Save Time Managing your Fantasy Football Teams

Managing a Fantasy Football team can be time consuming. Managing several Fantasy Football teams can lead to divorce or unemployment if you are serious about winning, right? Today I’m going to cover a handy little tool that I stumbled across recently. Actually, I would like to thank an unknown subscriber who led me to this site. Had they not used this site to display our feed and click through who knows when I would have found it. So here’s to you real fantasy football man of genius, whoever you are…

Last week I went over how to Dominate your Fantasy Football league using RSS Subscribing. Today we will go over how to use Symbaloo as your own fantasy news source. With a little legwork and customization you will have all the information you need to beat your rival in a fraction of the time that many spend gathering the same information.

Symbaloo is a site that is a bit like iGoogle or My Yahoo! to give you an idea. It’s much easier on the eyes though. It’s designed to be a startup page that gives you a place to have all your surfing spots set up and linked right in front of you when you get there. Think…Bookmarks, RSS Reader, info (like weather), and Search Engine all in one. It’s very customizable, which brings the idea of a fantasy news source to mind. There is a “Tour” video when you get there so I will leave the rest of the site pimping itself to that. Let’s dig into how to use this thing to cut down your fantasy browsing time!

There are two features we are going to cover here. The Desktop and Feed Reader. We will start with the Desktop. Clicking HERE will take you to a sample Desktop that I created for us. Now that you are there signing up for a free account actually makes this one of your pages (you can delete it and start over or build on it).

When you start a page you can choose to have it empty or filled with default tiles. I left some of the default we can use for fantasy in there. I also left the Tour tile in there so you can learn more about it by watching the video. Let’s go over the tiles shown…

• Tour-Site info and Video mentioned above.
• Search-Clicking this will display a Google search in the box in the middle of the page. You can choose from various search engines.
• Weather- Type in the city your players are in for the week to check the local forecast.
• News-Search Google News (or whichever engine you choose) for info on your players.
• Videos-This you have the option to search video sites like You Tube, Google Video, Daily Motion or others. The NFL cracks down on videos but these are good places to watch some highlights of the rookies when preparing for your Dynasty or Keeper draft.

Those are some of the default I left in. How about making this thing more customized to yourself? Let’s look at the next row, shall we?

• See the tab where it says “Add Here” on the left? Clicking that or any empty tile is going to let you create a custom tab. Here you are given several options as to what to do with this new tile. For our purposes we want to make a Bookmark. Enter the URL of…let’s say the site for one of your fantasy leagues. Now you can eiter choose to upload an icon (to make your page all pretty like) or use a default. Enter a title, click save and presto…you have a new tile linking to your league.
• The next two tiles were example bookmarks I entered. one of them is for the Football Jabber homepage, the other for NFL.com. How about a tile that displays an RSS Feed and bookmark together? That would be cool…right?
• The next tile is for the Podcast The Fantasy Football News and Advice Show. See the little RSS icon in the bottom right of the tile? That shows you that it doubles as a bookmark and RSS Feed. Clicking it gives you the feed, shown in the box in the photo above. Hovering over a title will give you an example, clicking on it will take you to that page. There is also a book mark in the title in bold above the articles. The next tile is the FootballJabber.com feed.

You can set tons of bookmarks and organize them as you please. In the options you can add more tiles or take some away, whatever you want. You can also create several different pages. Just click on the + tab in the upper left. Did you try it? If you did you will see the option of an RSS Desktop.

The RSS Desktop works similar to the regular Desktop except instead of the icons it is going to display the feeds themselves. Think about this…being able to browse all the latest articles from every local paper for NFL teams that offer an RSS Feed (If your not familiar with RSS Feeds or what to do with them, click that link up in the second paragraph) in a matter of a few minutes!

You can view the sample RSS Desktop I set up HERE. For those following along in the article here we have another screen shot below…

Setting these up is the same process as mentioned above for adding custom tiles to the Desktop. Hovering over a title gives you a preview of the article. You can stick any feed you want in here. I threw in some samples to give you an idea. We have the local paper for the Titans, Player news from Roto World, the Football Jabber Fantasy Feed, The Fantasy Football News and Advice Show Podcast feed, and even the feed from one of my fantasy leagues (if you use MyFantasyLeague.com your league has RSS feeds you can subscribe to).

As you can see in the picture above you can create several pages. It doesn’t have to be limited to your fantasy leagues, you can have personal pages as well all in the same place. Have some fun with this. Create tiles for all your players with images built in. When you have your arch nemesis in your local league over for some beers pop this puppy up and show him how scared he should be this season. Or better yet…don’t show him and keep this little secret to yourself while ruling your league!

Our friend over at The Fantasy Football Goat has some great video tutorials on fantasy team management HERE. The one there on the bottom will show you how to make a page kinda like I outlined above by using iGoogle. Go check it out. Had I not watched that video I would not have had this idea for Symbaloo!

If you found this helpful show some love by subscribing to the Football Jabber feed and sharing it with some of the tools below.

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