Last night I got into a fascinating discussion… how does scheduling for Major League Baseball work? You have to play each team in your division so many times, and you have to play teams in your league so many times, and then you have to fill in remaining games from the other league. There are dates when a team has to play at home – for example, you would want the Washington Nationals to be at home for the July 4 game, and you’d probably want the Yankees and Mets at home on September 11. Perhaps the Texas Rangers can’t be at home August 13 because Justin Bieber is having a concert in their stadium, that kind of thing. Then there’s logistics. You wouldn’t want a road trip to the Los Angeles Dodgers, then the Miami Marlins, and then the San Diego Padres, because it would be a waste of jet fuel. As someone who programs computers for a living, I nerd out on stuff like that. I would love to see the scheduling algorithm. “I bet in the 1940s before computers, the schedule took weeks to get done,” I said. “Now you can probably open an app on an iPhone and it’ll spit out the complete MLB schedule in two seconds.”
Well, as it turns out, there’s an ESPN 30 for 30 about that very topic. The Schedule Makers
Big night at the Redbirds tonight, as they play Las Vegas at 6:35 (gates open at 5:00). First 1500 in the gate get a free fidget spinner from Prarie Farms Dairy. It’s Princess and Pirate Night with Moana, Elsa, Jasmine, and other characters, a costume parade, and a horse and carriage for photos. There’s a special ticket ($17 field box, $20 dugout) that includes your choice of a pirate eye patch or a princess tiara. Live music by Jamie Baker Duo in the plaza before the game with select $2 draft beers. There will be fireworks following the game.
Hmmm… looking through the press release for this homestand, it looks like next Friday night will be Cougar City at AutoZone Park. Details to come.
I don’t know if I have any fellow webmasters who read this blog, but if I do, I want to recommend a tool I’ve been working with lately: Cludo. It takes search on a website to an entirely new level. It lets me create banners for featured search results, and the banners can even include video. I’ve been using banners this week to intercept searches for names of cities and returning links to everything we offer in that city. It understands that play, played, playing are basically all the same search. It can handle misspellings. It can let me define which pages I want to come up first, second, etc. for particular keywords and key phrases. I can boost particular areas of the website that are the most relevant. It has analytics including ineffective searches (users didn’t click on any of the links) and searches with zero results, so I can find opportunities to create content my users are looking for. I thought nobody could beat Google Site Search for search within a website, but I was wrong. Cludo takes things to a whole new level.
Even better, they did all the implementation for me. They worked for a few days then sent me a PDF. Put this code here, put that code there, and boom, I had a working search box. No CSS to tinker with, no Javascript functions to write, no XML or JSON to parse. I’ve been using Cludo for two weeks now and am already a huge fan.
It’s very possible that a bipartisan bill strengthening sanctions on Russia will land on the Trumpster’s desk for his signature this coming week. That will put Mr. Tangerine Man in a bind: If he doesn’t sign the bill, he pisses off his own party. If he does sign the bill, he pisses off his new best friend Vlad Putin. By the way, the president threw another tantrum on Twitter this morning.
That’s it for this post. Off to Bardog. With an Excessive Heat Warning today, I don’t see myself walking very far from home.