Great Britain Bulldogs Official Website

Happy New Year to you all, I hope you've had a good festive season and are meeting 2007 in good spirits!

A short update (whilst I use this time for work avoidance) on what's going on site wise. The media gallery continues to be the most popular item requested, though it hasn't actually been the next item added - that gain goes to the Personnel (Roster) and History sections where I discovered some previously published content was in the system, but not linked. Adding those links was a simple fix so they jumped the queue (quick wins and all that jazz).

I have been busy working on the Media section though. After uploading more than 3600 items (the joys of a superfast connection in the office - but still requiring most of 2 days to do) into the gallery application, I then spent the next couple of days working through all the images and trimming out the majority of the fluff, rotating and cropping as needed and basically organising what I have so far. It's very very tedious work to do! With that now done I have a good base of content with which to work on and am now left with just a few bugs/tweaks that need to be made to the system before I flick the "open for access" switch which will let you all in to view.

You may have noticed that I've started by adding in the Random Image display and some of the gallery statistics. The image search is also working, though I need to work through the images more (adding meta data like people's names, what's going on, etc - again incredibly tedious, and there's over 1700 images to work on) and to remove the current security restrictions before you'll really benefit from that. I also have yet to sort the user upload functionality as that ties into the whole eFootball system membership which isn't quite ready for the masses yet (more of a beta at present).

Alas the Christmas break didn't give me as much time to work on this as I had hoped, plus with other projects screaming for my attention it may be a couple of weeks before the gallery is fully open. 

Once the Media section is in place, I'm going to be hunting around for as much Bulldogs content as possible, especially related to the squad's history. There's also the player biographies and the rest of the eFootball platform to integrate, as well as trying to sift through the 500Gb (yes, ~500,000Mb) of video footage I have from tours and camps. The hope there is to produce some DVDs and add some small clips to the website - however, video editing is a time consuming process, so don't expect that anytime too either.

And all that is just some of the stuff I have in mind already, without taking into account the other duties I need to sort out (such as Bulldogs finances, future plans and more).

Hmmm, sometimes I can't help but think my out of work projects take more time and effort than my day job does... but isn't that always the case with Football? ;)