writing a browser extension for fantasy sports

[mjl]

I get annoyed when I want to post on RJ about what I should do with my team because I have to transcribe everything off CBS or Yahoo or whatever and I still can't include all of the context, like the standings in various categories. I'm considering writing a browser extension that I could click from my team page that would send the contents of that page and the standings page to a home server that would reformat the pages into a standard format, create player links to a site like Fangraphs, and give me a convenient link that I could post here.

Is this something any of you would use? Assume that it'd be free or ad-supported, maybe with an option to pay a couple dollars a year to turn off the ads. What other features would it need? Are there pages other than your team page and standings that would be important? Maybe the pages for offered trades? I think the available free agents page would be difficult since you'd probably want a filtered list, but I could also set it up where you have to click the button on every page you want to include, so you could do that. What sites/sports would it need to support - already planning for Yahoo, ESPN, CBS, OnRoto and baseball and football, am I missing any? What sources of player stats should it support? I was probably going to default to Fangraphs for baseball and I don't know yet for football, and maybe have options to switch to Yahoo or ESPN or b-ref.

[onejayhawk]

That would be marketable, especially if it was smartphone compatible.

J

[mjl]

I was trying to figure that out. I don't think Chrome for mobile supports extensions, but it looks like Firefox does.

[onejayhawk]

For the type of info junkies you want, mobile is going to be a big selling point. Even better if they happen to be Rotojunkies.

J

[mjl]

I wonder how many of those people aren't using whatever app their stats provider has though. I know espn, yahoo, and cbs all have fantasy sports apps, and I doubt I can integrate directly with those. maybe if I got established I could work with them or something.

[Moonlight J]

Something different than this?

[bryanbutler]

Something different than this?

oooh, snazzy. fixed the link (you had an extra http:// in there).

[mjl]

fairly different, yes. although that is doing something cool also.

this is more like... let's say it's June 10 and I want to post something here or tweet someone asking for advice on whether I should do a trade in my keeper league. In principle, the context bits that would be useful are: my roster (including salaries), the current standings in each category, the guys I'm trading away and for, their stats, and maybe something I haven't thought of yet. It would take an annoyingly long time to transcribe all of that, and it's not at all feasible on Twitter. But I can't give you a link to my team and league because you don't have my login for the site. So what I'm proposing is that there's a button in your browser that is visible when you're on a team page, and when you press the button it pulls your roster off the page, the current standings off the standings page, the trades being considered from the trades page, reformats them in a nice clean site-agnostic format, adds links to Fangraphs or whatever for your players, and spits out a link like "myte.am/8hFao" that you can put into your post or tweet and not have to type all that up yourself.