Home Page & Curation

The main list on the Home page is designed to provide a good sense of what's currently going on with your team just by scrolling down a single page. But, our crawlers find so much content that simply displaying everything we discover and add to our database in chronological order would rarely reflect a useful or accurate snapshot.

Our goal is for the home page to provide a good mix of local media coverage (newspapers, Canadian national media, beat-writers), columns, blog posts, podcasts, rumours, reactions, and updates, along with complementary radio clips and videos.

How it works

Our crawler runs 24 hours a day, always looking to find new and great content. We aim to be the most extensive resource out there. Sometimes that means, for instance, having a lot of podcasts, or adding posts about minor league promotions, or adding 12 individual post-game interview videos at the same time. Curation allows us to follow the content wherever it takes us, while still providing what is at the core of the Aggregator sites, an easy-to-digest up-to-date high-quality list of links.

An important distinction to make about Home is that we typically don't hand-pick items for this list. Their inclusion isn't specifically an endorsement nor an assertion of quality (though quality is the goal through programmtic means). Instead, we create rules that limit certain content and emphasize others, in an effort to make the best use of limited real estate on the front page, the most viewed page at each of our sites. Our admins monitor and tweak content evaluation throughout the day.

Why Certain Content Is Filtered

There are no hard and fast rules, but here are some circumstances in which an item might be held off the home page and why:

• No Attribution: We're less confident in an item's quality when we don't find an author or show or some type of attribution for the content.
• Link Dumps: A form of aggregation itself, Link Dump, is the generic term for a post that lists links, typically revolving around a single subject or theme, with brief descriptions and/or recommendations.
• Game Threads: These are community-driven and have minimal content, so they are typically found in the respective blog category pages.
• Radio, Video Clips & Game Recaps: These often come in bunches and would flood the front page without intervention.
• Blogs & Podcasts: Some blogs and podcasts are limited to keep the content balanced with other types of sources.
• Reference Post: A post referring to another article or podcast; often redundant if the linked media is already available elsewhere.
• Minimal Content / Slideshows: Some items, like player updates or slideshows, are not featured as they contain minimal content or require multiple clicks to view.
• Transcripts: Useful, but often redundant if the related radio or video is already available in the site's sections.
• Volume Content Limits: To maintain a balanced mix, excessive content from one source may be limited.
• Aggregation: News is often summarized by multiple voices, but redundant aggregation may be limited to ensure variety and fresh perspectives.