1992casey

Here's the deal on the audio. I called MLB customer service a few minutes ago. The bottom line is the games aren't free. You have to have a paid account which includes audio. Those of us who were getting games last year are receiving them because our subscriptions don't expire until March 31st. We'll also be out of luck?unless we renew?when the April spring training games roll around. This would also explain why people had trouble getting games last weekend via WTMJ's web site. If it's a pay service, WTMJ broadcasts would be blacked out. This is MLB's current promotion: people who sign up now won't be billed for 60 days. However, there is no discount. Normally, people are billed after 30 days. In the past, MLB has offered an option to pay for one day of service. That will return, but it's not being offered right now.

I had Gameday Audio two years in a row. The second year there was no record of my previous year. MLB said those records were only kept six months. Given that, I don't think you'll get charged.

Are you asking us to pick a single top choice? What are some other ideas you have besides date?

I just tried WTMJ; the sound was really crummy; that's not usually the case. Here's the mlb.com audio link: http://mlb.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/mlb/audio/gda/index.jsp

The web broadcasts on mlb.com are free. However, you need to create a login and password to access them. I'm listening to the WTMJ broadcast right now (via mlb.com) and listened to the Oakland broadcast for a while the other day. By the way, if you have a Mac, you listen to WTMJ with iTunes. That's slick and very easy. Something tells me that users should do a spyware check if they're using SurferNetwork, IE and Windows. The Royals' feed is on XM. I love it how the score, inning, and number of outs show up right on the radio's display.

The alternate style sheet is the way to go. That's a nice step to make this site more accessible. It appears that the majority is benefiting from the maroon, non-bold. My first impression this morning was "wow, that's bright", but as I looked at it more, I really liked it. What blew me away was that Brian saw it so much differently. Given that everyone is seeing decent contrast?and I saw 'bright', I wonder if it was simply a matter of his rods and cones? http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/wink.gif Brian, did you happen to ask anyone else within range of your monitors to look at the colors and tell you what they saw?

This would have been a whole lot easier if it were possible to only affect links within text messages. When I first asked the question, I didn't think doing something would affect the whole forum portion of the site. Idea: here's how links are displayed on this site's home page (hex #181E63, bold).

Are you saying the maroon doesn't stand out for you? It certainly sticks out on a Mac, where everything tends to be brighter. By the way?thankfully, the CSS blink function only seems to work in Gecko browsers.

I'm not offering an opinion here: I'm just providing something to look at. These are just color samples, not links. I didn't bother with underlining, figuring that it's a separate issue. I made a suggestion to look at the color in the top navigation bar. Here it is (hex #7B0E0B): You can see that it's virtually identical to maroon (hex #800000): I don't know if this is what Brian is currently using, but here's Navy (hex #000080):

colby, I don't think anything's been written in this thread that should cause anyone to take offense. whizkid, I prefer function over form, too, but I think there's room in this case to accomodate both. Underline on hover seems to be a nice middle ground.

You probably know this, but you'll also want to eventually reflect the new minimum wage. That amount should become obvious given a little time, too. (I've heard it's $316,000, but can't confirm.)

Given that you're responsible for the excellent graphic work on this site, I'm not surprised at all with that being your point of view. If I haven't mentioned it to you before, the way links work outside the forums is excellent, and much of that is due to your neat graphics. Honestly, I think there are a good chunk of users who find it a major accomplishment to be able to post a link at all. I think the site should show the links so it doesn't matter what kind of verbiage is chosen. I could get really picky about stuff like how we're never supposed to use stuff like "here" and "click here" as link text: it really screws up screen readers. But that's really beyond the scope of this discussion. It's just an example to demonstrate that we need to expect links to be posted in numerous ways: kind of a Murphy's Law thing. Brian makes a great point about color blindness. For standard visual browsers, the links do need to stand out.

Brian, I think we cross posted because I didn't see your edit. Maroon might be good. You know, you can put inline styles in link tags. Maybe you want to post a couple different samples. The only thing I wouldn't know how to do is a hover effect; I've never seen that done inline.

On my end, the way it currently sits, the blue doesn't stand out from the black. I'm assuming the blue is still there but the bold is gone. For lack of another one, I've colored my links with a color approximating the background containing the main links at the top of the page (where it says About Us, Power 50, Link Report, etc.). Maybe that would work. I like the underline on hover, but I'm not always fond of the text turning bold; sometimes that makes lots of stuff jump.

colby, I agree that you're not going to please everyone. For instance, you'll see some out there who advocate underlining all links under all circumstances because that's traditional browser behavior. I'm not in that camp. Given all or nothing, I'd go with all. It's always been obvious that the message lists are links; had there been the choice of leaving those alone, I might have done that. It's the links that users place in the posts themselves that get lost. I think rolling over everything in a message is too much work and user-unfriendly. As Brian mentions, he has to deal with ezBoard and play by its rules. Given that he was to work within a preset group of parameters, I think he made the right choice.

This idea just came up in a thread on the Major League Forum. Is there a way to CSS the links in the forums to be able to make them be more obvious? Before the excellent upgrade to this site, links used to underline themselves when the user hovered over them. Color would be a nice touch.

