If you know anything about me, you know that I have been a tinkerer ever since I was a little kid. When I was in my early teens, I would take door knobs off of the door just to see if I could keep them working without a part or two. (I usually failed miserably at this, but it was fun to learn.)
As I got older, I tinkered with wood working for a little while, built display systems out of Raspberry Pi’s and even built my own streaming platform that streamed a youth football league championship weekend. In typical fashion, I tore that down and rebuilt it from the ground up.
I’ve built websites, mobile apps, gaming systems, and a multitude of other tools that have improved on things or added to the experience for myself or the general public.
This week, I set out to build a few new things that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time.
Tim(ely) Thoughts
You know, this site didn’t exist a week ago. For two years, I’ve wanted to get back to writing again but this time about topics of my choosing. I wrote recap stories for a youth football league for two years, but never wrote about things that actually interested me.
I love music, technology, history, WWE, sports and any wide range of topics. Last year, I decided I would start to come up with ideas to deep dive albums but quickly realized that would be unwieldy. However, there is a lot of music out there that we’ve forgotten about or even worse, have never heard.
This site came from that idea. It was originally going to be built on Wordpress, but I have also really come to appreciate the free and open writing that can be found on Medium. I also like the idea that the news world has gone to lately with paywalled content and how Substack has introduced that approach to content monetization.
Through the power of Claude, I decided to mash all three together and this site is what came out the other side. There is a newsletter component to the site that I’ll release in the coming weeks. This site is also fully setup to have a paywall for specific content and even accepts donations from loyal readers. Those two elements were need I say, elemental to this endeavor.
The newsletter is powered by Resend, payments are powered by Stripe and the site is powered by a custom CMS that allows me to capture basic analytics around viewership (just views and unique views, don’t worry I don’t know where readers live or what they ate for dinner).
This site will continue to grow and develop and as an early reader, I’m eternally grateful for your support of independent writing.
News Aggregator
Five years ago, I brought an idea to a few friends of mine. What did they think about a news aggregator site for college sports in Pennsylvania? Penn State articles along side Penn College, Pitt alongside Pitt-Greensburg. I even bought the domain that I thought I would put the site behind and set off to building it in Wordpress.
I was aggregating content through RSS feeds, and everything was great until my server went down and I lost access to it. After that, I wasn’t about to rebuild everything from scratch because back in those days when you built something you had to build almost entirely from scratch with a ton of Google searching.
Lately, I’ve been disappointed in my experience with Drudge Report. I don’t feel like I’m getting all of the stories with no slant and it’s not up-to-date.
So I decided to bring back an old idea but make it new with a database that I controlled. A Python scraper, PHP and a database along with some extra help from Claude gave me all of the backend tooling that I needed for my news aggregator.
A cron job would run every 15 minutes to scrape the 15 sites I picked to fetch new content, including images. Then I realized that Claude Sonnet 4.6 has an impressive skill for creating front-end UIs. I put Claude to work on connecting the database to the front-end via APIs and next thing I knew I had the news aggregator I had been looking for.
Along with the main news aggregator, I also built out a sports scraper, finance scraper and a scraper to pull in story content from around the Division II PSAC.
Recap Generator
My original career path was as a Sports Information Director. My family never knew what that was either so to the uninitiated, that’s the person at college sporting events that records game stats, updates the website, writes news articles, updates social media and handles a multitude of other duties as assigned by the athletic department.
When I was in the business, writing a recap from a road game that you didn’t watch via live stream was very standard. We would get a stat file and write the story of the game from the play-by-play and box score. Typically, that would take 30-45 minutes to write.
More recently, there are some companies that have begun turning those files into full recaps but the cost of the service is prohibitive to most small colleges and universities.
That got me to thinking that there has to be a way to build something similar on my own. Again, using the power of Claude, I built a tool that accepts files from all major sports and spits out a recap in approximately 20 seconds.
I have a tester using the system as I would expect an SID to use it and he’s been genuinely impressed with its effectiveness.
What’s Coming Down the Line Next?
TennisStats
I mentioned that original career path of Sports Information. Well, tennis has always been kept in a program called StatCrew. StatCrew was built in the 90s and has become unfunctional over the last 10 years unless you do some wild hacks to your laptop to ensure it still works. You can't use it on an iPad or even a Mac.
Let’s fix that with a web interface that’s easy to use, but still generates files that can be used by SIDs to exchange information and update their websites.
Athletic Department Mobile App
I mentioned building a mobile app previously. That was built on Wordpress for the youth football league I helped with. This will include video from a third-party, news, schedules, advertising, push notifications and photo galleries.
It’ll be iOS only at first, as I typically code in Swift. However, Kotlin coding isn’t completely foreign so maybe we’ll add that later.
College Wrestling Pick-Em
We’ve all picked a bracket for the NCAA tournament. Whether you used Yahoo, CBS Sports or ESPN that was a tool that kept score as you accurately picked winners of games. (Or if you're like most of us, inaccurately picked winners of games.)
I’m not really a big basketball fan though and I live in Penn State Wrestling territory. I’ve always been a huge fan of amateur wrestling and thought, why not wrestling pick-em?
Last year, my cousin ran his own pick-em which he maintained through an Excel sheet. This year, I want to throw that on its head and have all 320 bouts (10 weight classes, 33-seeded wrestlers) picked.
Next week, we’ll build this out, with scoring, live leaderboards and a payment platform that allows for some winnings to be earned on top of the fun of March Matness.