The background
Adam, a lifelong American football (or, if you're already American, just
football) enthusiast with a background in community projects, made the
decision of a lifetime. With current young persons and drama programmes
drawing to a close and the upcoming sale of his London home, Adam began
planning a trip that would take him across the United States, several times
over, following one of America's national sports and its fans.
Adam's football trip is about the impact of American football in every city
in the United States with a national team. As a measure of gauging each of the
32 teams cultural influence as fairly as possible, Adam decided he had to see
a home game at every National Football League (NFL) stadium in a single regular
season, not including the Playoffs or the Superbowl. The NFL have also included
two international games into the 2008 season; one in Toronto, Canada and the
other in London, UK. Adam's challenge is to see 35 games in the regular NFL
season (just 17 weeks), including a trip back across the Atlantic, whilst
documenting his experience of the local fans in each location in writing,
photography and video.
The technology
Content management
The CMS covers several different facets of the site, from standalone pages to
blog entries and game reports. All of the content areas offer full WYSIWYG
editing functionality for the main body of the page. Search engine optimisation
(SEO) is also cinch with fully editable meta information, dynamic redirections
(301 and server-side) and a customisable site structure, where dynamic pages
appear to have a genuine path and .htm extension.
This content management system also allows for setup of each of the teams
and stadiums involved. The public interface draws on the colours specified for
each team. The latitude and longitude of each stadium is used to plot a route
across the globe and provide close-up aerial photography thanks to the
Microsoft® Virtual Earth™ software development kit (SDK).
As well as our standard CMS features, custom controls like a contact form
or lists of links can be easily dropped on to any page. To promote further
audience interactivity, each blog entry or game report has a comments and a
photo gallery module attached. Unlimited photos can be assigned to display
with the content that the user can simply click to enlarge. Users can leave
their comments against every blog entry, game report and photo.
Media management
The software behind AdamsFootballTrip.com includes a media management module
catering for digital photography. Photos are uploaded to the server where they
are analysed for EXIF information (the meta information associated with
digital photographs) and paired with a thumbnail version. Captions can be added
to each digital photo and they can be assigned to objects within the CMS. The
system also monitors and reports simple statistics about each collection,
making the administrator aware of at-a-glance information such as the
photographs without captions and/or associations to CMS pages.
Other functionality
More at-a-glance information is provided by a simple web traffic statistics
module within the CMS, showing aggregates per page. Of course, a more in-depth
log file analysis module is also available.
Email functionality is provided through a web based email client with all
the standard features included. The email client sends out HTML email using
a WYSIWYG editor, to contacts that can be retrieved from the address book
included. Incoming mail can be organised into editable folders and outgoing
messages are automatically archived in a Sent items folder. Bulk email is
directly supported, automatically adding the email addresses (of those who
have left a comment or sent a message through the site) into the Bcc field
of the next newsletter to be sent out.
