As you may know I am the editor of Vital Bradford and produce content for it (with appalling infrequency). One of the things I like to do is a little penpic of whoever will be in charge of the game.

The Football League launched a shiny, and fancy website at the start of the season called Refworld. It’s a good place to find all sorts of information about the men in black. And it provides a feed of latest news stories.

However, if I’m honest, all I care about is the person who could be ruining my afternoon. I want to know who will be in charge of my fixtures. And I want to know as soon as possible when it’s announced.

And there’s no way of doing that. There’s no way of seeing all upcoming fixtures for your club, or all past appointments. In a nice, easy fashion.

Yahoo Pipes is an excellent tool. I shared with you previously about how I put together something providing travel alerts from the BBC. And it’s a similar principal behind the Football League Referee Appointment Checker.

Basically tell it which club you’re interested in, or the referee who is notoriously dodgy and voila, you’ll have the upcoming fixtures and the referee, his two assistants and the 4th official.

Subscribe to the RSS feed it generates, add an iGoogle widget, a Yahoo Pipes ‘badge’ or subscribe to it by email. In theory, it should update whenever the football league announce new officials.

It will be interesting whether or not it does but I hope that someone finds this useful. Even if you don’t, I will.