New Club Members Area

Today we're updating the members area for club users, tidying up the layout a bit and streamlining a few of the functions. The first thing you'll notice is that the list of members has moved from the right panel to its own tab. Instead, you'll see a summary of recent activity on the right.

The sessions list has been updated and is now split into years, so you don't have to wade through your 2010 sessions to get to the latest ones. It will also sort with the most recent sessions at the top, or you can click on the column headers to sort it as you like. As before, clicking on the session will open up some more information about it.



The membership management features are relatively unchanged, although they look a bit tidier in some areas. You can now sort by EBU number as well as by name and it's a little easier to copy-and-paste the membership list into a spreadsheet or other document.

The major changes, though, are to the submission of pay-to-play files. When you submit one you'll see a screen a little like this:



Instead of showing the full ranking list, we're showing only the important bits — the people who mismatch and need to be resolved. This puts them all in one place and for large clubs with several visitors it should save a lot of scrolling. If you want to see the whole list you can click on 'Show all participants' and it will offer you the usual view.

As before, you click on the red cross to sort out any problems, although there is now an added 'Guest' button to quickly choose that option (the green question mark next to the red cross). The red cross takes you to a page like this:



This gives you the same options as before but all on one page so if your choice doesn't work out you don't have to go back to the beginning again. In the middle (3) you can select them as a guest or create a new record for them. At the top you can search by name (1) or EBU number (2). Search results will appear at the bottom (4) and you simply click the 'Select' button by the correct record. To save you a bit of time, the system will automatically search your membership list for anyone with the same surname and present them to you as an option.

We've tried to listen to the many helpful suggestions we've had over the past year and we hope these changes are positive ones. If you do find anything not working as it should or you have any further suggestions then please send us an email or leave a comment. And if things are really broken for you then you can still go back to our old members area for the time being.

EBU credits now in Members Area

As Barry announced yesterday, online booking is now available in the EBU Members Area but that update also added support for showing EBU credits.

If you won a prize at the recent Cheltenham Midweek Congress, for example, you'll now see something like this in your members area, in the panel on the right:

We hope this will be useful for people who want to keep track of their prize credits.

Last year's P2P Rebates are also now displayed in this table, for those people who played more than 150 sessions up to the end of March.

If you notice any problems with this or the online booking, or have any suggestions, leave a comment or email me. If you have any queries about your prize credits or current balance, contact the Competitions Department.

New Members Area

The current EBU members area is almost a year old now and we've had a lot of feedback in that time on how we might improve things. Last week we made live an updated version which has incorporated a few of the ideas and you can view it by clicking here (or following the link from the existing page).

The first thing you'll notice is the list of sessions on the right-hand side has been moved to its own tab and in its place is a summary of your latest sessions and master point credits. We've also moved the 'log out' button up here so that it's a bit more obvious.

Hover your mouse over an entry to see some more information about it.

The other major change is the sessions list.

We realised that the old list was rather basic and was getting a little too long for some people. It's now been tidied up and for those who have played a lot it will split itself into separate years, which should hopefully make it load up quicker too. The default view is by date played in reverse order, so the most recent session is at the top, but you can click the column headers to sort it however you like. As before, clicking a session will open up the full information about that session.

The other changes are mostly behind the scenes to make it load a bit faster. There's also an option to remember your login so that if you shut down the browser without clicking the 'Log Out' button you will stay logged in when you next visit the members area — useful for frequent visitors.

There's more to come in this area as we'll be adding master point promotions and National Grading Scheme information here too, but we'll announce those when they're ready.

For club administrators, the club counterpart to the members area is not available yet in this new version but should be ready soon. For now you'll have to stick with the old version.

If anyone has any suggestions or notices a problem, you can email me or leave a comment.

Updated Master Point Information

Since the introduction of Pay To Play it's become apparent that we needed an overhaul of the Check Points Online web page which has been used for several years. It couldn't cope with the new information and was in need of a cosmetic make-over. So today we're launching an update which you should find the next time you log on to your personal members area.

A new tab is now available called 'Master Points'. If you select it you'll find a list of all the master points that have been credited to your account. Rather than one long list stretching back years, it breaks down into Master Point Year. On the default page you'll see all the 2010 points and to select other years you just click on the year in the menu above.

