Humble beginnings

In 2006, the scoreboard at NBA.com was my favourite site for checking the NBA scores each day. It was a clean setup with quarter-by-quarter scores and category leaders for each team. The only problem? There was a date string that was part of the URL, meaning that the scoreboard itself could not be bookmarked. The only way that I could get to the scoreboard was to go through NBA.com’s front page. This problem was what I intended my NBA Scoreboard addon to solve.

The first version of NBA Scoreboard was a single button that, when clicked, generated the scoreboard URL based on the regional time settings of my computer. I live in Australia and we are 14 hours ahead of the east coast of the United States. The addon took care of all these differences, and still does, so that Today’s Scoreboard is today’s scoreboard all around the world.

XML Evolution

In late 2006, NBA.com released a new scoreboard that was based on XML and I added a host of new features to the addon. Live scores became available in the menu, as well as previews, boxscores and recaps. The feature list continued to grow, including the NBA Leaderboard. The leaderboard unpacks some of the hidden statistics that the NBA.com scoreboard no longer shows.

The addon addresses the increasingly cluttered scoreboard at NBA.com too. NBA Scoreboard Lite removes the advertisements, ticket sales, broadcasters, navigation panes, the headers and footers and leaves the scores. The clean scoreboard of days gone by is back!

Launching nbascoreboard.net

In September 2009, I launched nbascoreboard.net to host the NBA Scoreboard Addon for Firefox. To this point, the free hosting service provided Mozilla Addons was convenient. However, with the number of addons increasing, the turn-around time for releasing an update became too long. Now I can host my addon and provide updates as soon as I have finished the code.

With over 100,000 downloads, NBA Scoreboard is the most popular basketball addon for Firefox.

NBA Scoreboard is created and maintained by Ryan Linneman.