New Fantasy Football Signatures and DB Updates

FFL Signatures
In time for the coming NFL season (and it's counterpart the Fantasy Football League season) I have reworked the normal forum signatures available into a new section dedicated to Fantasy Football. These are slightly shorter and wider than the normal ones and they use a standard 8 jerseys rather than the maximum 7 used on the regular ones.

Each signature is 80px high and 600px wide, and created as a transparent .PNG file. There are currently more than 20 different backgrounds available in addition to the default version. Some include the words Fantasty Football, some don't, and a few label your players' positions.

As with the original signature maker there is a specific "collect jerseys" option that will start a session and allow you to create your signature while browsing and searching the database. When you've collected all 8 of your players simply hit the "Ready" button and you'll be taken back to the creation page.

You can find the FFL Signatures page here.

Site Updates
BR7 has, as of today, finished his massive undertaking of redoing, fixing and adding jerseys for the entire NFL. I'm not sure what the total was but I'm going to guess in the area of 4-5,000 jerseys in total. This includes the alternates as well as white jerseys originally missing from the database, as well as a number of throwbacks and anniversary uniforms.

We are planning on having all of the new players, trades and roster additions up before the season starts (hopefully). The deadline to cut teams down to 53 players is Saturday the 30th. Which will give us about a week to get them up and on the site. If we miss anyone feel free to let us know in the forum.


As per a previous post, all of the current NHL jersey fronts are know in the database. In addition arock12 has put a big dent into getting MLB jersey fronts onto the site. So far he's added nearly 100 including current and older jerseys.

The jersey fronts are located in the T-shirts/Jersey Fronts section of the site and specifically under the category of Jerseys located here. In addition searching for a team name will bring them up on the regular section of the site with the normal jersey backs. These can be used with signatures, avatars and wallpapers.

This is still a relatively new part of the site so I'm trying to improve upon the functionality of the search and display parts.

Other Stuff
The forum has had a couple small changes made. There is now an announcements section for news etc, the ranks images have been updated, jersey counts have been fixed, as well a couple of other things.

I am finally getting some work done on the tutorials that have been put aside for months. To start with will be some overall "best practice" type posts and overviews. Followed by some more detailed instructions in regards to the jerseys themselves. For now these will probably be done for Illustrator, with additional programs coming later.

Hats...

Site Forum and Message Board - Now in Beta

I have finally taken the time to install a proper message board/forum on the site and after checking things countless times in different browsers on both PCs and Macs it looks like it's go. For the moment I'm going to call it Beta until I know for sure that things are working as they should.

To start with there are 6 different categories: Widgets, Jersey Database, Sports Jerseys (the real ones), Sports (in general), Misc (for everything else), and if you are registered on the forum you will have access to one called Making Jerseys. The last one is members only as it will offer template downloads, tutorials, as well as help in the learning and creation process of making the jerseys to be used in the database on the site.

The other forums will be all access for everyone (though read only for those not registered) and will hopefully help people solve and get answers to commonly asked questions. As well as give people interested in the site and similar interests a place to discuss different topics.

The forum is powered by phpBB, which is an Open Source and free message board "program". I did my best to fit it into the template of the site - so you'll notice that it is a bit smaller than most forums you may be used to. If you find anything truly troublesome or just not working let me know and I'll try and fix it.

Anyone who is a member of another forum should have no trouble figuring out how the different functions work, however there is an extensive FAQ. One thing I did do that most sites don't is allow Flash. However if it ends up being an issue or over complicating posts I'll remove it.

For those interested in being the Premier Members (and getting the honorable rank as such) you can visit and register for the forum here:
The Forum

Hope to see and hear from you there - and as always with any questions or issues feel free to contact me.

Jersey templates now available and more info...

This has been a long time coming, but you can now download the templates that are used to create the jerseys in the database. (There is a new section here.) Currently there are 7 styles available and that covers nearly all of the jerseys in the database. I will be adding more over time to give people some additional options.

All of the downloads are available for Photoshop (all CS versions), Illustrator (CS, CS2 and CS3), as well as the open source vector format SVG. There are many programs available that can handle these three different file types, some are free such as Inkscape for vector formats and GIMP for pixel formats. If you have any problems with the files let me know. They should render in without any problems, however I am unable to predict their appearances in different applications other than those that I own.

The templates appear just as they do to the right. They include all of the layers and masks and I tried to label them as best I could. You will need some time and practice to figure out where to put what, but I hope to post some tutorials and example files in the not too distant future to make it easier to understand. The texts (name and numbers) are basic system fonts and are present to give a rough idea of where to put them.

You will find resources to help you with the creation process in the links page located here.

My hope is that by offering the templates people will have the chance to create jerseys that they'd like to see in the database and help add to the site. Feel free to contact me with any questions you might have.

Site updates, NHL rosters, behind the scenes....

As of now every player currently in the NHL has a home and away jersey in the database. Six weeks of work is finally finished (till the trades start rolling in...) You can click the images to the right to see what 1700+ jerseys looks like...in mosaic form.) What does this mean? Well, it means that I can start updating the older hockey jerseys in the database with a better vector template and bring things up to speed. This is the reason why the requests are currently closed, since I don't really have the time to fullfill them it's best to wait.

