deeden.co.uk

Translation to English of portions of Richard Scudamores article on the football “product”

2008-08-10T19:42:53Z

Richard Scudamore wrote an article for the Guardian on the Premier League. I feel that a partial translation to English might prove informative.

Title: Great product shows the value of our ‘virtuous circle’

I think of the league as a product. This may tell you all you need to know. From here on when I say “virtuous circle”, read “money making schemes”.

The Premier League enters its 17th season off the back of, arguably, our most compelling competition yet.

3 teams finished within 4 points of each other; this is regarded as compelling. Please ignore that these teams have won the last 13 titles between them.

The clubs put on a great show - fantastic football in the finest set of club stadia in the world and the highest average top-flight attendances in England for more than 50 years.

Sky said that it was a great show, it must be true. Having fine stadia also means that the football must be good. High attendances is also good, we can constantly replace the people who no longer attend with other people, that business model worked perfectly for AOL.

On top of that we had an all-English Champions League final for the first time - testament to the strength of the Premier League and the standards being set week in, week out.

We had an all-English Champions League final for the first time. It shows what can be done if you spend a fortune on players and wages. It also helps to have 18 non-English players involved in the match.

It is no accident that Premier League clubs find themselves in this position, financially strong and performing well on the pitch. The collective selling of our media rights and the equitable distribution of broadcast revenue provides the stability to invest, while rewarding success.

It is no accident that Football League clubs find themselves in this position, financially struggling and performing badly off the pitch. Frankly, we don’t care.

Reconciling the interests of all 20 clubs is not easy. There is a significant differential in income as a result of the size of individual clubs: the matchday revenue of some dwarfs the entire earnings of others. This is exacerbated at the very top by the distorting impact of the Champions League revenue, something that must have an even greater impact in other European leagues. That is why the distribution model operated by the Premier League is so important to competitive balance. Every pound earned centrally has a redistributive effect. This makes it imperative that when we explore potential new opportunities, we do so on a league-wide basis.

We share all money, apart from the money we don’t share. The money we don’t share distorts things, even I have to admit that. Can I try to distract you by making a pointless remark about other leagues? Now that I have distracted you I’m going to try floating the 39th game idea again.

The more people want to watch Premier League football, the more others will seek to circumvent rights structures. This means not only potentially less money for clubs and players, but for youth development, flexible ticket pricing and community initiatives, all of which are critical to ensuring our continued success, and all of which rely on our ability to defend each constituent part of the ‘virtuous circle’.

I’m raising the spectre of piracy here. I have no actual point to make, it just may distract you again. Please try to keep a straight face while I claim that our aim in making more money is to fund youth development or flexible ticket pricing.

The Premier League, and English football, is in robust health.

The Premier League is scarily uncompetitive. When I say that English football is in robust health, I mean the turnover of about 5 clubs in the Premier League. Who cares about the England team, I know we don’t.

The Premier League clubs understand the importance of this model: investing in the acquisition and development of playing talent; keeping and attracting fans; new and improved stadium facilities, and an increasing amount of corporate social responsibility activity.

Please pay no attention to the fact that I didn’t mention a competitive league.

This ‘virtuous circle’ is the rationale that underpins everything we do. It starts and finishes with the football. Everything else - the fans, the sponsors, the broadcasters, even the community programmes - flow from that. And that is exactly how it should be.

Don’t forget that “virtuous circle” means “money making schemes”. As I say, “everything else flows from that.”

Hat-tip to Daring Fireball for the concept.

Migrating ExpressionEngine from development to production

2008-06-25T21:01:00Z

Moving an ExpressionEngine site from one server to another, or even one domain to another domain, is a complicated process. Whenever I’ve attempted to do this I’ve found that the hardest part is making sure that the database is correct for the new location. This involves copying the database across and then making sure I change every path and domain through the control panel to the new values.