It's not a fix, but I found a workaround for this situation: the Text-Bgcolor Fixer extension for Firefox. Excerpts from its description: When the user switches settings, the changes show up in the status bar at the bottom of the Firefox window until the bar is needed to display something else.

I'll include the search plugin uninstall process for the Mac because it's a little bizarre.

Slick. I'm looking forward to it. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/happy.gif Maybe the plugin will be an impetus for a lot more Firefox/Mozilla usage among visitors to this site. Have you noticed browser stats?

I updated the Baseball America icon this morning. I still wish it had a more professional look, but at least there aren't pixels popping out at you anymore. One suggestion for anyone trying to create these: trying to make anything transparent is probably more trouble than it's worth. It's probably impossible to predict how the transparent section would make the main part of the picture show up on someone else's computer, anyway.

I have no clue if this would be a good route to go, but I thought pass this information along for Google's Free Site Search. (It's the third option offered on the page.) Besides being free, it offers the options of being customizable and 'site flavored'. There are restrictions, though. The terms of service would have to be read. I don't believe you're allowed to remove Google's web search function, for instance, and they want their logo used according to rules. One thing I don't like is that there are two radio buttons included underneath, with the default set to search the web. I figure I already have plenty of ways to search the web. I'd like to see the default set to search whatever site I'm visiting.

I put the parentheses around the "www" to keep the code from truncating into a link. I'm assuming that "+%s" refers to the search input. Just out of curiosity, what does "&btnI=I" mean? I use the site:brewerfan.net method in the Google Search bar all the time and it works very well. For example, here's what you get when doing a Google Search for wes helms site:brewerfan.net. I think using that method would make a fine plug-in for this site. In the Search questions thread, Brian mentioned the possibility of re-implementing a site-wide search. If there's something better later on, any Brewerfan.net plug-in could be updated. I did some "I'm Feeling Lucky" searches of both Brewerfan.net and The Baseball Cube in via the Firefox location bar. Very often, the page that resulted was right on; occasionally the search burped badly. If I'm allowed to vote, think I'd choose the first method. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif I found this snippet of code in Google's Site Search documentation: Would rearranging that be useful at all in writing a plug-in?

I have a couple of search icons that I'm using on my hard drive; you're welcome to use them for as long as you like. They would replace the "home plate" Baseball-Reference.com icons that show up on the ESPN and Baseball America searches. It makes it easier to differentiate which search engine is which in the search box (since only an icon appears). Be forewarned that I'm no graphic artist and I just did a quick job; there's especially room for improvement on the one for Baseball America. In other words, my feelings wouldn't be hurt if they weren't used or someone came up with something better. They do the trick, though. Here they are: EspnPlayer.png BaseballAmr.png Edit: Graphics moved to different server

If you can download and install software, you should be able to figure Firefox out. Running it is easy. One of the huge things Firefox offers on a Windows system is security. IE is literally a spyware magnet. The problem is that IE is capable of installing software without the user knowing it. In some cases, all the user has to do to get spyware is visit a web page. Because IE is tightly integrated with the Windows operating system, everything on the computer becomes vulnerable. It helps a ton that Firefox isn't part of the operating system. And rather than the hundreds of security issues affecting IE, many of which have been extremely critical, Firefox security issues have been very few and very minor. In contrast to Microsoft, which might take months to address an issue, the Firefox team will address these minor issues in a matter of days. The biggest thing is that Firefox won't install software without the user's permission. (If you choose to install something, you might get asked to confirm as many as four times.) First, you have to click a link to initiate an installation. If the source isn't on your trusted sites list, Firefox asks you if you want to trust it. Then you have to click the link again and click another box telling the browser to go ahead. If this sounds like a lot, it isn't. The program walks you through all of this. Of course, a huge Firefox advantage is the built in pop-up blocker. Browsing in tabs is another. Several?even many?web pages can be open in the same window. If you have questions, their support forums are excellent. As far as the basics of using the browser, if you can use one, you can use the next. Forward, back, reload, stop, the location bar, and bookmarking are basics in every one. As far as some of the other features, you may find them in different menus than IE, but they'll do pretty much the same thing. Firefox is a very basic browser. It isn't loaded with features. But you can add 'extensions', meaning if a feature you want seems to be missing, someone has probably written an extension to cover it. My favorite extension is Adblock. It blocks annoying ads within web pages. Extensions tend to be tiny, too; many are under 10 K in size. And of course, the search bar?which started this thread?is great. There are hundreds of search engines that can be added to its drop down window. Firefox's cross platform nature is great, too. Windows, Mac, and Linux users can have essentially the same browsing experience. It's easy to jump from one OS to another and know what to do. It's great for developers. Generally, the same extensions work on all three platforms. The search engines work on all three platforms. That really simplifies things a lot. Last but not least, Firefox is under active development. There are new releases every three months or so. How often is there a new IE? Not often!

When there's time, it might be cool to look into different graphics for each plug-in. I see your using the one from Baseball-Reference.com. I suppose it could be copyrighted. The other advantage with different graphics is we'd be able to tell at a glance which search engine we have picked in that box. It sounds like you're having fun! http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif