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Plain Text Sports

plaintextsports.com

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Re: Plain Text Sports

#31

Post by jaywalk »

mad_vill wrote: post #24
jaywalk wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ESPN has a surprisingly comprehensive JSON API that isn't locked down. If you're only using it for a hobby app, you won't run into any issues. It's been around for quite a while.

I thought they shutdown their public api.

Officially, yes. But here's the NFL scores API, for example: http://site.api.espn.com/apis/site/v2/sports/football/nfl/sc...

It's a "private" API for their website, but like I said it's been around for a while and using it in a hobby app isn't going to be an issue. Using it commercially is just begging for trouble, though.

Re: Plain Text Sports

#32

Post by dagurp »

smcl wrote: post #8

I'd love something like this for European football leagues. The "best" I've found is https://livescore.com but for a while they stopped working on iPhone (they really wanted you to download their app) and I'm quite sure they're probably full of trackers and stuff.

I've used https://m.livesoccertv.com/ or https://www.bbc.com/sport they're not too heavy

Re: Plain Text Sports

#33

Post by zouhair »

jaywalk wrote: post #12
wallawe wrote: post #7

Where do you get your data from? I've found sports data (especially odds/lines) to be overly expensive when trying to build hobby apps.

ESPN has a surprisingly comprehensive JSON API that isn't locked down. If you're only using it for a hobby app, you won't run into any issues. It's been around for quite a while.

Shutdown for almost 8 years[0].

[0]: http://www.espn.com/apis/devcenter/blog/read/publicretiremen...

Re: Plain Text Sports

#34

Post by jstanley »

kevincox wrote: post #28
lelandfe wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does it really need to override my font size? 13px is too small for my display The advent of good browser-based zooming has made non-default font-size users like yourself a small segment. The days of having to author everything in em/rem is mostly over – keeping everything scalable was tedious and prone to issues. I'd bet you encounter issues regularly: explicit font sizes on a root element are a ubiquitous practic…

I'm sure I have "problems" quite often but the sites listed are quite readable. Sure, I would prefer them to use my default font size but something with their contrast, font or otherwise seems to make it not stand out. > non-default font-size users like yourself What does this even mean? The default font is being overridden and irreverent here. Are you suggesting that there is a default default font that is expected…

I think the suggestion is that instead of using your computer with a font size that is comfortable to read, you should leave all the rest of the fonts on your system tiny, but zoom in your browser so that web pages are readable.

Re: Plain Text Sports

#36

Post by ubertaco »

I did a `curl https://plaintextsports.com/mls/standings` and, to my surprise, got an HTML response back (rather than just plaintext data).

Seems like this isn't actually plaintext (as in the mimetype `text/plain`), but is instead just "minimalist-aesthetic sports" (with the caveat that for some reason there's CSS styling to make the font unreadably small at 2560x1440, which was what led me to try `curl` in the first place, assuming that since it'd be plaintext, I could just get the data in plaintext without any extra CSS formatting making it hard to read).

Re: Plain Text Sports

#37

Post by abcanthur »

swinnipeg wrote: post #2

I like it! Sites like NHL.com or ESPN.com are borderline hostile navigating this info. It is reminiscent of the morning sports pages in the newspaper I would read each morning as a kid. The one improvement would be if there was page that summarized the league. i.e. Click on NHL and it lists scores, games that day, standings, and possibly scoring leaders. That would be capture all of the important points on one clean…

Great site, I've been using it for months. It's a really different and richer experience at night when the games are in progress. There are added features for the big leagues, such as the NBA games feature a game flow graph of the scoring margin. It truly shines when you're at a sold out NBA game, you can barely get a tweet out due to the crowd size, but you can still refresh the box score of your own game in <second to check on foul trouble.

Re: Plain Text Sports

#38

Post by CJefferson »

This does look really nice, and the author should be proud, however I wanted to make a general comment (which isn't a critism of this website).

If you aim is to help people who want pure text-based interfaces (the blind in particular), this is much worse than a proper HTML page, which they can easily explore by headers. Well-formed HTML is actually one of the most accessible formats, and drawing boxes with CSS (rather than ASCII art) is also much better, as a screen reader would try to read the art, and get confused by boxes next to each other.

Re: Plain Text Sports

#40

Post by tiffanyh »

CodeIsTheEnd wrote: post #27

Hey, HN! Creator here! I started building Plain Text Sports last year when I was watching an NFL playoff game in rural southwest Wisconsin. We had poor TV reception -- the image was going in-and-out -- and the local radio station was mostly static. I tried to check ESPN, but the loading bar was as frozen as the ground outside. I then had the idea for a website designed for the pure sports fan: no ads, no images, just…

Love it and found it via Gruber's post.

Question: why not use a proportional font for all things other than the score? It would make readability much better. Is the output being mapped to individual character widths, that's why?

EDIT: One more question, is there a URL I can share that enables dark mode? e.g. https://plaintextsports.com/?mode=dark

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