We put the ticker on our homepage a while back, as a way to elevate scores on the page. Then, we kind of noticed that, it was mainly elevating news on the page, not scores. So we’ve updated the algorithm behind the ticker.

It will now show news, until games have started for the day. Once games have started for the day, it’ll become a scores only ticker - showing the scores for games in progress or that have finished and scheduled start times for upcoming games. The idea is, once games have started - let’s just focus on the games. There are a lot of other links to the top news stories on the rest of the page.

On boring days, where there aren’t enough sports/leagues with games (the day before the MLB All-Star game for instance…and the day after), we’ll round things out with a couple more leagues of headlines, but leagues with scores will always come first.

In fact, your scores will always come first. If you go through the trouble (and it isn’t much trouble) of setting your favorite teams, they will always come first in the ticker - regardless of whether the games have started for the day or not. If they are your favorite teams, we figure you want to know how they are doing. If they have a game later today, you want to know when. If they played yesterday, you want to know how they did. So the game status of your favorite teams will always be first in the ticker, followed up by the games or news around the top leagues.

Also, while we were at it, we streamlined the look and functionality of the ticker. You can use the left and right arrows to scroll through items a lot quicker now, if you want to find a particular score or to quickly check out news headlines.

–Cristobal
Yahoo! Sports Developer

Original post by Yahoo! Sports Blog

Yeah, Ari, we’ve been slacking on the posts. Thanks for noticing and calling it out. Light a fire, eh?

But it isn’t like we’ve been on vacation. We acquired Rivals.com - and though we aren’t in the position to tell you all our plans, we are excited by the possible synergies ahead. Pretty good business speak for an engineer huh? Seriously, we are really excited about the potential that teaming up with Rivals.com has - and you’ll be seeing some of those benefits soon. And some later, as there are some longer term plans too.

What we can talk about is the update to the navigation bar (aka - the nav). Before our most recent redesign, we had links to league home pages on every page, so a link to the NFL index was always at your finger tips, even while browsing a NBA article and vice versa.

With our redesigned nav, we wanted to introduce the notion of breadcrumbs. So when you’re on a player page, you can have quick links to his/her team page and to the league page and so on. With the flyouts, you get a lot of depth within the breadcrumb nav. I personally use it quite a bit: going from a player page to a team’s depth chart, as I’m scoping relief pitchers for fantasy baseball (example below). But the breadcrumbs came with a cost. And in this case, we put the quick links to other leagues in a flyout.

If you knew about the flyout, things were okay. However, we found that not everyone found the flyout…some of you were even using the links in the footer to jump to another league. We didn’t mean to move the nav to the bottom of the page, as some of you have asked us.

So, we’ve brought the league quick links back up to the top of the page and they’ll stay there across all our pages, so you have a quick and easy way to jump from sport to sport.

And on our home page, instead of repeating the leagues across our sub nav (the white part of the navigation bar), we’re going to be using that area as a way to link directly into current sports events. Like shortcuts, but updated often, as events pop up.

So - is it easier to find your way around now?

–Cristobal
Yahoo! Sports Developer

Original post by Yahoo! Sports Blog

When 750 came last week, we put up a little module on our MLB homepage where you can stay on top of Barry’s home run total. Check it out.

Original post by Yahoo! Sports Blog