'll see if the guys I know would be interested.

I'm always on the lookout for someone to partner with on this. It's not easy to find the right fit though. It's a passion project, not a paying position (and probably never would be), so the person working on it has to feel motivated enough to take their free time (which they could be using to make money by freelancing) to work on this. Even myself, as the creator, go through ups and downs in terms of being able to find time for the project. If you know someone that fits the bill, feel free to PM me or send them my contact info.

Also, to clarify my previous comment. I am a developer, just not a *web* developer - this project was partially to bring me up to speed on some recent technologies on that front.

arbsn · Post #7 » by **arbsn** » Thu Feb 12, 2015 4:25 pm

I really like this idea.

Keep it simple and it will be effective.

Improve the layout (make it more organized, keep it simple, more feng shui)

It would be a cool future project to upload database of all historical boxscores and so you can render all-time badges. You'd probably need some help but I could see you partnering up with Basketball Reference or one of the many basketball stats websites to get this data

ruckus · Post #8 » by **ruckus** » Thu Feb 12, 2015 4:59 pm

Really good idea. It gives you a sense of each game without a wordy recap. I can also see this being a useful fantasy-league tool.

Sherlock · Post #9 » by **Sherlock** » Thu Feb 12, 2015 5:23 pm

Love the idea. Very cool concept. I'd definitely use this.

Feedback:

1) As has been mentioned, improving the design and aesthetic would be helpful.

2) Not sure how easy/doable this is, but given that NBA.com has all of those little snipped videos of highlights from the game, it'd be very cool if you could click on the badges and go immediately to the video of the play. E.g., DeRozan gets a game winner badge last night. You click on it, and it takes you to the video of the shot on NBA.com. Or it could be to queue up highlights of the 3 or more alley-oops in a game, etc.

3) Is there a badge for someone who collects 3 or more blocks in a game? I saw the rejected badge and the block party badge, but there doesn't seem to be one for the player who actually does the blocking of the shot. (Unless I missed it!)

Post #10 » by **Kohanz** » Thu Feb 12, 2015 5:34 pm

Wow guys. I'm loving all the feedback (and watching the record number of visitors that are checking out the site)! Thanks so much. I really do appreciate all opinions: positive, constructive, even downright negative.

arbsn wrote:I really like this idea.

Keep it simple and it will be effective.

Improve the layout (make it more organized, keep it simple, more feng shui)

The recurring theme is that the design needs help. I, like most of you, have enough sense to realize that it could improve - but I'm just not sure how. If anyone has suggestions on that front (either improvements or what about the current design isn't working for them), feel free to blurt them out.

arbsn wrote:It would be a cool future project to upload database of all historical boxscores and so you can render all-time badges. You'd probably need some help but I could see you partnering up with Basketball Reference or one of the many basketball stats websites to get this data

Love that idea. Would need historical play-by-play, but I'm sure they have that going back at least a few years.

ruckus wrote:Really good idea. It gives you a sense of each game without a wordy recap. I can also see this being a useful fantasy-league tool.

That's exactly what I'm going for, so that's encouraging to hear. There are a few games for which there aren't really any badges that summarize the game. I think the most urgent need for badges is to provide more information on what happened in those games (was it a blow-out? see-saw battle? etc.)

Phil A Xiao wrote:Love the idea. Very cool concept. I'd definitely use this.

Feedback:

1) As has been mentioned, improving the design and aesthetic would be helpful.

2) Not sure how easy/doable this is, but given that NBA.com has all of those little snipped videos of highlights from the game, it'd be very cool if you could click on the badges and go immediately to the video of the play. E.g., DeRozan gets a game winner badge last night. You click on it, and it takes you to the video of the shot on NBA.com. Or it could be to queue up highlights of the 3 or more alley-oops in a game, etc.

This is a feature that's a high priority on my list. Great to hear that I'm not alone in wanting it. NBA is very fickle about embedding their videos, unfortunately. One alternative would be Youtube, but what I'm leaning towards is embedding Vines, since those play instantly without having to load a player. From what I can tell, for the biggest plays of the night, there is usually a decent Vine of it somewhere.

Phil A Xiao wrote:3) Is there a badge for someone who collects 3 or more blocks in a game? I saw the rejected badge and the block party badge, but there doesn't seem to be one for the player who actually does the blocking of the shot. (Unless I missed it!)

You didn't miss it - it definitely doesn't exist. This is a case where I'm trying to walk the balance of not having too many badges. Blocked shots is recorded in the box score, so you could see it on there, whereas having your own shots blocked is not listed in the box score (I don't think it's an interesting enough stat to list for every player). One of my philosophies initially has been to avoid badges that could easily be gleaned from looking at a basic box score. However, I realize that I'm violating that philosophy with things like the Double-Double badge. Thanks again for the feedback. When I integrate video highlights, I'll definitely give you guys a first look.

