At the beginning of this month, NASCAR changed their website design which necessitated making some changes on my own NASCAR page. First, it seems that NASCAR has removed their RSS News feeds from the site as those are no longer working. As such, I’ve had to remove the NASCAR News headlines and excerpts from my page for now. There might be some way to get the main stories by parsing the website itself or I may have to use another online source that has an RSS feed that I can parse without much code modification.

I have also corrected the links that referenced Dale Jr, Tony Stewart, Mark Martin, and Danica Patrick’s pages on the NASCAR website. The ones in the Drivers Standings list are still pointing to the old pages, which do get re-directed; however, I am not going to correct those as I suspect I’ll have to completely change how I’m getting the standings once the 2013 season starts. In fact my links to the Drivers Standings now go to 404 error pages. The only reason I’m able to get the 2012 standings is that I was getting them based off the server’s IP address which looks to still be active and has the old website content. The current NASCAR Standings page’s content is now completely generated via JavaScript in the browser which means my current method of getting the standings will not work at all. 🙁

Given the above, my overall opinion about the changes to the NASCAR website is not going to be very objective right now. It seems to me the overall design is putting emphasis on it being viewed with a smartphone or tablet with a small screen and not necessarily on a PC with a large viewing area. Everything is huge and there so much wasted space. The front page is consumed by a 1280×530 image at the top and if I enable ads on the page the only thing I see on the front page is a banner ad and that large rotating image banner. OK, I do see the navigation menus at the top, but I have to hit Page Down twelve times to see all the content. Granted, it’s ten Page Downs on my blog but I’m showing complete article content.

Anyway, I’ll have to wait and see what happens on the site during and after the Daytona 500 races to really give my final thoughts on the changes and work on getting the 2013 Driver Standings. 😕