Update: Batch two added.

SALT LAKE CITY – ESPN College GameDay is coming to the University of Utah this weekend, with a variety of shows airing from Presidents Circle starting at 10 a.m. MT Friday and concluding at 10 a.m. Saturday. All events are free and open to the public. No. 5 Utah will host No. 23 California Saturday at 8 p.m. MT in a game that will be televised by ESPN.

ESPN will begin broadcasting shows from Presidents Circle on Friday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. MT with a live show scheduled from 12:00-12:30. It will be a carnival-like atmosphere on Friday with sponsors such as Pizza Hut, Home Depot, Coke Zero and Cheezit offering promotional items, food sampling, games and a sign-making competition.

Beginning at 6 p.m. Friday, overnight camping will be permitted in Presidents Circle. All camping gear must be cleared by 4 a.m. Saturday and fans will be admitted into the GameDay site starting at 4:30 a.m. The first 300 people in line will earn a place in the pit, located immediately adjacent to the GameDay set. While signs are encouraged, fans should be aware that prohibited items include projectiles, signs on sticks, food or drink, backpacks or purses.

People with Crimson Club tailgate passes may begin parking in the Guardsman Way lot at 10 p.m. Friday or when the lot is cleared. Fans with the proper parking pass who choose to camp in other lots around campus may begin setting up after 6 p.m. Friday.

On Saturday morning, there will be free parking for the general public in the Merrill Engineering lot and fans are encouraged to arrive at the GameDay grounds on Presidents Circle by 5 a.m. for the start of the live hits.

The ESPN College GameDay show will air from 7 a.m.-10 a.m. and will feature hosts Lee Corso, Kirk Herbstreit, Rece Davis, Desmond Howard, Sam Ponder and David Pollack.

ESPN College GameDay previously visited Salt Lake City in 2004 and 2010.

This post courtesy of the U of U Ticket Office.

Today marks the two week anniversary of the opening of Ute Hub.  Things are settling down now.  Signups are a few per day now, not 250/day that we saw in first couple of days.  Membership is at a little over 700 now.

This past week I setup a Ute Hub Facebook and Ute Hub Twitter.  Give them a follow!

I’ve been working on some site improvements.  I started some PHP programming of the “retro” forum thread style.  Got the basics done.  I also redesigned the forum index page.  The out-of-the-box one sucked.

Forum activity has been great.  The forum is now at roughly 3500 posts since the site opened.  That’s awesome.

In the two weeks the site has been in operation the Utes have crushed the Oregon Ducks 62-20 in Eugene, and ESPN Gameday has decided to come here.  Oh, and the Utes vaulted up to #5 in the college football rankings in the AP poll.  Of course, Ute Hub claims full credit for the Utes’ success!

I installed the Tapatalk system here for those who like to use the Tapatalk app to read forums on their mobile devices.  The users who prefer that have been very excited.  I hope to continue the design of the site so that such a thing isn’t necessary.  Until then, Tapatalk is alive and well.

Earlier today I put the first small google ad on the site.  There are some expenses involved for hosting, some apps (chat, like), and so on.  I’d like to see for now the site at least attempting to cover its own costs.  If not, at least contribute a bit to it so I’m not totally out of pocket.  Not to worry though.  The site is registered for three years and there’s no risk of “not paying the bills” and having the site go down or anything like that.  But I’d like to see it pull its own weight.

This past week was a bye week.  Coming up is the Cal game with ESPN in town.  I’m working to arrange a Ute Hub member meetup at the tailgate.

I’m also thinking of whipping together some Ute Hub cards to hand out at the tailgate and the game.

Looking forward to week #3!

GO UTES!

What a first week for Ute Hub. It’s not possible to document everything that happened, but the first few days were so crazy that my mind was completely buzzing, like I’d been on a bender in Vegas for days with no sleep. From new member signups, deployment challenges, cyber attacks, email problems… there was a lot to tackle. The site rolled on, no crashes, no hangups, and logged quite a bit of traffic and user activity.

During the week I setup the forum, social style user profiles, blogs, mobile view, chatroom… and spent days tweaking small parts to improve the user experience.  It’s a good start but we’re nowhere near done yet!

User/Forum Stats

New member signups: roughly 675
Forum posts/replies: roughly 2600
First poll concluded: 474 votes
Spammers/bots deleted: 400

Site Stats

In the first week of operation Ute Hub produced some fairly mind boggling stats, in part thanks to many discussions over at UFN as to whether or not the site sucks and who is visiting and all that… Here are some stats for the first 7 days of the site’s existence.

Unique visitors: 26365 (max single day 7551)
Hits: 1878220 (max single day 398410)
Pages displayed: 211105 (max single day 52103)

I’m sure things will subside a bit with the bye, and lack of discussion in other sites, so I don’t expect this week to be crazy like that.

Let’s keep building and making the site better though your participation and my web geekiness. Invite some friends.