I’ll be launching a new feature here tomorrow evening. It’s not getting a particularly big launch because a) I’ve only just decided that I’ve got the time to do it, and b) I’m not sure quite how it’s going to work, so starting slowly might be for the best.
I’m really pleased at how BaseballGB has moved from being an occasionally updated blog back in 2006 to being a website built around a group of regular features and columns. However, one thing that we don’t do quite as much as I think we could is commenting on things as they happen. I do this on Twitter, but that’s not quite the same. So, I thought it would be a good idea to introduce a ‘live blog’ element to the site.Â
The one live blog I’ve written in the past came in June 2008 when I kept track of the first round of that year’s amateur player draft (all 3 hours of it!). It was a lot of fun to do, but it was a bit fiddly in terms of constantly going in and editing the post, while asking readers to refresh the page every 5 minutes or so. Despite enjoying the experience, the ‘logistics’ of it made me put the idea on the back-burner.
Thankfully, those logistical problems have now been erased courtesy of CoverItLive. This is a brilliant application, increasingly used by many different organizations and websites, that makes live blogging easy to write and easy to follow.Â
I thought I’d start by focusing on my favourite part of the baseball week: Sunday evenings. With lots of live games to comment on and a week’s worth of news to reflect on, it should make for a good time for all.  I suspect that it will mainly be me writing to myself this time around, but if you’re about then why not join in the fun and post some comments? The blog will be available to look back on immediately after the event. I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to do this every week, and it might make sense to switch things about a bit (i.e. sometimes picking a single ‘early’ game to focus on etc), but we’ll see how this first one goes and take it from there.
The only slight difficulty is that this site runs on WordPress, which is one of the few platforms in which you cannot embed the CoverItLive window directly onto the page. So you’ll need to click here to open the live event in a new window
