Good morning!  The team at MLB Secrets has been hard at working to provide a better user experience.  After reviewing our statistics and logs, we realized that many users would go to the homepage at www.mlbsecrets.com and not know what to do, so they would just leave or go directly to the blog at blog.mlbsecrets.com.  To fix that, we made changes to the homepage to give users a suggestion as to what they may want to discover.  Please check out the changes at www.mlbsecrets.com.  We hope you like them:

• We’ve added MLB Secrets Discover.  We want you to discover new players, teams, contracts, salaries, awards and Twitter accounts, so on the left-hand side you’ll different links every time you refresh the page.  Give it a try.  Go to www.mlbsecrets.com, take a look at a a contract or award.  Click on it.  Then refresh the homepage.  You’ll see a whole new list.  This way you won’t get stuck looking at the same things.  You can learn something new that you weren’t aware of beforehand.
• We integrated the MLB Secret’s blog to the center column.
• Added the blog’s Top Stories.
• Added MLB Secret’s Twitter feed.

It’s hard to believe that this is build #123 of our website.  For those that aren’t familiar with software releases, it basically means that we’ve created 122 other versions before the one that you see today.  Some of the differences between versions are small.  Others are significant like the current change.  We want to keep on building, so please keep the suggestions coming.

Some people have asked us what technology is being used at MLB Secrets.  The main site at www.mlbsecrets.com is on a CentOS operating system.  It’s coded in Ruby and uses the Rails framework.  All the data sits on a MySQL back end database.  We use the nGINx web server and it’s clustered via Mongrels.  The blog that you are reading right now at blog.mlbsecrets.com is sitting on WordPress.  Both sites are located in different data centers just in case.  There are various other technological facets involved, but I can go on forever talking about what is being used.  If you want me to go in depth about the technology, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to do a little tech talk.

We love the feedback that everybody is providing us through Twitter or through email.  Please keep them coming.  You can send a suggestion, feedback or just say hi through Twitter (@mlbsecrets) or email me (bigal <at> mlbsecrets.com).