Since 1997 I’ve ran a Fantasy football league with some good friends. I can still remember the day sitting in Kevin’s basement, being a Junior in high school, and picking my first fantasy football team. At the time, fantasy football wasn’t too popular and I didn’t really understand the concept. I drafted two QBs with my first two picks since there was a bit of confusion with the rules.
This was the day of Herman Moore, Barry Sanders, and my first pick ever, Jeff Blake (old Cincinnati Bengal QB throwing to WR great, Carl Pickens). Man, just talking about these guys makes me sound old.
Over the past 13 years, not only the players drastically have changed, but so has our league. We now have the annual draft at the Bolenbaker’s, and Mrs. B makes some of the most amazing food you could ask for: potato salad, homemade icecream sandwiches, homemade meatball sandwiches, and much, much more, including her famous butterscotch chocolate chip cookies.
We’ve had our fair share of league and rule changes. Kevin used to print out hundreds of pages each week and deliver us the point totals in high school. When everyone left for college, I developed the league’s website as a school project. And since then the site has morphed into a few different forms. It went from a static HTML site, to a PHP site, to a few cool new features, and now I’ve finally put the entire thing in WordPress.
This has been a side project of mine for the past year, and with the new season starting, I was running behind on schedule. Finally, this weekend, I got everything to where I needed it to be and launched www.ffbl.net.
The new features from the last revision include the profile section which shows a team’s best picks over the years and includes an All-Star team. The message board is now available on each page. I also added some WordPress functionality with the RSS feed on the home page as well.
The reason why I added it to WordPress is so I can update it quickly, so hopefully this will make my life easier. We’ll see how it works.
Either way, it’s done, and I’m burnt out of WordPress for now. I think my next project will be to add some features to this site once I get motivated again.
Until then!