Spring/Summer Update #1 2026

 

I hope everyone is enjoying the start of the off-season. Summer plans are the best plans. I'm posting now, and possibly monthly over the spring/summer, to bring the few who look at this blog up to date on what I've been up to since the end of the season. 

February

• Finished and distributed 2026 League Yearbook.
• Rolled over the league site to 2026.
• Did routine new season site tasks, i.e., clearing rosters, resetting waiver $$, shuffling schedule weeks, etc.
• Fixed broken code affecting the Quick Links module.
• Reached out to MFL for help fixing a misspelling of a champion owner's name on the site plaque.
• Related to above... was reconnected to all of our MFL season sites, many of which had been disassociated from my account for various, mundane reasons such as a defunct email address. 
• I cleaned up those old league sites and added a header and/or year graphic to each one to easier ID them. See below for more details.
• Began the process of adding 'legacy' season sites on MFL. Once they 'reattached' my account to our previous seasons, I was also able to create sites for 1980, 1981, etc. These sites are limited in scope with a banner and scores; they will represent our complete history. 
• Used ChatGPT and Google AI to clean up the coding of Ed Hughes Tribute page and several other news blog pages.
• Began updating a long-abandoned project...an Excel workbook of scoring by franchise and owner from 1980 to date.

Old League Sites...    

For a couple of years, I've been aware that many of our pre-2020 MFL sites had fallen into disrepair, with bad links, missing graphics, and corrupted layouts among the problems. Part of that was due to MFL's policy of moving older sites off their original servers. And part of it was because much of my customization code/graphics had been stored on defunct or outdated sites, or on ones like my old Flickr account, that had gone from free to requiring payment. 

I wasn't really able to do much to fix the issues, with the older sites particularly, because in moving them to other servers, MFL had somehow dissociated them from my account. Or severed my ability to log in as commish. 

Then, a few weeks ago, I noticed that a championship owner's name from a decade or more ago was misspelled on the Champs plaque on our site. I went back to the year in question and found I had no ability to fix that. With the season over, I had the time to do something about it. I contacted MFL and, after a series of messages back and forth, they re-linked me to all our seasons. A few more messages and I was able to figure out how to get the name straightened out. 

With that done, I decided to clean up the sites, at least those with issues, most of which were seasons before 2020. I converted them all to a common, default layout and 'skin'. All of them have a new/updated/restored graphic on the front page to make them easy to ID since they otherwise look similar. In restoring the sites, I used the original banner or a higher-quality reproduction in cases where we had one. I created those that were lacking. 

Once I finished that, I took on the task of creating MFL sites for all of our seasons. The only real content they have is scores, the schedule, and standings to go along with season-appropriate banners.  It's tedious work to enter the data, but I enjoy finishing up a site. The sites do not have rosters, as the MFL database doesn't reach back to the 80s, but I've noticed that our 2003 site has FA listings for that season, so I may be able to load rosters for some of the later 'missing' season sites. Sites are in place from 1980 to 1983. That '83 site is incomplete, as I haven't yet tackled adding the schedule and results. 

If you are up for a stroll down memory lane, you can do so now, and the links to each are in an easy-to-find spot. I took our 'Yearly Best' page, which lists the team that had the highest scoring, the most wins, and the champ for all seasons. I linked the MFL sites to the year listed in the left column. You can get there through this Hughes News site. Just look in the right column for the link to 'Yearly Bests and Websites".