Over the next couple weeks I also plan to do some work on the actual site, not just the content, but the actual layout and setup of the sections. I hope to improve upon the current database to add some more options and simplify the output. As well as add some new areas, such as Top 100, user submissions, etc. All of the new widgets currently record which jerseys are used and shown, which allows for an overview of who's popular and who isn't. This is actually a pretty interesting thing to look at since it changes quite often.

There will be a couple of new widgets coming out in the not too distant future, one of them wil be a rather drastic overhaul of the rather ancient HockeyFan widget...it's time has come and gone.

And, finally, now that I have a couple minutes of spare time I can get to the contest for jersey number 10,000. That will be up sometime today.

About the New Site Widget

With the new site the original version of this widget became obsolete so for the sake of combining a number of ideas into one I made the new version more handy and functional.

The widget includes the news feed for the site, which is the same on the front page, including updates, additions to the database, new site features, and blog posts. The last of these appear in a slight orangish color. Clicking on the "boxes" will take you to either the blog or the main page for the site.

You can search the database, much like in the NHL widget, by entering search criteria which will give you a list of results including player's names, team, sport and jersey type (i.e. color). Clicking on the results will show you the jersey (seen in the pictures to the right) in a locker. From here you can either return to the search function or click display to show only the jersey.

The other feed within the widget is a list of the last of 50 jerseys added to the database, these are shown and function exactly like the search pane, you can click on them to preview and display them. Updating this list, and the news feed, is done by clicking on the round arrow in the bottom left hand corner of the widget.

I added two new features which I originally had considered adding to an updated version of the HockeyFan widget, however I thought they would be better suited here. One is the ability to show a completely random jersey chosen from the database, and the other is the ability to show a random jersey that corresponds with the current day. Alas, if you're bored, this will give you something mildly amusing to do...

Finally I put in the ability to simply enter a player ID number, these are found within the database on the site, if you want to easily show any particular jersey from the database without trying to sort through a search.

The Dashboard version and the Yahoo! version differ only slightly from one another. They both have mini jersey mode, and Dashboard has the ability to show random jerseys whenever the Dash is activated. I didn't add this to the Yahoo! because, in essence, it is always active and you can very simply trigger a new random number by clicking on the "shuffle" button. To revert from showing only the jersey in Dashboard you simply click on the widget to flip back to the main side. The Yahoo! version uses a small arrow button which is shown when you mouse over the jersey. The dock icon in the new version of Yahoo! widgets shows whatever the last jersey you displayed was, or the current one being displayed. This may make it a bit easier to locate the widget on your desktop.

You can download either version here: HockeyWidgets site widget

As always, please let me know if you find any errors or bugs.

The Dashboard version was updated May 6th to fix a couple of issues with the display. If you happened to download the first version (4.0) please download 4.01 as this will eliminate a couple of problems you may encounter.

Requests for the Database

Many people have sent in requests for the database and if they haven't appeared yet, well, I haven't forgotten about you. I have reformatted the site with the intention of being able to have more time to answer these and get more work done on adding to the database and improving the quality of the mini jerseys contained within it.

A lot of people want to know what the deal is with the lack of basketball jerseys and, fear not, they are coming. It has just taken a while to find a format for them that will work based on their size. I hope to start adding more of these in the near future,

At the moment there are a couple of priorities based on a number of different factors; the NFL rosters need to get done as I intend to put out an updated version of the NFL schedule widget before the summer. There will most likely be a CFL widget done at the same time, so look for CFL jerseys soon as well. NHL requests are something that I want to try and get done while the playoffs are going on, and after that the rest of the baseball teams.

Soccer/football jerseys are probably the most widely requested and I hope to get some time to start making more of these in the near future. The Premier League requests are on a bit of a hold because they will all be changing in the next month or so to a different font. There are some long standing requests for other teams that I'll try and work on when time permits.

Thanks for all the patience those of you who have been waiting and wondering.

To keep track of things I have provided a page with a list of all current requests. If you have made a request and don't see it on the list then feel free to submit it again. It's possible that I may have missed a couple.

The complete list is available here: Current Requests

About the new site

Well, I've been meaning to do this for a while now, and after a few days of work it's finally done. Essentially, what I have done is remove just about everything that was old and out of date. I've tried to streamline the site to keep it focused on the important things so that I can spend more time working on them, and less time trying to keep the site organized and up to date. All of the calendars and clocks etc that use jerseys to show the date have now been moved to a single page with all of the downloads. They are located here. In total there are over 200 of them. I don't plan on updating those that exist, nor making anymore as the jersey database sort of eliminates the need for specific teams.

The jersey database is now a bit more efficiant as you can preview the images without leaving your current search. And all of the other pages have received a bit of an update, including the contact and request forms which are no longer Flash and should function more reliably. The site RSS feed is now identical to that which is used in the site widget and will include all site updates, including additons to the database etc. I've reduced the total number of widgets available, since a number of them were no longer functioning and it wasn't really wise to have them offered anymore. What's left are the main widgets that I'm going to continue to update.

It is my hope that reducing the weight of the site will allow me to get more work done on requests, jerseys for the database, and spend more time creating more new widgets.

As always if you are having any problems with the site, or have found broken links due to the transfer, please let me know via the contact page.

A huge thanks goes out to DA who worked on the great fabric swatches and the stitching patterns used for the new site.