Following a half-hearted online debut in season 2004-05, Simon’s FFL.com really came to life in August 2005. In the early it days it wasn’t unheard of for a manager to overspend by a million or two and get away with it, but since then the FFL machine has gone from strength to strength, with minileagues, news feeds and even pretty little graphs to show how well your team is doing.Season 2006-07 will see the launch of the Fantasy Football Forum, as well as bigger and better prizes. As usual, we’ll be running FFL Cup/Plate knockout competitions, but if manager recruitment continues the way it has in the last two years, we’ll need to get our thinking caps on to deal with the extra teams (FFL Spoon anyone?). We know there’s plenty of you out there with ideas so let us know what you think about that or anything else you think would make the competition better!
£££
One handy thing about running the competition online is that we can boost the prize fund with a little help from advertisers, and YOU! The Google Ads you see at the bottom of every page earn money whenever someone clicks on one, so if you see one that interests you, or your just bored, CLICK IT! Every bit helps. As for the Amazon ads, you’ll need to click through to Amazon and actually buy something before we get any cash (see our Privacy Policy on this), but it’s generally a lot more than we’d get from Google. Either way, all money generated through advertising goes straight into the prize fund, along with your entry fees.
The science bit
Besides the basic platform of PHP/MySQL, certain parts of the site are powered by open-source third-party software written by some very clever people. Some of these include:
- CakePHP - rapid development framework for web applications
- Wordpress blog software has been integrated for Simon to post his chat, as well as other content on the site.
- bbPress - which powers the FFL Forum
- Google Chart - generates the graphs on the team and player pages.
- Akismet - spam protection!
- SimplePie - helps us to bring you news feeds from places like BBC Sport.
In addition to this, some of the graphical icons used on the site are courtesy of Fam Fam Fam
Cheers,
Iain
