Paste everything: widgets with sports information for external sites

People who are interested in football like ratings - first of all, the games of football players. Previously, it was the privilege of newspapers - for the readers, these endless “Baranov (5.5)” were often almost the main information about the match. Now, players’s actions can be monitored in different ways (and it’s not in vain that SOGAZ - the Russian Football Championship was popularly renamed SopCast - the Russian Football Championship in honor of the Internet TV program) - but there is no less debate about the level of the game, since there are still no universal objective indicators.

We at Sports.ru wanted, on the one hand, to involve as many people as possible in the assessment of football players - believing that the average data would make more sense. On the other hand, fans tend to group by interests and not trust the opinions of people from other groups - therefore, we decided to make it possible for them to evaluate players where they want, and so that no one else bothers them - say, in their own communities and on fan sites. As a result, we developed a customizable web widget for player ratings, which is easy to embed on your own website or blog. All assessment data is collected from us, but it is possible to display in the widget ratings only those who voted through it. So far, of course, the widget cannot yet be inserted directly into the newspaper (as we did in the illustration for this topic from the Hungarian Nemzeti Sport), but this,

The widget with the scores now looks like this (you can configure the number of displayed teams and select which columns with what data will be displayed in the table):



To get the widget, you need to go to the online match you need, go to the scores page (for example, today's match “ Volga ”-“ Zenith ” ) and vote yourself (this can be done even without registering on the site). After that, the link "code for embedding on sites and blogs" will become available. By clicking on it, you can customize the appearance of the widget, and then get the code itself.

So far this is only a beta version of the project, widgets work in battle for literally a week - we continue to make corrections and will be very glad to advice and suggestions. It was decided to make several modes - the widget can be inserted as iframe, as html, containing the form for sending data (for blog platforms that do not support iframe - first of all, for LiveJournal, which is still popular among our users), and for insertion into texts and blogs Sports.ru itself has a special internal tag. None of the methods, to our regret (and the calmness of many others), are suitable for Habrahabr.

Player ratings have been working with us since the beginning of the Russian football season, are integrated into all our football statistics and are generally quite reasonable (for example, average player ratingsin the championship of Russia). In particular, they are generally close to Sports.ru’s estimates put forward by the editorial staff - perhaps only more attention is paid to outsiders (who receive higher points for victories than recognized leaders) and some well-known players.

We were ready to repel the attacks of cheaters - but it turned out that abnormally low and abnormally high ratings almost always cancel each other out, affecting dispersion rather than average. We cut off part of the estimates that do not suit us in quality, but not too large - one of the goals of our project was to get reasonable estimates even with small samples. Now we continue to analyze the incoming data, perhaps closer to the end of the season we will talk about the results.

This is not our first experience in creating blocks with our content for external sites. On many small football sites that do not want or are not able to do news on their own, there is a custom block with our news - for example, on the site of Manchester United fans we use our English football news.

We have plans to share information further, gradually transforming from another sports site into a full-fledged “sports provider” - now a good part of our work is occupied by all kinds of information export and import (for example, we receive information about matches from statistical data providers, we process it and transmit further in the form of ready statistics for Yandex or all the same widgets with estimates). So if you are interested in following such a transformation, subscribe to the blog - we still have a lot of topics for stories regarding new forms of media existence (and we will be happy to answer questions and accept suggestions about specific topics of interest).