May Update...a LONG one!

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How I Spent My Summer Vacation...

Last time I posted here I mentioned that I was adding league sites for the seasons we spent prior to our first year on Myfantasyleague.com (2003). I also wanted to 'fix' our established sites since quite a few had degraded over time due to 'link rot' and lost graphics.

 

It was a long, and sometimes tedious process, but it was also fun and I have it complete. Read on to see what I was able to do. First up, the 'sites that never were':

Before we go any farther.. the sites are all found by clicking the 'Yearly Bests and Websites' link on the right.

MFL allowed me to create a site for each of these seasons. They don't have player databases going back that far so what I was able to do was somewhat restricted. Each of those seasons uses a common 'skin' (they all look alike) and I was able to do the following:

->Create a banner: This was something I've had a lot of fun with. I tried to be era 'appropriate' with these. When I could I included Hughes News graphics from the corresponding year. The 1995 banner I added to the top of this post is an example of that. In other cases I built it around a player or two from the title winning club like the '92 Steve Young banner, or I just created something that I liked for no good reason.

->Season Notes: From the scores and standings, as well as the old Hughes News issues, I came up with a few lines covering what made each season unique. Changes to the league makeup, team shuffles, rule changes, quirky scoring weeks, that sort of thing. 

-> Scores, the schedule, and final standings: Entering the schedule, team names and weekly scoring was the 'drudge work' part of all this. But in doing it, and cross-checking the data, I was able to fix some errors I found in the records I was keeping and in what I produced for the Yearbook. I even found at least one correction I needed to make in a Hughes Bowl game score. Luckily none of the 'fixes' changed a game winner at any point. 

I also found that I had screwed up the 1983 schedule (see below) but it's too late to do anything about that now. LOL  Live and learn. 

->Hughes News Examples: Each season has a link near the top of the page to 'Hughes News' which sends you to the Campionship Edition for that season as well as some sample pages of each year's newsletter. Some seasons have one, others have several. Many of the sites have Stat Sheets as well as the newsletters. Since I used the same style of spreadsheet stats for long stretches I didn't include them for each year. 

It was fun to go back through the archives and trace the evolution of our communication over the decades. Handwritten/typed with 'rub-on' headlines and letterheads through 'web-posted only', email-only seasons, etc. I'd forgotten stuff like using Quattro Pro, WordPerfect, 'The Commissioner' and assorted other programs to run this thing and get the info out to everyone. I had several flashbacks to using Macintosh desktops and workstations at UH Intramurals and at school in Baytown, and that bulky Gateway 2000 386-SX aka my dear, departed first home machine. (with 2MB of RAM, and 40MB hard drive! LOL). 

->Missing/Upgraded Champs Editions: In some seasons, particularly in the early 1990s and early 2000s, I sent the majority of  'newsletters' as emails, or as online, text-only pages. Some title winners during that era never received a 'proper' Hughes News Champs Edition. I've tried to rectify that by putting something more graphical for those teams. These are also  part of a different project I'm working on. I've done 5 or 6 as of this writing and I'm planning on doing a few more this summer. In most cases I've included the original 'News' (such as it was) along with the new, updated version. These are all accesible through the season site link as noted above and the Champions News Editions link to the whole history of these newsletters over on the right. 

The 1992 Champions Edition is shown below. Originally that season had a pretty 'Plain jane', text-only version and I thought I'd bring it into the modern era. The text shown is the original text with some spelling/grammar corrections.  The photo is one from the 49ers' 1992 season that I ran through an AI site and I loved the way it came out, (We will discuss AI below). if you look at Bobby's title season site you will see this and the original.

->Misc. stuff: the Hughes Bowl box score, the champ's helmet and the approriate playoff bracket: Both are dsplayed on each year's site. 

We began with MFL online in 2003. All our league sites remained up and visible but many had gotten 'unlinked' from my account which meant I had no way to fix anything that had gone sideways. Banners and other graphics which had been housed on my old Flickr or Photobucket accounts were no longer visible and modules with bad/outdated info/links couldn't be removed. 

That finally changed when I asked the MFL folks to allow me to access our 2011 page so I could correct a misspelled owners name and have the plaque look more, well, professional. They were kind enough to walk me through that AND they returned all the league sites to my account.

So regaining those sites has allowed me to reinstall some banners. In many cases I recreated the originals or created a new one. I applied the same ‘skin’ and module arrangement that I used for the new league sites to be consistent. I also added a helmet for each champion. 

And, again,  the Champ's H-News is linked near the top as in the 'new' sites. A few other Hughes News pages are there as well. But, since we were doing things mostly online and eventually via the blog, they are almost all just text-based newsletters. By about 2006, give-or-take, we were totally on the blog and for some of the years all I was producung was stat stuff. I've tossed some examples of those under the Hughes News links as well.

All the stats, rosters, etc. are still available via the regular menues, unlike the '80-'02 sites mentioned above.

After some debate with myself, I decided to 'convert' these to the standard, simple template, at least through 2024. I figured that as we move along I'd leave the previous season site intact for one full season. This also cuts down on the bandwidth for TOS who provides and hosts the new template and all the scripts that make it work.

Using AI... this is certainly becoming a contentious subject as of late. And I understand the debate. No need to get into that here. My use of AI in relation to this project was limited to:

• Tweaking some images of players so that they appear in EHFL uniforms. 
• Having some legacy images 'cleaned up' or enhanced for aesthetics. Old Mac and crude pixel art needed to be fixed.
• Adding color to the background on some of the banners I created. A real timesaver and much neater than I could do.
• Correcting or suggestions for the code I used to building or tweaking some tables and pages. I could spend an hour hunting down a missing ">" but Chat GPT can do it instantly. 
• Pulling the text from old News Champs editions that had been converted to image files. I used the text to create the new replacement Champs editions. MS is abandoning/cratering Publisher this fall and I'm racing to save a lot of the work I did with it. 

I'm also in the process of creating new helmets for our teams which I may or may not use. AI has had a hand in that. 

The Championship Plaque... the site-based one (auto-created by MFL each season) went FUBAR when I added the new sites so I created a new one from scratch. You can view it via the link in the right-hand column. AI helped with fixing the coding I struggled with to align the 'plates' and size the text correctly. 

And finally...this was a really fun project that turned into way more work than I anticipated when I began it. But I enjoyed it, truly a labor of love. 

I also love feedback and corrections! Please check out as many of the new/old yearly sites as you can, especially those that represent your title(s), and let me know what you think.

Can we all agree that the Statute of Limitations is up on a mistake I made 43 years ago, scheduling the 1983 season? The graphic below is the 'Schedule Validation' page that I generated after entering the schedule into the new/old 1983 season website. Click it, and the problem is evident.

(Click to Enlarge)

We were a twelve-team, two-division league. The idea was that a team played the other five division rivals twice, and four games against teams from the other division. It was supposed to be four games against four different opponents. 

As you can see, the Heroes, for example, played three different Wice teams, with two against the Giants.  Several other teams had the same scheduling anomaly. The Bombers, the '83 champs, played two games against both the Nats and the Blizzard! Yikes!

If you stuck with me here and read all the way through, thanks. Again, comments/corrections/criticisms and all very much welcome. Enjoy the rest of the break. See everyone soon.

-Commish