Buff · Post #11 » by **Buff** » Thu Feb 12, 2015 6:42 pm

Cool stuff,

Look, I'm also a developer (not web by trade, but getting much better at it) I might be able to help you a bit. PM if interested.

duppyy · Post #12 » by **duppyy** » Thu Feb 12, 2015 6:47 pm

Looks good.

Hope to see it grow!

Morse Code · Post #13 » by **Morse Code** » Thu Feb 12, 2015 7:01 pm

Awesome idea, and a great vision for it. I'm not going to give feedback because other's have mentioned the things I would say, and also you clearly have a good grasp on the concept and what's needed to make it popular. Overall it's fk'n awesome and you're a G Kohanz. Much respect.

arbsn · Post #14 » by **arbsn** » Thu Feb 12, 2015 7:56 pm

Another idea - if it's possible, maybe you could find a way to scan all the game recaps across multiple sites (espn, nba, yahoo, and the team websites) and see what the most repeated quote for each game is that way you can have "quote of the night"

Post #15 » by **Kohanz** » Thu Feb 12, 2015 8:00 pm

duppyy wrote:Looks good.

Hope to see it grow!

Morse Code wrote:Awesome idea, and a great vision for it. I'm not going to give feedback because other's have mentioned the things I would say, and also you clearly have a good grasp on the concept and what's needed to make it popular. Overall it's fk'n awesome and you're a G Kohanz. Much respect.

I'm generally not one to put myself out there, so this project has been a bit new for me in that sense. I have to say you guys are making my day with your kind words. I appreciate your appreciation

Post #16 » by **Kohanz** » Thu Feb 12, 2015 8:02 pm

arbsn wrote:Another idea - if it's possible, maybe you could find a way to scan all the game recaps across multiple sites (espn, nba, yahoo, and the team websites) and see what the most repeated quote for each game is that way you can have "quote of the night"

Yes! I've had a very similar thought previously. The idea would be to have all the players' twitter handles and then to scan for and include tweets that came within 1 hour or less of the game starting or finishing. There would of course have to be some manual moderation to make sure the tweets were relevant - but similar idea. The hard part is finding interesting stuff. To be honest I find 98% of what players say before and after games to be wholly uninteresting (not that I blame them - they get crucified if they say something worth noting).

chuckdevlin · Post #17 » by **chuckdevlin** » Thu Feb 12, 2015 8:13 pm

I suggest this website to help with the template of your site and organization.
http://www.blended-html.com/
It'll generate the source code for you

Post #18 » by **Kohanz** » Fri Feb 13, 2015 2:09 pm

One nice thing about the extended all-star break is I'll hopefully have a decent amount of time to implement some new features. Some of the things on the list (not sure how many I'll get to):

1) Better site update mechanisms - this is back-end and mostly transparent to users, but right now the site updates once nightly. If I add new badges or change the rules for existing ones, I basically have to wipe all the badges and award them again (on my slow server, takes a few seconds per game, so that adds up). I'd like to add mechanisms so that adding or updating a badge only requires re-processing that particular badge. Also would like to investigate how much optimization and server power I'd need to do live in-game updates. The code is set up to handle it, but it's just too slow right now.
2) Video highlights included with some badges - would have to involve some daily manual work, so that's a bit annoying.
3) Pre and post-game player tweets - ditto to 2
4) Better box-score page, including gameflow chart
5) More badges for "boring" games

... and I'm sure there's a lot more to think of along the way.

Post #19 » by **Kohanz** » Fri Feb 13, 2015 2:13 pm

chuckdevlin wrote:I suggest this website to help with the template of your site and organization.
http://www.blended-html.com/
It'll generate the source code for you

I appreciate the suggestion, but with all due respect, those kind of sites and templates are for non-developers. I'm using a UI framework called Bootstrap (which is used by many, many websites and was originalyl developed by Twitter) and a layout engine called Isotope, both of which are widely used in modern websites. The reason it's tough to lay out the games summaries in a "regular" or grid fashion (as shown in your link) is that the game summaries vary in size depending on how many badges they have. Solving this issue is not as simple as putting it into another static layout (Isotope gives me a dynamic layout at least - try resizing the window and see what happens). Anyway, this is becoming an OT developer rant...

Post #20 » by **Kohanz** » Fri Nov 20, 2015 3:28 am

Hi guys, it's been a while, but I finally found some spare time to work on this again. Read the initial post for an introduction.

The update is that I added the ability for recappd to include video highlight in the badges. I just finished this today, so it's not well-tested, but this page gives an example of how that looks. Mouse over the badges with the "film" icon to view the highlights. Should work on mobile as well, but you'll have to click the video to start.

http://recappd.com/games/2015/11/18

Please keep in mind that the site doesn't quite do real-time updates yet. It's possible, but I'd need to pay up for a beefier server and I haven't justified that to myself just yet. Right now it runs on a $5/month VM with limited computing power. At this point, it's more about catching up with the previous night's action than it is for live viewing anyway.

Let me know what you think and if you like it, please share it!