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I'm very happy to announce the latest improvement to Batter's Box, courtesy of our technical guru Gwyn Price. On the sidebar, the formerly useless "20 Hot Topics" segment has been changed; it no longer shows the articles (active or ancient) in order of total comments. Instead, it lists the most recently active threads, plus the time of the latest comment!

This will save time when you visit the site. No matter when you last checked in, you'll be able to see what you've missed, at a glance. It's going to be especially helpful for Internet Explorer users, as the other trick we "borrowed" from Sean Forman of Baseball Primer works only in other browsers.

There will be a few growing pains with this feature; if you had bookmarked BB including the former index.htm home page, that link won't work and you'll get a 404 Error. The "new" home page is index.shtml -- however, if your bookmark just points to www.battersbox.ca, it should be fine. Also, there is no automatic refresh function yet, so don't be surprised if there's a delay before the list gets updated. We have put in a request to Rogers, our Web host, to automate it every five minutes, but that won't take effect for a few days. For now, the BB authors will take turns running the update script manually.

I'm so happy with this, I'm going to move it higher up on the page. Bear with us if there's some unusual activity or the site seems a bit slow; it does take some time to rebuild Greymatter after making changes. Awesome work, Gwyn. We're doubling your salary.
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Coach - Wednesday, April 02 2003 @ 05:49 PM EST (#91613) #
OK, it's only working from the Home page so far, but be patient. And ignore the phantom comment on the Hall of Merit thread; that was just my test to see if "old" threads could be revived. They can, but even after I deleted the test comment, that thread moved up to the top of the "active" list.

That's something else I expect will result from this new wrinkle -- threads will remain active longer. If a new comment is posted on an old thread, it will be obvious, instead of being lost in the constant influx of new material from our prolific contributors.
_Jacko - Wednesday, April 02 2003 @ 06:20 PM EST (#91614) #
Gwyn Price. That name rings a bell.

Former GM of the Cardiff Dragons?

jc
Coach - Wednesday, April 02 2003 @ 06:28 PM EST (#91615) #
To manually refresh the Hot Topics list, click here. Ignore the resulting page; you can click Back on your browser. When you refresh the Home page, the sidebar should be up to date.
_Gwyn - Wednesday, April 02 2003 @ 06:53 PM EST (#91616) #
Jacko

Indeed! Formerly and currently of the Cardiff Dragons in the JRRAL.
_Jacko - Thursday, April 03 2003 @ 12:21 AM EST (#91617) #
Hey, long time no see.

I used to be the GM of the Upper Canada Rebels back in the late 90's.

Does Sparky "King" Banaian still run the league?

jc
_Gwyn - Thursday, April 03 2003 @ 12:24 AM EST (#91618) #
Hi Jacko,

Sparky is still playing, but Pete Faux took over the commish duties.
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