I’ve never succeeded in migrating successfully using the manual method. I always miss something and have to deal with some small problem that inevitably crops up. Finally, I decided to make it easier on myself, so I wrote a script to perform the update for me. This will not be for everyone, however if you’re comfortable with command line scripts and ruby this may do the job for you.

The script (the impatient among you can find it at the end of this article) does one job and one job only. It takes a MySQL dump from an EE database and makes the updates required for any domain name and path changes, writing these out again in the format of another MySQL dump. For example, if I tell it that my development site lives at /www/deeden.tld and my production site at /www/deeden.co.uk it updates the database to reflect this, dealing with all of the complications that arise, such as correctly dealing with the serialisation which some of the tables use.

An example of performing the above update would be…

ee_migrator --current_domain=deeden.tld --new_domain=deeden.co.uk --current_path=/Users/steve/Sites/deeden.tld --new_path=/www/deeden.co.uk development_sql.txt > live_sql.txt

This runs the script (assuming it is named ee_migrator) and changes all occurrences of the domain deeden.tld to deeden.co.uk as well as changing the path to the web site from /Users/steve/Sites/deeden.tld to /www/deeden.co.uk. Rather useful when I’ve been developing a site on my iBook and want to move it to the live server.

I’ll put together a page with full instructions on the use of the script in the next few days. For now I’ll give a brief explanation of the parameters…

-h, --help: Display usage instructions.
-t, --table_prefix: Specify a different table prefix from the default, which is exp.
-a, --all_data: Keep all data from the initial dump. By default the script ignores a number of tables which should not be copied from a development, such as control panel logs and email caches. The --all_data allows all data to be copied, unsurprisingly.
-c, --current_domain <OLD DOMAIN>: The domain being moved from. In the example above it would be deeden.tld. In the case where the domain isn’t changing simply leave this option out.
-n, --new_domain <NEW DOMAIN>: The domain being moved to. In the example above it would be deeden.co.uk. In the case where the domain isn’t changing simply leave this option out as well.
-s, --current_path <CURRENT SITE PATH>: The path to where the old domain lives. If the path isn’t being changed then leave the option out.
-p, --new_path <NEW SITE PATH>: Specify the new path to the web directory. Again, if this isn’t being changed simply leave it out.

The input file is a mysqldump file, and the output is the same file with the appropriate changes made. Generally I do a dump of my development database, do a quick scan of the output to see that everything looks alright and them import the new database file into my a fresh database for the live site. Your mileage might vary.

There are a few things to bear in mind if you do plan to use this script, such as…

Backup your database.
I accept no responsibility for any damage this script may do. Use it at your own risk.
If you find a bug please do report it.
If you make an enhancement please send it to me, it may be useful to other people.
Seriously, backup your database.

The most recent version of the script is version 1.0.

A new beginning

2008-06-22T21:48:01Z

Many months ago I decided to completely re-“design” my site. This decision was made at around the same time I decided to leave my previous employer and move to Banjax. At that time I figured I’d have my new design in place by the time I started my new job. Clearly, I was wrong. A number of things caused the delay, including one abortive design including some CSS I’m proud of and some javascript wizardry. Some of that abandoned design will no doubt appear on some other site of mine in the future.

This version of the site uses ExpressionEngine as a content management system allowing me to move away from Movable Type. The change was made for a number of different reasons, including frustration at the generally static nature of MT, as well as a desire to play with a different system. I’d done some work with ExpressionEngine while still at Front and that had piqued my interest enough to make the move. There are still some little niggles, such as some issues to do with 404 errors, but overall it has been an interesting experience and I’m happy with the move.

The site is by no means finished, but it’s in a much better state that my previous one. There are still some rough edges (in particular with some of the layout) and some sections, such as that for code, are missing, but it’s in a fit enough state to go live.

I’ll be releasing a number of different plugins for various systems over the next few weeks as I tidy the last few remaining details. One of these will be the plugin I wrote for EE to display the relative times in the Tweets and Links entries in the middle column. All of this will come in good time though.