Where it all began
Aston Villa Central began to come to life towards the end of 2008, but the curtain wasn’t really yanked away until January 2009. The aim at first was to provide a home for the wallpapers and videos I was making at the time, but also to share some statistical research work now and again.
That was the aim anyway, I didn’t really intend to write much myself, but it wasn’t long before I began to enjoy the writing process (most of the time) and the blog took on a life of its own. The focus has always been to do something different from the existing blogs in the same sector; a lot of work has gone into researching and creating original content and the way it’s presented.
Technical bit
WordPress is at the heart of Aston Villa Central, but actually employs two separate installations: one for the blog, and another for the wallpapers. This was done so that each wallpaper could have its own permalink complete with tags and categories for SEO purposes. Not the most elegant solution, but prior to the custom post capability that WordPress introduced in version 3.0 it was the easiest to implement.
The Villa Wire uses SimplePie to parse RSS news feeds with a cron job refreshing the cache every 20 minutes. Aston Twitter simply uses Twitter’s own search widgets with a little extra CSS to customize the appearance.
Aston Villa Blog
The blog is the backbone of AVC, and is naturally housed in the root WordPress installation. The posts are displayed on the front page in a typical linear fashion with a sidebar on the right.
Aston Villa Wallpapers
I’ve uploaded more than 70 wallpapers to AVC, most available in multiple sizes including some images designed for mobile devices like the iPhone, Blackberry and iPad.
The Villa Wire
The Villa Wire is a news aggregator in the same vein as popurls and Alltop, preferring to use only a select number of sources in their own fixed location on the screen over the “river of news” format favoured by most aggregators.
Aston Twitter
When originally conceived, Aston Twitter consisted of two frames using Monitter scripts to update live Tweets from opposing sets of fans during matches to form a kind of “crowd-sourced” commentary. Early tests using the 2009 Super Bowl suggested the idea had some merit, but the volume of Tweets during Premiership matches never got close to replicating the early promise and development stalled.
For now, then, Aston Twitter uses search widgets developed by Twitter to provide live updates of several key, preset search terms and remains “just for fun”.
