Active Product Development : 2009 : October

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The Sportspower API

Posted by JeremyGThomas Oct 19, 2009

Sportspower is a leading highschool team sports ranking website. It contains a complicated algorithm that factors in things like win/loss record, homefield advantage, state division and school size to calculate team rankings at the divisional and national levels. Take a look at the national ranking for "mega" highschool football teams on Sportspowerhttp://www.sportspower.com/football/teams/high-school/football/texas/cedar-hill-longhorns/2034/ratings/mega/spc.

Rankings data is available through an open API, and we partnered early on with ESPN Rise to feature football rankings on their site. Check out the bottom right-hand corner of http://espn.go.com/high-school-sports/rise/football/ where they build a widget consuming the Rankings API. The API is now available for all developers to leverage in their applications or websites.

Read up on the Sportspower API on developer.active.com. Typically, the API is used to:

Determine the geographic context for ranking data by querying the Playoff Group, Playoff Subgroups or Sportspower School Size Classification API for the relevant group ID (i.e. "60" for all very large highschools in the United States).
Use the geographic context (group ID) to get a list of rankings for a given sport.

During the initial rollout, only highschool football (api.sportspower.com/football/) and basketball (api.sportspower.com/basketball/) is supported with lacrosse data from laxpower.com soon to follow.

179 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: rankings, sportspower, product_development, api, highschool

Active.com Data Featured on ESPN and Livestrong.com

Posted by JeremyGThomas Oct 12, 2009

Livestrong.com and ESPN Rise are new additions to a growing list of websites featuring active.com data through integration to the active.com API. As Geoff Skow writes on developer.active.com:

Demand Media's LIVESTRONG.com, a “practical resource to find a wealth of health-related information from a wide range of sources”, taps into the Active.com directory of community events to add to the relevance and usefulness of its business listings. For example, the site includes an Active-powered list of nearby events to each of the pages in its Restaurant section:

ESPN Rise uses the SportsPower API Service to better fulfill its goal of offering “all the latest high school sports information, including scores, stats, rankings, polls and athlete profiles”. The site features the top ranked high school football teams across five classifications according to the Active Power Ratings. New ratings and rankings are unveiled every week throughout the season, and are generated at the national, state and local level.

We're excited about the uptake of our API and hope to see developers do new and innovative things with our data. You can read more about our API on programmableweb.com at http://www.programmableweb.com/api/active or read through the api specification at http://developer.active.com/docs.

286 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: active, product_development, api

Searchbeta.active.com Released

Posted by JeremyGThomas Oct 5, 2009

I'm happy to announce the release of searchbeta.active.com! We've been working for many months to improve upon our "Alpha" and today we're ready to open the new Search to you. Keep in mind it's still in beta and there are a few kinks. We're hoping to gather a lot of user feedback so that, when it comes time to replace search.active.com, we've built a product that you will love to use. Check out this screencast for details: