squarepusher

[ Would it be possible to also include dates on the articles? ] ...done.

How much does it cost to run Brewerfan? The cost of our hosted server is $50 a month. The cost of the Brewerfan store is $6.95 a month. The cost of the hosted message boards are currently $919 per 6 months or $153 a month. How much money does Brewerfan take in? See our running balance sheet here: http://www.brewerfan.net/downloads/brewerfan-financials.xls Have you thought of using advertisement money to pay for costs of the site? We have partnered with ticko.com for a small text link at the bottom right-hand side of the home page. We are also currently partnered with eBay, Amazon.com, and iTunes and their referral programs. Check out the "Support Brewerfan.net" page for details. We try to avoid large obnoxious banner ads, popup ads, and other blatant forms of advertising. In the future, as costs grow, we may include more advertisers into the mix, but we want to make the site as pleasant as possible for everyone who visits. Why do you choose to use ezBoard for your fan forum instead of running it "in house"? Having another service manage your message boards has its advantages and its disadvantages. While it's hard to integrate with ezBoard, programatically, it's been very helpful not to have to worry about the traffic to the forum. ezBoard also provides a fairly detailed set of functionality that I haven't seen offered (or at least exceeded) by other bulletin board softwares out there such as phpBB. As traffic increases and I have the time, I fully plan on writing my own forum software that has customized features that are applicable towards the baseball world, but of course, there are only so many hours in the day. How much money do you make off items in the store? Cafepress.com is our merchandise provider, and they allow you to set your own profit margins on their products, while they take care of all of the manufacturing and shipping. I currently have every item in the store set to $1 above cost. The goal is not to use the store as a fundraiser, but to allow people to support the site by increasing name recognition. If the store starts to generate more revenue, we may raise the profit margins a dollar or two, but the goal with it is always to provide reasonable merchandise. I've seen hosts out there that only charge $20 a month, and they allow you to have a message board? Why are you getting ripped off? Brewerfan.net is written 100% in Java, and as such, needs to have a host who can provide the facilities to run it. I program Java professionally, so the site is a way to support the Brewers, while supporting my ability to learn and grow as a programmer in the language I use professionally. A lot of the stuff we do behind the scenes is very complex, and "cheap" programming langauges like PHP just won't work, or at least, not as efficiently as Java. There are all kinds of free software packages out there. Why don't you use any of them? Some baseball fan sites use prepackged portal or content management systems software like PHP Nuke and PostNuke. I thought it would be more interesting to write much of Brewerfan.net's code from scratch so that we can completely customize the site to provide the best possible baseball fan site on the internet. We do, however, build on a large number of open source frameworks. I'll list and link them here for any who are interested in learning more: the spring framework, SiteMesh, hibernate, quartz, struts, webwork, lucene, tomcat, MySQL, JFreeChart, Cewolf, jakarta commons, log4j, oscache, rss4j, velocity and xstream.

casey, here are the ezSupporter benefits: www.ezboard.com/content/view/50 ja002h, that's correct. In theory if every user (and lurker) here had an ezSupporter account, the bill would be $0.

Here's the short answer (i'm going to formulate a longer Zen and the Art of Brewerfan Maintenance post later tonight): - it's page views that count against the site cost. Of course, posts contribute to the amount of page views that occur, so they're not entirely unrelated. - it's the prior 3 months to renewal's page views that factor into the cost - our next renewal date is 11/23/05 - our next renewal cost is $919 for 6 months of service. - our last renewal cost was $945 for 12 months of service (so you can see how we've grown recently). - people who purchase the $12 ezSupporter per year membership's page views do not count against our total... so if you are here frequently, it would help Brewerfan out a tremendous deal if you decided to do so.

Go for an XXL. I'm a size XL, and like my shirts roomy too. XXL is just about right.

All designs are now online: www.cafepress.com/bfdotnet/547317 If you need these logos on any other of our items, don't hesitate to ask.

Here's version #2, courtesy ColbyJack: www.cafepress.com/bfdotnet.19660668

Here's version #1: www.cafepress.com/bfdotnet.19639902 This one's for maximum readability at a distance. Patrick will be coming up with another design which we will also make available. If you'd like the graphics to be on any of the other items, by all means, we'll make it happen.

I'll see if I can't get one online tonight or tomorrow morning. I'm thinking BIG BLOCK LETTERS with 3TO on the front, and the Brewerfan logo on the back.

Go to the home page, and look in the right column.

You know, the Brewerfan.net store DOES offer stuffed bears. If we could just develop an appropriate slogan for the shirt, we'd be all set.

MassBrew is actually just a product of Brewerfan, Inc's cybernetics division. He only needs to recharge his batteries for 3 hours a day.

Brewerfan.net is built on a large number of open-source frameworks. The problem is when your entire system IS one open-source product, you leave yourself at the mercy of hackers.

I fixed his stats.... i'm guessing it's an isolated incident, as it basically just reads the data straight out of the database and displays it.

PackerChatters.com actually uses phpBB, not ezBoard. phpBB is an open source software, meaning anyone on the street can look at the source code and look for vulnerabilities. I'm guessing there were (or will be) several phpBB forums hacked.

And these are San Diego regulars Cappy's mowing down. Wow, he was one of the guys I was least high on coming into this year.

www.baseballprospectus.co...icleid=724

If Overbay's Nintendo, then Wes Helms has gotta be Coleco.

I based my assumption off the fact that Brad Nelson was optioned to AA. Of course, we have Nelson Cruz being optioned to AAA, so i'm not sure what the real story is here.

I'm guessing the LF experiment could be over for Brad Nelson. That's too bad, as it almost ensures he won't see the majors for the Brewers, unless he's relegated to backup duty.

Thanks for the insights!

TV capture card....

Out by a mile: http://www.brewerfan.net/images/other/outbyamile.jpg

Sure think, DHonks. How about one of him striking out: http://www.brewerfan.net/images/other/helmsshot.jpg

Well, it's between Obie and Glover now, I would think.