To see the date when an entry was credited, hover your mouse over the line and it will pop up with this information.

Finally, note that points credited under the P2P system will be credited monthly and amalgamated by club. The entry now tells you which club and which month it was for.

This new feature is available now and the existing page will be retired. If you notice any problems or have any suggestions, leave a comment or contact us.

Improvements to the Knockout Pages

If you've looked at the Knockout Draw pages on the website in the last couple of days, you'll notice some cosmetic and navigation changes which we hope will make those pages look and feel better. As always, if you disagree or have any suggestions then leave a comment or email me.

One addition which I especially want to highlight is the introduction of an RSS feed. If you look at the top of the right-hand menu you'll see an orange icon.



This is a link to an RSS feed containing all the knockout draws. If you open this in your feed reader (see this blog if you don't know what I'm talking about) you'll initially have over a hundred draws appear, but in future you'll receive prompt updates whenever we make a new one. Doing this means you won't have to check back continually for any new draws; you can instead sit back and wait to be notified automatically!

As this is a relatively new feature, there may be some teething problems so I'd be interested to hear if anybody has any difficulties getting it to work.

EBU Map Improvements

The map on our website, showing the locations of all our clubs and teachers, launched in August and was very well received. Newcomers could now find clubs in their local area without having to know anything about the sometimes unusual county boundaries. Students could see quickly what teaching was on offer in their region. Information was presented in a much clearer and more accessible fashion. And there was a lot less clicking to do all round.

But it wasn't perfect and, as one of the most popular functions of our website, we wanted it to be better. So today we've updated it with some new features.

We've made it look a little neater in places. The club and teacher markers on the map are smaller and look slicker. The old markers occasionally overlapped each other, obscuring the one underneath, and this problem is slightly lessened.

You can now do local google searches within the map by clicking on the control at the bottom left. So you can look up things like the chippies in the Bedford area, for that pre-bridge dinner.

Some people have expressed concern that the map runs slowly on older computers or computers without broadband. For those people, we provide a simple text version of all the map's information. Just click the golden link at the top of the page. You'll see a list of counties and clicking one will give a list of the clubs affiliated to that county.

We're now marking National Pairs heats on the map (and there's a menu item to show them as a list on the text version). They show up with a black corner rather than the usual white and the date of the heat is given below the sessions information. It might be a little hard to pick out black-cornered markers from white-cornered ones, so one of the checkbox options is to hide everything but the clubs with heats. This should make it very easy to find heats in your local area. If you're organising a heat and it's not on the map then let us know.

There are one or two other minor feature changes which I'm sure you'll notice as you go along.

A lot of these changes were made because some of you took the time to give me feedback and tell me about the things you didn't like or felt could be improved. I'm very grateful for that. Please keep doing so, either by email or by leaving a comment.

The blogs get a spruce-up

As you may have noticed, this blog is looking a little different today. We hope you like the new look. The primary difference is that on the left you can now see all the usual EBU menu items and we think this will make it a lot easier to navigate the website. There have also been some substantial cosmetic changes.

The new look only applies to the Staff Blog currently, but look out for it on the others over the next few days.

If you have any comments at all or if it breaks horribly in your browser then email me or post a comment below.

A map to help your quiz efforts

I can tell that some of you might be struggling with the answers to my earlier quiz, so I'm going to give you a little bit of help. I've quickly put together a web page that shows, on a map, where all the bridge clubs and teachers are.

Click here to view

It takes a little while to load up all the data and it really is best if you have a broadband connection.

The map is fully dynamic — if you've used Google Maps before then you'll be familiar with the functionality. You can use the navigation controls in the top left to move around and zoom in. You can also click and drag the map to move it or double-click to zoom in.

There are four different types of markers on the map (currently). Only the county markers are visible at the default zoom level but if you zoom in three times or more these will disappear and the others will be shown. The different markers are as follows:

County marker. On the map this will also have the three-letter county code shown. Hover your mouse over the marker if you're unsure which county it is. Clicking on a county marker opens up a window where you can go to the county's website or list that county's affiliated clubs.

Precise club marker. Red markers show (we hope) the exact position of a club venue. Click the marker to open up a tabbed window with all sorts of information on the club, including contact details, playing sessions and what facilities the club offers. Hover your mouse over any icon which you can't decipher and it will give a brief description.

