We have recently launched a range of upgrades to the photo gallery feature of the website.

Hitssports.com users can now upload video just as easily as uploading images to their photo galleries. Video uploads are automatically converted to a web ready format, and these are then streamed from within the photo gallery area of the website. This means that the video will play from the website almost instantly, in a similar way to website likes youtube.

The second update allows photos and videos to be tagged with details of members that are included in the photo or video. The benefit of doing this is that members profiles then display a gallery of all the photos that they have been tagged as appearing in. As well as tagging a photo or video, with a members you can also tag with a related fixture. This time this has the benefit of a photo gallery being shown in the results page for that fixture.

We believe that this update allows you to create a fantastic record of the history of your club, in both video and photos. Your information will be accesible to all for many years to come.

Thought I’d take the time to post about what we’ve been working on recently and wsome of what we are planning for the future.

 It’s been a really busy time here at Hitssports the last few months.  We’ve been gearing up to support Football, Rugby and Hockey clubs and now that’s completed we’ve been improving a few other areas of the system.  Notably we’ve launched an updated interface througout the admin area to make the system easier to use and including context sensitive help against every field.  If you click on pretty much any field label, or field in a form throughout the admin area the label and field will be highlighted and a context sensitive help message will be displayed.  This should make the system a whole lot easier to use and improves the consistency of the layout in the admin area.

We’ve managed to get the issue resolved with the image manager, so that when editing pages you will now be able to easily navigate to include images uploaded to your photo galleries or your members photos.  This has been a real thorn in our side for a while, it’s been very difficult to get resolved, so we’re very pleased!

A few people have asked about video uploads, this is something that we are currently working on and we hope to launch fairly soon.  This will allow you to upload any format of video file, and have it automatically converted to a web friendly format.  The video will then be displayed with a thumbnail, in your galleries, we believe this a really exciting feature that will become more and more useful with current mobile phones taking high quality video.  Alongside the release of video we hope to also release a new feature to allow all media uploaded to the galleries section (photo and video) to be tagged.  Photos/videos will be able to be tagged with a list of members in the photo/video, and a fixture that it relates to if relevant.  This all means that when you look at a player profile on your website you will also be able to easily see all photos of them on the system, and any video that includes them too!  Likewise the results page for a fixture will include and linked images or video.

 We’ve got lots more on the horizon.  Right now we’re trying to generate interest from new clubs, and we’ve decided to take out advertising in next months Four Four Two and Rugby World magazines, to generate more interest from Football and Rugby clubs.  We really believe our service is second to none, now it’s just a case of getting the message out there and building on the system that exists….

 We’ll update this blog entry with more details on our Roadmap soon.

We have now launched our service to Football, Rugby and Hockey clubs.  Most of the features remain exactly the same across all sports, the results section and stats are obviously different for each of the different sports.

The updates allow the entry of results data, specific to each sport.  For football, this allows the entry of goals scored, and information on any cards received.  The rugby version allows the entry of all points scores, broken down by tries, conversions, penalties and drop goals, and again information on any cards received.  The hockey version allows goals scored, and a log of any green, yellow or red cards received.  All results data is specific to each player who competed in a match.

On the front end of each website the member profile is amended to show summary performance statistics by season, and the results pages have been amended accordingly.  Further statistics will be available on the front end of the website through a “stats” page shortly.  These will include top goal / points scorers and other information.