Team Checkin

Submitted by John Locke on

In January 2003, Freelock launched a prototype site to manage sports teams: Team Check-in. This website helps recreational sports teams find substitute players for games, allowing each team member to quickly sign in for each game. It tracks the history of the team, emails game reminders, and even lists upcoming games at fields it knows about.

It's a web site that actually does something.

About Team Check-in

The site was for two main reasons:

  1. To help soccer team's captain get enough players to each game
  2. To act as a public sample of my development and problem solving skills.

Since much of the work done is proprietary, we can't let prospective clients play around with the behind-the-scenes workings. If you would like to play around without signing up a real team, you're welcome to add bogus teams and data to the test site.

Our team, the Fiddlers, began using a limited version of this site to manage the team in November 2001. Freelock gradually added features to the site, and during December 2002/January 2003, it was completely rewritten to allow it to work for any number of teams in any number of locations.

So what was used to create it?

  • Server - There are two servers currently running Team Check-in: a web server, and a mailing list server. Both are running Red Hat Linux.
  • Web Server - The web server uses Apache, PHP, and MySQL. Apache is the world's most popular web server, PHP is an excellent scripting language, and MySQL is a fast, light, database engine. The web server is hosted by a service on a shared server in a high bandwidth, high capacity data center.
  • Mailing list server - The mailing list server is on a low-bandwidth, less-reliable connection to the Internet. I personally administer the mailing list server, and have put together a system using Postfix and Mailman. In addition, the list server runs the same web technologies as above, and operates as a test server.
  • Development environment - The Team Check-in site was developed on a variety of computers running a variety of operating systems, but my current favorite of the lot is Active State's Komodo IDE (integrated development environment), which I'm running on a Mandrake 9.0 Linux workstation.
  • Site management - Team Check-in is owned and operated by Freelock, LLC.
Story Type
Customer

Add new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
About text formats

Filtered HTML

  • Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a href hreflang> <em> <strong> <blockquote cite> <cite> <code> <ul type> <ol start type> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <h1> <h2 id> <h3 id> <h4 id> <h5 id> <p> <br> <img src alt height width>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.