I was looking for a program to get live stats for my yahoo fantasy football league and quickly found statfink. It’s openly available on sourceforge, is updated quickly if any issues arise, and is designed to be used by your whole league. For instance two updates were released this past weekend. One big interface update on saturday and another on monday for stat scraper issues. It’s more advanced however than the average fantasy football player will be able to accomplish but if words like mysql, php, htpasswd, and apache bring back fond memories you’ll feel right at home.

I’ve been using it for the league I play in for a few weeks now and everyone loves it. So check out my statfink page and see how my team, The Holy Hand Grenades, are doing this week. The new interface was just released this past week and is a huge improvement over the old that you can also check out at that link.

As for setup it was really simple. I’ll go ahead and include the most recent install guide here so you can get an idea of the process.

1) Extract the files from the archive.
(in linux: tar -zxf statfink-x.y.tar.gz)

2) Copy the statfink folder to a directory accessible from the web.
(usually /somewhere/public_html/)

2a) It is STRONGLY suggested that you password protect the ‘helm’ directory with an .htpasswd
file. There is a nice tool (http://www.clockwatchers.com/htaccess_tool.html) there to
handle this if you don’t know how. Many people have this functionality built into their
cPanel. Otherwise, anyone will be able to control your copy of statfink or get your yahoo
passsword, which could really ruin your day.

3) Make sure your permissions are set correctly, you can do this in an ftp client by going
to the file properties or file permissions(usually by right clicking the file). The permissions
to the statfink, statfink/helm/, and statfink/helm/config/ directories should all be “777” (or
all the boxes checked, read write exeecute for all). The reason for this is that the web server
will have to write some files to your directory in the next steps.

4) Fire up your favorite web browser and point it at the helm directory in the directory you
installed statfink into. (eg. http://www.your-host-here.com/statfink/helm/)
Click the link that says “Configure Statfink” to set up statfink. Fill out the form
completely, and then click the “Save Settings” button. This will bring you to a page telling
you everything was saved properly. If you’re setting up Statfink for the first time, click
the first link to initialize your database using the database settings you just entered.

5) At this point you need to set up a league for Statfink to track. If you just clicked the
database initialization link, you’re hopefully now at a page that says that it’s done making
databases and that you need to set up at least one league. Enter a league name here (10
characters or less, letters and numbers only) and click the button. On the next page you’ll
need to fill this form out COMPLETELY with every box containing something, at least a zero.
Click the save settings button. Congratulations! You’re ready to start using Statfink on
the helm page, or if you have more leagues you want to set up, go back to the main config page.

A great source for helping you get your site up and running is Statfink4Dummies.  It goes a little more in depth than the simple instructions I posted above.