An explanation of the many ways to enjoy MLB Trade Rumors:
- If the main site doesn't load perfectly on your cell phone, try the more mobile-friendly mlbtraderumors.mobi. It's a simple page that shows you just the headlines and lets you click through to what you want to read.
- If you want only the hard news in the form of transactions, our transactions page is the ticket. You can also get only the transactions via Twitter or RSS.
- To return to the main page at any time, just click on the title or the Home button on the navigation bar below the title.
- The navigation bar will cover many of your needs. Use the About dropdown to learn about this site or any of its writers.
- The Contact button takes you to a page where you can write an email message to the MLBTR writers. If you have a link to a rumor we've missed, please send it in through the Contact page! Also use the Contact page to inquire about advertising on MLBTR.
- The Archives dropdown shows you 15 months worth. If you need to go back further, click on Site Map at the very bottom of the page. Site Map also lists out every MLBTR post category, including players, teams, and features.
- The Widget button takes you here, where website owners can easily add to their sites a constantly updated box with all of MLBTR's headlines.
- The Forums button takes you here, to a message board community of MLBTR readers with over 5,500 members. You can discuss any baseball-related topic on the Forums, and start your own thread too.
- Feeds By Team is a very useful dropdown. Hover over it to see all 30 teams. Click on the team name to bring up a page of every post containing information about that team, with the latest on top. These are the same pages you'll find if you go to the Rumors By Team section on the sidebar and select A's Rumors, Angels Rumors, etc. Also under the Feeds By Team dropdown, you'll find RSS and Twitter buttons. Those links allow you to follow a single team's rumors via RSS or Twitter. Did you know we have a separate Twitter account for each of the 30 teams? For example you can follow @mlbtrtigers, where you would get the latest Tigers updates.
- On the far right of the Navigation bar, you'll see buttons for Twitter, Facebook, and RSS. MLBTR has over 41,000 Twitter followers, over 21,000 Facebook fans, and over 32,000 RSS subscribers. Sign up for these and you'll be the first to receive all of our posts.
- On to the sidebar. It begins with a list of our Top Stories, which our writers update any time major hard news occurs. Go here for a quick update on the most important stories. Below that is the site's Search Box, where you can type in any player's name and get the latest on him.
- MLBTR Features has all kinds of goodies, including our free agent lists, reverse standings, list of Scott Boras clients, latest Elias Rankings and GM-related stuff. Many of the MLBTR Features are constantly updated by our writers, so be assured that our free agent lists are always fresh. The Elias Rankings have been reverse-engineered for MLBTR by Eddie Bajek, and you won't find that info anywhere else.
- Below Features you've got headlines for all the Recent Posts, in case you'd rather not scroll to see all the headlines. Then there's a box for our Mailing List, where you can sign up to receive a daily email containing MLBTR's posts. Use this option if you don't need the news as soon as possible.
- Next we have Featured Posts, where you'll find original work from MLBTR writers we consider noteworthy. For example, read about which teams are spending aggressively on the draft.
benkarl
MLBTR is great. But in the past I’ve had problems viewing MLBTR on my android phone, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. It might be a good idea to help out the growing mobile web users by adding something like WPtouch.
I have no idea what your web stats look like, but I would bet that you pull a decent amount of traffic from Twitter. I would also think that your mobile stats are trending upward too. WPtouch would detect mobile users and automatically take them to a mobile version of MLBTR instead of having them go to the .mobi version.
I’ve seen these these ‘How to Use MLBTR’ post before, and it just seems overly complicated. People are lazy, and making things easy on them might help to keep and even grow MLBTR.
Tim Dierkes
I appreciate the suggestion. I’d rather not bounce people to the .mobi automatically; the .com offers a lot more, as you’d expect. For those who can’t get the .com on their phone I’d rather just ask them to type in .mobi.
benkarl
The best comparison I can give is TechCruch. They are using WPTouch and DISQUS.
I can understand not wanting to flip people back-and-forth between a regular site and a mobile site, but I’m just coming from a usability perspective.
I just went the the .mobi version of MLBTR, and was having problems navigating the site.
The first five post that show up on the .mobi site work fine. I can click the post headline and it takes me to the post, but after I get to the post the only way to get back is to hit the back button in my mobile browser, click the header image, or click the back link way down in the footer.
I also noticed that the if I click the ‘previous entries’ link I’m taken to a page that shows the previous 5 post that were on the .mobi home page plus the next five newest MLBTR post. The problem is that the headline navigation (link to the post) on all 10 post is nonexistent. The only thing I can see is the first couple sentences of each post. So, at this point there is no way to navigate the .mobi site other than using the footer links.
The last thing I noticed was that the Google Mobile ad seems to be broken. For some reason the ad seems to be linking back to MLBTR. Once I click the Google ad the page either reloads or takes me to a 404 page. I’m all for ads, but something is broken.
I’m using a Google android phone, and I came across the same set of problems for the default browser and the Dolphin Browser.
I hope I don’t come off has trying to bash the site, but I just wanted to let you know what I have experienced when trying to use the .mobi version of MLBTR.
Thanks for all the time and effort you put into this site, and keep up the good work.