Category Archives: SoccerPhone

SoccerPhone 0.1 Code Release

By | March 8, 2003

I finally got around to releasing the code for SoccerPhone on the SoccerPhone SourceForge project site. So, if you’re looking for code samples for using VoiceXML and Python CGI scripts to speech enable a web site, check it out. the code is licensed under the GPL. Since MLS changed the HTML layout for their live… Read More »

SportsML

By | February 18, 2003

SportsML — The Sports Markup Language Over an afternoon capuccino at Peet’s, I read about SportsML in the final issue of New Architect magazine. When I invented a simple XML-based markup for SoccerPhone in around February or March of 2002, I didn’t realize that a more general purpose XML-based markup language for sports was already… Read More »

SoccerPhone Lives Again

By | February 2, 2003

After the Major League Soccer season ended last fall, I forked the code for SoccerPhone so I could work on a version that downloads the live scores from SoccerNet and reads them to you over the phone. This was a much bigger challenge than automating the MLS live scores page. I now had to deal… Read More »

Minor SoccerPhone Fix for Final-OT

By | August 31, 2002

The Crew-Revs match ended in overtime. In the past, the MLS website used “Final (OT)” or “Final (2OT)” to indicate overtime. The 2OT only appeared once that I can remember. Whether the game ends early due to a golden goal or if both overtime periods are played, the website usually says “Final (OT)”. For the… Read More »

This weekend’s SoccerPhone fixes

By | July 27, 2002

In the scoring details on the MLS webpage, the time has always been given as just the minute of the goal, e.g, 34 for a goal in the 34th minute. The main exception is that goals in extra time are sometimes given a plus sign, e.g., 92+. In today’s game between Dallas and Colorado, Steve… Read More »

Fixed Caching of Results for SoccerPhone

By | July 22, 2002

Fixed the problem where the Python script wrote the cached results to one place, but the VXML code looked for it in another directory. I didn’t detect the problem earlier, because 1) I accidentally ftp’d a copy of results.xml to the VXML directory and 2) I didn’t do a good job of regression testing failure… Read More »

More MLSnet.com Scores.html Web Page Unpredictability

By | July 21, 2002

Whoever runs the MLS website is definitely keeping me on my toes. They made a couple new changes to the scores page that broke SoccerPhone again. First, they dropped the date information from each score. Admittedly, I probably should have had exception handling code for this scenario, but it just seems strange that they would… Read More »

SoccerPhone Now Says Day of Week

By | June 29, 2002

I finally fixed the problem I caused at some point in the past. For some time now, SoccerPhone got an error when it couldn’t retrieve the scores from the MLS website. The problem was that I needed to set a variable at the VXML Document level scope, not at a block level scope. I didn’t… Read More »

SoccerPhone Bug Fix For When MLS Website Unavailable

By | June 29, 2002

This wasn’t such a big deal at the beginning of the season when virtually every game was played on a Saturday. However, recent weeks have included a lot of Wednesday games, and there have also been some Sunday games. So, to make it easier for you, my valued non-paying patron, to keep track of when… Read More »