While porting SoccerPhone from TellMe to BeVocal, I ran into a couple differences between the two as a development environment and a deployment environment. Porting Code from TellMe to BeVocal The porting process went pretty quickly. Fortunately, the Python CGI scripts didn’t have to change. Three cheers for standards and for application communication via XML… Read More »
I just published the 0.2 release of SoccerPhone to the SourceForge project site. The main two features of this release are: Support for the 2003 version of the MLS live scores page Support for BeVocal as well as TellMe as a VoiceXML gateway I had always wanted to port SoccerPhone to another VoiceXML Gateway, but… Read More »
Yahoo! Sports Well, we won’t have Byron Moreno to kick around anymore. He’s decided to retire before getting kicked out by FIFA. After making several shockingly bad calls against Italy during the Italy-South Korea match in the 2002 World Cup, Mr. Moreno kept the controversy fire roaring in an Ecuadorean league game later in 2002.… Read More »
After TellMe dropped support for free VoiceXML application extensions on their public service, I didn’t have an easy way to make SoccerPhone available to others. The only way to reach it on TellMe now is to call in with my developer ID and password. Fortunately, BeVocal allows you to make an application available without having… Read More »
Bad news for my free, public SoccerPhone service, which ran as a TellMe Extension. I received the following email from TellMe today: VoiceXML Developer, Tellme has made many investments in VoiceXML over the past four years. One of these investments was in the Extensions program, with the goal of making VoiceXML a more utilized public… Read More »
Okay, so I’ve now updated SoccerPhone to work with the new HTML layout for the live scores page at the MLS website. The cool thing is that I only had to update a few methods in the Python CGI scripts, mostly the regular expressions that I use to locate the game time, scores, elapsed time,… Read More »
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 — 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 »
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 »
Watch and/or download Soccamatic, a great two minute Wallace and Gromit short by Nick Park. English football fans will especially enjoy it. Former San Jose Clash/Earthquakes midfielder Eddie Lewis now plays for Preston North End, which is the English First Division team that Wallace mentions just before pulling out the Soccamatic.