Paste all: sports information widgets for external sites

People who are interested in football like scores - first of all, football games. Previously, it was the privilege of newspapers - for readers these endless “Rams (5.5)” were often almost the main information about the match. Now, the actions of the players can be monitored in different ways (and it’s not for nothing that SOGAZ - Russian Football Championship ”was renamed“ SopCast - Russian Football Championship ”in honor of the program for Internet TV) - but there are no less disputes about the level of the game, since there are still no universal objective indicators.

We on Sports.ru wanted, on the one hand, to involve as many people as possible in the evaluation of the players - assuming that the average data will make more sense. On the other hand, fans are inclined to group by interests and not to trust the opinions of people from other groups - so we decided to make it possible for them to evaluate players where they want and so that no one else would interfere with them - say, in their own communities and on fan sites. As a result, we have developed a custom web widget for evaluating players, which is easy to paste into your own website or blog. All estimated data are collected from us, but it is possible to display only those who have voted through it in the widget. So far, of course, the widget cannot be inserted directly into the newspaper (as we did in the illustrations for this topic from the Hungarian Nemzeti Sport), but this is, in general, a problem primarily for newspapers.

The estimated widget now looks something like this (you can adjust the number of displayed commands and select which columns with data will be displayed in the table):


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

So far this is only a beta version of the project, the widgets work in combat for literally a week - we continue to make corrections and we will be very happy with the advice and suggestions. It was decided to make several modes - the widget can be inserted as an iframe, as html, containing a form for sending data (for blog platforms that do not support an iframe - first of all, for the LiveJournal still popular among our users), and for inserting 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), is suitable for Habrahabr.

Player ratings have been working for us since the beginning of the Russian football season, integrated into all of our football statistics and, on the whole, quite reasonable (for example, average players' scores in the Russian championship). In particular, they are generally close to the estimates of Sports.ru, which are being edited by the editors, except that more attention is given to outsiders (who receive higher scores for victories than recognized leaders) and some well-known players.

We were ready to repel the attacks of twists - but it turned out that abnormally low and abnormally high estimates almost always compensate each other, affecting the variance rather than the average. We cut off some of the estimates that do not suit us in terms of quality, but not too much — one of the goals of our project was to obtain reasonable estimates even with small samples. Now we continue to analyze the incoming data, perhaps closer to the end of the season will tell about the results.

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

We have plans to share information further, gradually turning from another sports site into a full-fledged "sports provider" - now a lot of export and import of information takes up a fair amount of our work (for example, we receive information about matches from providers of statistical data, process it and pass further in the form of ready statistics for Yandex or all the same widgets with estimates). So if you are interested in following this transformation, subscribe to the blog - we still have many topics for stories about new forms of media existence (and we will be happy to answer questions and accept suggestions about specific topics of interest).