SF
Mako Shark
Well that title's been used a few times over the years, but hopefully not again for a while yet.
You will notice a lot of changes from how the site looked last season, and from the previous version released at the end of last season. Some changes and updated features are still in progress. There may be some temporary problems while I update settings on the site now that it is moved to the host server.
The site has now jumped on the vBulletin bandwagon, which many of you are probably familiar with. While this means there is now a forum on the site, that was not an objective of the re-design. Personally I think League Unlimited and Sharks Finatics have that very well covered, with good communities there already. I couldn't guarantee the server (and the bandwidth and disk space) could cope with a heavily used forum anyway. Instead, the forum is mainly aimed at making organisation, management and searching of the varying content on the site easier, from news to match reports and images. It also allows the introduction of a fairly familiar, and easily adaptable interface. The style used is currently quite basic and 'blocky', but new styles can be introduced in future reasonably quickly.
As above, there is a good chance that early on, there may be some vBulletin settings, or cookie issues that need to be fixed up.
(Note: An occasional error related to the database/memory is occurring. Hopefully it will be fixed soon with help from my host, but in the meantime, just refresh your browser and the page should load.)
The other major change is that the site will now cater for different grades - NRL (i.e. First Grade), Premier League, Jersey Flegg etc - and different competitions - e.g. Premiership (i.e. the regular season), Trials, or mid-week Cups - when recording and presenting statistics. It may be a little confusing at first, and it has made it harder to choose where each link on the site should go, but I hope it will make sense over time... and it will continue to be improved until it does. Both teams can also be listed for a match now as well. The changes have meant most of the statistics code has been rewritten, and there are more complex situations to deal with, so if you notice any errors please let me know.
Please see this thread for more information on the statistics.
Having the different grades doesn't necessarily mean that this season there will be full team lists and scores for every game for every grade, as can be seen already this year. While it would be nice, the main focus will still be on the main competition - the NRL Premiership - but catering for the different grades allows some more flexibility in future.
I'll have to see how the speed of the site goes. While I having been keeping a careful eye on page serve times during development, some of the statistics pages are quite complex, and some things might still be slow. This could also include the Javascript menus on the left side of the statistics and home pages. These use AJAX, which means that menus can be loaded dynamically (e.g. the full match list, divided into years, rather than loading every single match into the one dropdown menu on every page load), but even that may be a bit slow, and it will be removed if it is frustrating to use. The site does use more Javascript than previously. I will try to improve it more in the future for those who can't enable Javascript.
In regard to this site's objectives, there will probably be less of an emphasis on images etc than there used to be. This is somewhat inevitable as there are now thousands of images around, and the major rugby league sites are archiving them better, treating them with more importance and displaying older photos more regularly. It would also be impossible to keep track of them all, so is probably better handled in the distributed manner of the Internet. I will still try to add screencaps after particular games though.
And one final issue, some aspects of the site, particularly statistics, are now probably best viewed with a wider screen resolution than previously. Sorry for those with older monitors, but there is just too much information to fit in the statistics tables.
Well, apart from all those issues, I hope you find the site useful, and hope even more that this will ultimately turn into a good season for us Sharkies.
If you have difficulties with registrations, passwords etc, or any other error reports, please email me at:
You will notice a lot of changes from how the site looked last season, and from the previous version released at the end of last season. Some changes and updated features are still in progress. There may be some temporary problems while I update settings on the site now that it is moved to the host server.
The site has now jumped on the vBulletin bandwagon, which many of you are probably familiar with. While this means there is now a forum on the site, that was not an objective of the re-design. Personally I think League Unlimited and Sharks Finatics have that very well covered, with good communities there already. I couldn't guarantee the server (and the bandwidth and disk space) could cope with a heavily used forum anyway. Instead, the forum is mainly aimed at making organisation, management and searching of the varying content on the site easier, from news to match reports and images. It also allows the introduction of a fairly familiar, and easily adaptable interface. The style used is currently quite basic and 'blocky', but new styles can be introduced in future reasonably quickly.
As above, there is a good chance that early on, there may be some vBulletin settings, or cookie issues that need to be fixed up.
(Note: An occasional error related to the database/memory is occurring. Hopefully it will be fixed soon with help from my host, but in the meantime, just refresh your browser and the page should load.)
The other major change is that the site will now cater for different grades - NRL (i.e. First Grade), Premier League, Jersey Flegg etc - and different competitions - e.g. Premiership (i.e. the regular season), Trials, or mid-week Cups - when recording and presenting statistics. It may be a little confusing at first, and it has made it harder to choose where each link on the site should go, but I hope it will make sense over time... and it will continue to be improved until it does. Both teams can also be listed for a match now as well. The changes have meant most of the statistics code has been rewritten, and there are more complex situations to deal with, so if you notice any errors please let me know.
Please see this thread for more information on the statistics.
Having the different grades doesn't necessarily mean that this season there will be full team lists and scores for every game for every grade, as can be seen already this year. While it would be nice, the main focus will still be on the main competition - the NRL Premiership - but catering for the different grades allows some more flexibility in future.
I'll have to see how the speed of the site goes. While I having been keeping a careful eye on page serve times during development, some of the statistics pages are quite complex, and some things might still be slow. This could also include the Javascript menus on the left side of the statistics and home pages. These use AJAX, which means that menus can be loaded dynamically (e.g. the full match list, divided into years, rather than loading every single match into the one dropdown menu on every page load), but even that may be a bit slow, and it will be removed if it is frustrating to use. The site does use more Javascript than previously. I will try to improve it more in the future for those who can't enable Javascript.
In regard to this site's objectives, there will probably be less of an emphasis on images etc than there used to be. This is somewhat inevitable as there are now thousands of images around, and the major rugby league sites are archiving them better, treating them with more importance and displaying older photos more regularly. It would also be impossible to keep track of them all, so is probably better handled in the distributed manner of the Internet. I will still try to add screencaps after particular games though.
And one final issue, some aspects of the site, particularly statistics, are now probably best viewed with a wider screen resolution than previously. Sorry for those with older monitors, but there is just too much information to fit in the statistics tables.
Well, apart from all those issues, I hope you find the site useful, and hope even more that this will ultimately turn into a good season for us Sharkies.
If you have difficulties with registrations, passwords etc, or any other error reports, please email me at:
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