Imprecise club marker. Pink markers correspond to the approximate position of a club venue. We hope they're in more or less the right place (i.e. within a few streets), but we can't promise anything. If you're involved in a club and want to turn your pink marker red, click the checkbox below the map and then click on the exact position of your club building (switching to satellite view might help). It will pop up with a window showing the latitude and longitude of the point you clicked which you can send to me in an email.

Note: club markers refer to the venue of the clubs. This isn't necessarily the postal address. If a club has more than one venue then they will get more than one marker on the map and searches for the club will show multiple results. Also, all the clubs shown have given us permission for their details to appear on the website. If you want your club shown and you're affiliated to the EBU, let us know and we'll get it added.

Teacher marker. Click the marker to see further information about the teacher. It's important to note that the location of the marker is only the general area of the teacher and doesn't in any way give an indication of where that teacher lives. If any teacher wants to move their marker then follow the procedure described above for moving club markers.

Note: only EBUTA teachers with a Full or Professional status are eligible to appear on the map.

The Search Box

Instead of panning and zooming the map to find the information you're looking for, you can instead use the search box in the top right. This works in two ways. First of all, you can type in your postcode or home town and then press the search icon (a pair of binoculars that appears just under the box) or press return. This will then attempt to find the location you've entered and will move the map to that place. For instance, try entering the following queries and pressing enter:

'leicester'
'bn20'
'hp19 8az'
'10 downing street, london'

The map can show the whole world so if it doesn't recognise a UK place name, note that it will search further afield, possibly with ridiculous results. County names aren't recognised directly, so entering 'yorkshire' will put you in Ohio!

The second use for the search box is to quickly find a club that you already know the name of. For instance, if you want to find the Young Chelsea Bridge Club but you're not entirely sure where it is, just type 'young chelsea' into the search box. This will bring up a link which you can click and go directly to the club's details. You can also search for teacher names in this way, and even the club contact's name.

If there are more than 12 items found in the search then use the green arrows to move forward and backward through the list.

For the computer experts out there, I should point out that the search box uses regular expressions to match the search terms. So you can search for '[0-9]' to bring up a list of all items with a number in them.

To bring up a list of clubs within a county, you can do a special search. Type 'county:' followed by the name of the county (the first few letters should do) and it will list them all for you. You can also do this search by clicking on a county marker and clicking the 'list clubs' icon on the popup.

I hope you find the map useful for answering the quiz questions. You can all get down to trying to win that prize now. If you have any comments on the map or see some problems then feel free to email in or leave a comment below.

New Bridge Shop Web Pages

Today we launch a new look to our Bridge Shop pages. There are now a lot more images of our products available (click on the thumbnails to open a new window with a larger picture) and we hope it is presented in a clearer and more easy-to-navigate way.

As always, we're pleased to hear constructive feedback on any new website feature so why not leave a comment below or send me an email.

Introduction to Feeds

WARNING! Moderately technical computer stuff follows!

You may have noticed that the EBU has gone a little blog happy lately. There are more to come, too, and it might become harder to effortlessly keep up with everything. A lot of the items that appear in the blogs will be highlighted on the EBU front page of course, but not everything, and if you don't check in for a few days you might miss something. You can keep up by visiting every blog on a regular basis but that would soon become boring.

The solution is to make use of the automatic feeds that come from the blogs and which get updated whenever a new post gets made. A feed is just a stream of information and a feed reader can keep tabs on these streams and let you know when any of them change. This is not as complicated as it might sound and in fact you all probably have feed reader functionality in your browser right now. For instance, if you're using Internet Explorer 7 you can click on the orange feed icon to subscribe to a feed:

The feed will then appear in your list of favourites and will be highlighted when something new is available. Similar things can be done for Firefox, Opera, Safari and lots of other browsers. Alternatively, you can use a feed reader program to do this outside of your browser and there are lots of good ones out there. This Wikipedia article tells you all you need to know. In this way you can keep up to date with the blogs you're interested in without having to check back every day yourself.

Feeds are very useful and we intend to use them a lot more in the future so this is something that is worth discovering, if you haven't done so already.