This and that

• Now again, for those who liked this Nike ad, this is how it was made !! I personally have seen better Cricket ads, but this one is right up there..

• Martin Scorcece finally won an Oscar this past weekend. Will Sachin Tendulkar win a World Cup ?

• And talking about momentum in the run up to the WC, if anyonez got it, its gotta be England and New Zealand. But, momentum could only take you so far in the World Cup. Look at India's 2003 campaign. But at least England and New Zealand have created a few doubts in the minds of the faithful.

• No matter who says what, but I firmly believe that Shoaib and Asif will play the WC 2007. There ya go fellas, my first WC prediction !

• And then there was Wasim Akram. Here is a fitting tribute.
  

• We, at cricketernews.com have been observing that some non-cricket related blogs and videos and creeping into the site. Thats because the super-duper program that we wrote to collect cricket related information is duped into collecting info on crickets and more ! We certainly don't want NSFW kinda stuff appearing on cricketernews.com. If indeed you find offensive info on cricketernews.com, please let us know at contact@cricketernews.com. We'll get rid of it ASAP.

Cricket World Cup 2007 - excitment has no limits

How is this world cup different from other cricket world cups? No, it is not the venue of tournament nor the amount of money spent for the world cup. But it is the form of various cricket teams. Just days / weeks before the start of the world cup no team looks a clear winner at the moment. At least in the last installment we could broadly agree that Australia or South Africa could win the world cup. However, this is not the case for World Cup 2007, which I believe brings in more excitement due to uncertainty of a sure winner for the spectators and the bookies.

Australia has lost the recent series with New Zealand, South Africa is no longer the same force while lead by Hansie, Sri Lanka lost the ODI series in India, India just looks to regain some form in the home series, Pakistan looks to have some internal issues, West Indies looking to regroup under the captaincy of Lara, England having lots of new players for this World Cup and so on... This is what excites me - expectation of an equally fought, close finishing and the sunny West Indies for an memorable world cup.

It is now time to relax, cheer for your team, grow nails inorder to bit them off during close matches, switch on the TV to watch Mandira showcase her 60 odd new dresses and listen to some Sidhuisms. All in all expect a fun filled time during the World Cup.

Which team are you cheering for and why? Send in your choices... :)

2 weeks to WC

From making Cricket related commercials (Nike) to auctioning saris with players' signatures(eBay), the advertisers are embracing Cricket as expected. Even US State department is taking notice. But will the host countries be ready? No - says this article from LA Times.

Indian team - then and now

We at cricketernews.com started comparing Cricket teams announced for this World Cup and its previous edition played in South Africa in 2003. Here is a comparion of 'Team India' that played in 2003 and now:



Its going to be the last world cup for the some of the Indian bigwigs - Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Anil Kumble and Sourav Ganguly. While Mohd. Kaif is unlucky to miss out the 2007 bus, the 2007 squad still looks a solid batting unit.

Want to add/remove your content ??

Its been about couple of weeks since cricketernews.com went live. We already have a few bloggers asking us to add their blog sites to cricketernews.com. If you want to add your site to cricketernews.com, please send us an email at contact@cricketernews.com with your name, country, URL of your site and URL to the RSS content on your site. We would add your site for free. The only condition is that your site has to be about Cricket or should have significant Cricket related news, videos, blogs or podcasts.

If your site has already been featured at cricketernews.com and you would like to remove it from cricketernews.com, please send us an email at contact@cricketernews.com. We will take your request seriously and will remove your site from cricketernews.com as soon as possible.

Using cricketernews.com

How to bookmark cricketernews.com in Mozilla Firefox?

Open Firefox browser and go to cricketernews.com. Ensure the page is loaded completely. Click on the 'Bookmarks' menu from the top and select 'Bookmark this page'. 'Add Bookmark' dialog opens up. In the 'Create In' dropdown box, select 'Bookmarks Toolbar'. Then click 'OK'. A new bookmark link is created in the toolbar section of Firefox browser like in sample on the right hand side.

If there are already a bunch of bookmark links on the toolbar and you do not have space for adding 'cricketernews.com' link, you can delete links to sites that you are not interested in. To delete, right click on the links and click 'delete'.

How to bookmark cricketernews.com in Internet Explorer?
Open IE browser and go to cricketernews.com. Ensure the page is loaded completely. Click on the 'Favorites' menu from the top menu and select 'Add to Favorites'. 'Add a Favorite' dialog opens up. In the 'Create In' dropdown box, select 'Links'. Then click 'OK'. A new favorite link is created in the toolbar section of IE browser.

If there are already a bunch of favorite links on the toolbar and you do not have space for adding 'cricketernews.com' link, you can delete links to sites that you are not interested in. To delete, right click on the links and click 'delete'.

Using cricketernews.com
The cricketernews.com developers spent a lot of time and energy trying to make the site easy to use. The site was designed keeping in mind casual Cricket surfers and die-hard fans hungry for any and all information(most of us at cricketernews.com belong to the latter community). Our ultimate goal is to make Cricket surfing a fun activity.

Under every tab, there are rectangular blocks - each of which we call as Channels. A channel is nothing but source of information. For example, under news tab, BBC, cricinfo, ABC etc are channels. When you click on a specific channel, say BBC, the page displays all the news items published by BBC. You can read the news by clicking on the 'Read more' link. This will take the user to the specific news page at BBC. After reading the news item, you can come back to cricketernews.com by clicking 'Click here to go back' link at the bottom of the web page. This link will take you back to the BBC channel.

Comments, feedbacks and suggestions are always welcome at contact@cricketernews.com

More about CricketerNews.com

CricketerNews.com is a Java based RSS aggregator for Cricket. It aggregates Cricket news, videos, blogs and podcasts from a variety of sources - from around the world. The site aggregates cricket news from some of popular news sources such as BBC, ABC, CricInfo etc to name just a few. The site pulls together some of the most famous Cricket blogs from around the world too. And then there are Videos and Podcasts.

The cricketernews.com team put together the site in just under 3 months. For techie folks, here is some technical info.

What technologies does cricketernews.com use ?
As you may already know, cricketernews.com is an RSS aggregation site. It uses an enhanced version of Informa RSS engine and mySQL database. Persistance layer has a good mixture of Hibernate and JDBC. EHcache has been used improve the performance. JSF is used in the server side. The slick front-end has been made possible thanks to AJAX. We used Yahoo's AJAX toolkit. We'll make more techie info available soon. We also plan to Open Souce our code, so that CricketerNews.com could grow rapidly, benefiting from Cricket-loving software developers.

Feedback, suggestion, comments are most welcome at contact@cricketernews.com

Welcome to CricketerNews.com Blog

Wecome to CricketerNews.com blog. This blog has been published by creators of www.cricketernews.com. We will use this blog to keep everyone updated on what's happening at cricketernews.com and also to talk about our passion - Cricket.

What is CricketerNews.com ?
CricketerNews.com is an innovative website dedicated to Cricket Videos, News, Blogs and Podcasts. It was designed to be a one-stop-shop for all cricket news.

Why did we create CricketerNews.com ?
Because we love and live Cricket.
Because we have insatiable hunger for anything related to Cricket.
Because we spend a lot of time reading, watching and listening to Cricket.
There are plenty of good cricket sites, blogs and videos out there in the Internet. The information is spread across the web, we simply aggregate information.

How did CricketerNews.com come into being ?
CricketerNews.com started as an after-work, evening-hours project around the summer of 2006. However, we soon realised that general public could benefit from such a site. So, we put some more time, effort and money to put CricketerNews.com online.