Tuesday, October 17th, 2006
MyESPN Beta: Ajax Portal
Category: Showcase
Cody Swann of the ESPN team let us know about the new MyESPN Beta, a rich portal for ESPN content built on Behaviour/Prototype.
It all works very cleanly. When you signup it walks you through configuring your portal in a way that is much nicer than showing you an empty/sample page to “go and tweak”. You can put in your zip code and it instantly comes back with your local teams, and one click later and the team news is added.
It is also interesting that settings are mearly portlets themselves.
Check it out and let us know if you have any feedback. Cody wants to know what you think.
4.3 rating from 13 votes
The flexible (scaling) image is great, very nicely done. The site scales down to fit within an 800×600 resolution as well which is excellent, and the user can change their font size. (And there’s only one table that I saw inline in the markup! ;)) Nice work!
Site looks great! Espn has been in the Ajax world for a long time, I can remember when they first integrated it online, they changed their scoreboard page from using “meta refresh” to real-time update via Ajax. I believe this was in or around 2002, maybe before. It would be great to see a write up of their usage of Ajax over the years.
They were also an early adopter of XHTML/web standards, a nice thing to see on a major web site, and (if I recall correctly) sIFR and related Flash text replacement techniques.
I love ESPNs willingness to explore new uses for web-based technologies. From the updating scoreboard, to being one of the first major sites to run with standards, its fun to watch what they’re going to do next over there.
As for MyESPN, while it’s well-executed, the quantity of information presented is a bit overwhelming. I have all my local teams up on the page, and while I can tell it to not display stories for each one, I’d rather they give me the option to make it a little more like the “quick” my espn they have on the right sidebar of most pages and only display one-line headlines.
Overall though.. good work…
JavaScript - 483 kb (20 Files)!
They seem to have some problems now? Fails in IE and Firefox
Functionally doesn’t work in Safari
I like it … but I could do without the HUGE banner right at the top of the page. I have no issue with advertising, but that banner is huge and is right in your face.
Actually the more I play around with it the more I don’t like it. My issue is that it’s hard to stay focused and read the thing. I have a large monitor, but every module is that same color, and the text just blends into each segment. I do like they large number of themes they have, maybe a different theme would help in this regard.