There's been a pick up in young American players about to make the jump from MLS to the European leagues. Chicago Midfielder Demarcus Beasley is set to sign for Dutch club PSV Eindhoven for about \$2.5 million while DC United midfielder Bobby Convey might be headed for Reading of the English First Division for a \$1.2 million transfer fee. It's looking more like the way to a succesful soccer career might start in MLS. Landon Donovan came back from Germany to play for San Jose, and this week Danny Szetla elected to sign with the League instead of going abroad. MLS gives young stars a better chance to play first team games, establish themseleves in the lineup, without having to deal with language and cultural barriers.

One thing that'll be easy to implement is saving a user's name, email, and website to a cookie and prepopulation the comments field if that cookie is there. Do I need the ubiquitous Save-my-info checkbox or is it ok to do this behind the scenes?

I'm also thinking of implementing an optional email notification if you want to subscribe to a particular entry. I think I have to put some safegaurd in place to prevent someone from coming to an entry, subscribing random people by fake posting their info and using the notification to spam others. One idea I have is to require subscribers and posters to verify their email address by sending an email with a confirmation link that needs to be clicked on. Would this put too much of a barrier to potential comment submitters? Another strategy would be to keep track of the last time that a notification email went out on a particular entry and limit the emails to going out after 1,2,3 or more hours. This removes the need for people to confirm their addresses. Along with that, I can implement a blacklist of IP addresses from which to refuse comments. That may be an easier, both for users and for me, solution to implement.

Related to the above, would RSS feeds containing comments to a particular entry be useful or preferred? They'd accomplish the same as the above but then user's would have to have a link or something that they can put in their aggregator.

Any thoughts or critiques would be appreciated, even of a non-technical nature

Dan Willis writes Are Useful Requirements Just A Fairy Tale? (and why an IA should care). The article resonates with a lot of themes that we programmers have been dealing with at work over the last year. Sandy has mostly lead the charge to get more complete requirements written early in the process.

In some cases, this resulted in spotty requirements that only vaguely described parts of the challenge. These requirements lacked credibility and people tended not to pay much attention until they saw the user interface. Because of this, even points of conflict described well in the requirements weren't addressed until the design was near completion.

We need different levels/sets of requirements. Our one set of requirements are still trying to serve multiple audiences: the client & project manager(s) who care about what will be done, the IA & designer who care about how it should look and behave (a superficial simplification - yes), and the developers who care about how all the pieces are implemented using our standard platform and work together. Dan addresses these groups and their different requirements needs quite intelligently