Matthew Knott

Work is now well underway on the beta version of my rugby score predictor site, gybbon.com.

This season the software has been in a closed trial of 6 individuals at mattknott.com/scores, with some great feedback. The Beta will be the first large scale trial, and I'm aiming to go for over 100 players. That may not seem like much but fora  new site I think it'll be a good start. There are some brand new features coming in such as bonuses, mini leagues and an all new player positioning system. I will also set up the site to email players when a new league becomes available to register for, and if there are any fixtures upcoming that they haven't registered for. Users can also become a fan of a club and a country if they want to. Initially this just links in a logo on their "My Page" and shows recent results for the club & country, but hopefully will provide a springboard to more specific targetted content and advertising.

Behind the scenes the administration is far more advanced, meaning there should never be a need for me to tweak anything in the database again, and I've put in a framework that should be highly future-proof. At the top level we have seasons. Each season is made up of a number of leagues and competition, and each competition has teams, the end result being a distinct season-league-team entity that a fixture can be built around.

With the public nature of the site, it is going to be far better designed than last seasons site, although whether or not I finish all the tweaking and the tarting up by launch is another question, my initial concern is getting a working site which hopefully I can run in parallel until the end of the season.

I will continue to add new features and improvements as feedback is generated through the 2009 - 2010 season, but hopefully, by the start of the 2010-2011 season I'll be finished and can just focus on maintaining the thing and getting proper sponsorship and prizes, lots of prizes!

In order to help with the maintenance burden, I also plan to have friends and colleagues work on adding fixtures and results, but with dozens more fixtures due to the addition of the Guiness Premiership, it's going to be a lot of work to maintain.

Hopefully, we'll get lots of people sign up and make this my first successful project, my dream being to get sponsorship by Kooga or the like and have a Gybbon.com cotton shirt.