Another month or so has gone by which means it's time for another lil update on things here on the the site. If you're blind, you might have missed one of the most recent updates, the announcement section on the home page. Then again, if you were blind, you'd be using a screenreader and it woulda been read to you...so I take that back.

In said announcements I mentioned the SublimeWeb Cup, and here is your 'more info'. I'm gonna get some sort of Cup trophy to award to the poolie who does the best overall in all 4 pools combined in a calendar year. I set up a points system that takes into account where you finish, how many teams were entered and how you did relative to the winner as far as points go for each pool, then those are added up to give you your score for that year. Starting next season there will also be $10 from each pool going into the pot, and I'll throw another $10 in to make a $50 prize for whoever wins the cup that year. The cup will be awarded this year, but there will be no prize money.

In the 'pools' section there is a menu item for 'SW Cup' (the name of it might change, but it will still be there) which will have all of this info (eventually) as well as the current standings. Since only the football pool is finished thus far, that's the only pool counting towards the standings. Once hockey is done, that will be added, and so on and so forth, and the 'Cup' season will end with Nascar wrapping up in November. The current standings might change in the next month and a bit as I tweak the formula to get it to where I want it (ie. make it nice and complicated so no one can figure it out for sure...kinda like the BCS)

The Nascar season is up and running and there are 16 teams entered in the first pool. I've added a few columns to the drivers page and fixed up the standings page, as well as got the weekly update working so I can do the expanded standings page since the last site update. Judging by the current top 5 you don't need to know a whole lot about nascar to jump out to an early lead.

The hockey season is winding down, with the last regular season games being about a month from now, and Jesse has taken over the lead and starting to put some distance on the competition. We'll see if he can hold his lead until the end. Judging by all the flip flopping, he probably wont...which is alot more fun that last year when Morgan ran away with the pool from the Olympics on.

I've finished the work I had to do to prepare the playoff pool for the new site, so all that's left is for a few teams to start clinching. I'll have it open for registration by April 1st at the latest and possibly before that since there should be enough teams qualified to start picking from. The deadline will be the first game time of the day following the day the last first round series starts. Confused??? Good...basically if the last first round series gets started on Friday night...the deadline will be game time of the first game on the Saturday. I'll post it when playoff scheds are announced.

Anywho...that's what I've been upto on here as of late...feel free to drop a comment or suggestion in the comments section or shoot me an email.

Alot has been going on the past couple weeks here at SWFS. We crowned the first Loser Pool champion, registration has started on the first Nascar Pool and I've been continually adding and tweaking.

First things first...the Loser Pool. Congrats goes out to Nick Caric, our first champion. In a format that was new to pretty much everyone who participated, Nick was near the top from the start. With 16 losses to only 5 wins, and the top NFL teams having mediocre seasons, quite a few points were racked up. I have a feeling it could be a most points record that will stand for a little while at least. Congrats also goes out to Jen Clements and Michelle Loosemore who round out the top 3 and were in it right up until the big game.

I'm definitely looking to ways to improve the loser pool, so I'd love to hear from anyone who participated. What could I add, remove, change, etc. to make the experience better. I've considered adding a couple 'bonus' prizes to the pool for next season as well as toyed with the idea of sending reminder emails a day or two before the deadline. So yeah...post a comment with any suggestions or thoughts on the matter.

In case you haven't noticed the first nascar pool is up and ready to go. We have about 15 entrants so far and will hopefully end up with a few more for this first go round. The deadline is this Sunday as the season kicks off with the Daytona 500. Closing time has been changed to 2pm as they pushed the race back a little this season.

As I mentioned before I was considering sending out email reminders for the loser pool next season, so I put together an email app to send them out. I'll also send out periodic updates (pretty much just letting everyone know when pools are starting). I sent out one last week to most of the members on the site, so if you didn't get it, check your junk mail or check your profile to make sure your email is up to date (I had a few returned so i fixed the ones I knew of). I'm still working on the format of the emails, trying to find a happy medium, since different email apps display things a bit differently...so please bear with me until then. If you don't want the emails at all, for now just send me an email or leave them going to junk. I'll put in a checkbox in your profile saying whether you want to recieve emails or not in the next few days.

With the past week being relatively hockey and football free, I was expecting to take a nice little break from working on/updating the site. Boy was I wrong.

After getting quite annoyed with the shared hosting I was on, which was causing some problems being able to access the database for the pools (sooooo basically about 90% of all the content on the site), I decided to upgrade. So I moved the site over and did all the stuff needed to make it as smooth a transition as possible (I think it was only completely offline for about 15 min).

The new hosting gives me access to things I didn't have access to before with the shared hosting, so I was able to upgrade things, and change some settings to make things more secure. In the process I opened up a pile of error messages, since you can't get away with being lazy (ie. leaving out quotation marks) with the increased security measures. I think I've nailed down most of the errors, but there might be a few more here and there...if you get some goofy message unexpectedly, shoot me an email and let me know what page it's on, so I can clean it up. Everything should still work as intended even with these error messages.

I've also added a message on your 'team' page for each pool, letting you know if your team hasn't been marked off as paid. I've also set it up that you'll recieve an email from now on whenever your teams get marked off, so keep your email address in your profile up to date.

As always feel free to give some feedback on what you like, don't like, think could be improved, etc at pools@sublimeweb.net.

I was looking at my 'To Do' list from a couple weeks ago and there were a pile of things checked off, so I figured it might be a good time for an update.

The Nascar pool I mentioned in the previous update is now ready to go. It came along alot faster than I was expecting. Mind you there are still a few pages I need to tidy up and make pretty, and one page I think I want to add...but I'm going to put it up and let everyone have a look, and get some feedback first. So check it out when I get the links up to pick a team (which should be in the next day or so) and let me know what you think.

The nascar pool is a salary cap pool. Each team has 10 million dollars to pick 8 drivers. You get the points the driver earns according to the Nextel Cup points system. Check out the 'Rules' page in the 'Pools' section for more info.

I also put up the payout page in the 'Pools' section finally. I've had it done for a while and still hadn't moved it up for some reason. Thanks Nick for the email, which reminded me about it. You'll be able to check out the payout structure for each pool including bonus', and then the winners once everything has been double checked and confirmed.

I've done a few other little things here and there as they pop up. Adding the next/prev buttons to the messages again, adding the Nascar events to the calendar (unfortunately they're all TBD except Daytona since they haven't announced all the sponsors yet). The 'To Do' list still has quite a bit on it, so I'm sure you'll see another update in a couple weeks.

I hope everyone had (or is still having) a great holiday from work/school/whatever. I was originally hoping to get a few more things done on my week off, but no such luck...I even skipped a football recap on boxing day.

The current pools are now completely online and being used on a regular basis, with 10-20 people checking their standing each day. I have decided to add a Nextel Cup Nascar pool to the site as well and have started hammering out how it's going to work. It should be online and ready to go by February 1st at the latest.

Since the last update I added the ability to register new users, as well as making it possible to reset lost passwords, and find forgotten usernames. I've also added the ability to change your email address and other personal info. Be sure to keep your email address accurate as you will need it to reset your password.

I added the records page in the pools section as well...check it out to see how your teams stack up historically. Alot of the records are held by the same people, as no pool has had more than one completed season. Everyone's profiles are now available to check out as well. Click on a person's name in the standings or on blog comments etc. to take you to their profile (minus some personal info).

There is also a calendar available listing a bunch of dates: for pools opening, pool deadlines and deadlines for the loser pool. I'll probably be putting each of the nascar races in as well as any other information I feel is needed. There will eventually be links on all the pages to reach the calendar, but for now you can access it from the main home page.