Matchpointer Online
(Serving Tournament Bridge players in A.C.B.L. Unit 430:
Greater Vancouver, Fraser Valley, Howe Sound, Sunshine Coast)

How do I ... ?

Help for the site.

Since I handed over the print Matchpointer to Ben Takemori about a year ago, I've been busy doing first the detailed planning of the online version, and then doing the technical work to set up the bare bones of the site that we put online when we launched a month ago.  One thing that I haven't done a lot of is simple writing.  It was always my intention that the online version of the Matchpointer share the print version's tradition of featuring interesting writing, but I knew that the first priority had to be getting the informational things online.  In the past six weeks, I have spent a fair amount of time doing just that, and although the job still has a fair bit to go, it's time to spend a few hours of indulgence: double indulgence, actually--I'm going to write (1), and as a first topic I choose how the site came together (2).  At the end of it all, I'll give you some tips on how to best use the online edition.

I first tried to create a Unit 430 Web Page in 1997.  I created a main page with many links to departments and specific pages where information of a certain type could be accessed, just as I have done now.  The two main problems were a lack of sufficient time to keep things current, and (as I quickly discovered) an impossible situation on the Internet.  In 1997 the Net was in the middle of the 'browser wars.'  Pages set up for viewing on Internet Explorer would not be rendered properly on Netscape, and vice versa.  The "work-arounds" for these problems made for headaches for the person who wrote the code behind the web pages.  And even if your page was viewable on both major browsers, there were a half-dozen other programs that some people used to view pages on the Web, some with their own quirks.

I would have been content to live with this second problem if the first were not so daunting.  Updating the pages whenever something happened was not as quick a process as I would have liked, and the 1997 Unit 430 page got behind fairly quickly.  Most of the problem stemmed from the other difficulty: in 1997, writing a page meant both writing the text and writing what is known as the markup: the extra codes that define the formatting.  Because of the browser wars, essentially Web programmers were spending four or five times as many hours on writing the markup (with the workarounds for different browsers) than the actual text.

Let me just stop here to make a very important point.  The craft of writing can be divided into two main chores: writing from scratch, and editing what you already have until it is 'done' (however you, as an artist, define that.)  In the movie Finding Forrester, there is a wonderful scene where Sean Connery's character teaches his young student these basics, by sitting down at a typewriter and letting the words pour out of him.  Later, the student (unable to get started as Connery is) retypes an essay written many years ago by Connery's character and then proceeds to edit and revise until the new version is his except for the title.  The introduction of the word processor over the last two decades has made the craft of writing easier, but introduces a new concept.  We are so used to the concept of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) in our word processing programs, that we are unfamiliar with what's behind it.  The lure of changing fonts, type sizes, adding italics and boldface, and other cosmetic special effects are so great that many writers never get down to actually writing as Connery's character does.  You cannot hope to produce inspired first drafts, or edit these first drafts with any kind of skill, if you are constantly flirting with the makeup.

In 1997, Web page composers had no choice but to spend 90% of their time in makeup.  The result was a lot of Web material that was viewable on all the major browsers, an impressive accomplishment in the midst of the browser wars -- but not a lot of really good strong writing.  My advice to anyone writing is to spend six months writing your first draft of everything you write in a text editor (like Windows's Notepad program, although there are many superior shareware text editors out there).  Once you discover real writing (separating the words from the formatting), you'll be concentrating on the words themselves, and not trying to make mediocre words look good with makeup.  Then you can go back to your word processor and use it the way it was meant to be used.

Eventually, despite the encouragement of many people, I abandoned the project and concentrated on the print Matchpointer for most of the next eight years.  And during that time, the problem of competing Web browsers was largely eliminated.  The Internet's "governors," the World Wide Web Consortium, gradually convinced the people behind the programs to equip newer versions of their browsers so that they would be compatible with a new set of standards.  Internet Explorer was on over 90% of Windows computers by 2004, but other browser programs like Opera and Mozilla were meeting more of these standards than Microsoft's browser and gaining popularity.  Internet Explorer was finally upgraded to version 7 in 2006 to meet most of the new standards.  The key idea behind these new standards?  Separating the content from the formatting, and making the formatting language standard across all browsers.

When my stint as Unit 430 President came to an end in mid-2002, I had given the new Unit President, Peter Morse, a few ideas for mega-projects that I would like to work on: the Unit Player Rating System, and the Unit Web Page.  The UPRS involved entering thousands of event winners into a spreadsheet, and was ready to be unveiled in the Matchpointer about a year later.  The Web Page then once again took a back burner as I struggled to find a way to do all the things I wanted to do, and yet keep it all updated without getting bogged down.

When I took over as IMP League Commissioner from Brad Bart in 2004, I got back into the Web page production business with the IMP League Web Page.  I quickly realized that the way to go (which Brad had pioneered) was to have a computer program read basic data about players and matches and then take that data, compute the standings and statistics, and produce the web pages itself.  It's not hard.  The language used to display Web pages like this one is nothing more than basic text and a limited series of commands enclosed in <arrow brackets>.  Within these commands one can place special code to change the style, based on a second file called a Style Sheet.  The paragraph you are reading now begins with a <p> command and ends with a </p> command (the slash means 'end of').  But within the command I can insert something like class="red" and if my style sheet has separate rules for paragraphs with a 'red' class, that paragraph will be formatted according to those rules instead of the default paragraph rules.  (In the midst of the browser wars, the <p> command itself would have a dozen extra instructions and the text in the paragraph would be riddled with other instructions like a bar after a mob hit.)  Once you learn the system, it is not difficult to create a whole system of style rules and page templates, and give the instructions to the computer to fill these templates with actual data.  Of course, I also added a program called Whizbang that predicted the final standings based on the results so far and the pre-season predictions.  It worked beautifully: I would enter the match data into a text file, run the Whizbang program, and the computer would take about 2-3 minutes to simulate the remaining matches a million times, and then less than 5 seconds to write the new versions of the standings and statistics pages.

My programming language of choice until 2005 was the QBASIC language that Microsoft had included in its DOS software in the early 1990s, before all PCs had Windows.  QBASIC integrated well with the programming techniques I had learned in the 1970s in high school.  I was aware that this language had become badly outdated, but I was uncomfortable with the strictures of most of the newer languages like Java and C.  In 2005 I discovered the programming language Perl, which was named Perl before its supporters created the 'backronyms' Practical Extraction and Reporting Language and Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.  For me, the advantages of Perl were in the design goals set down by Perl's creator Larry Wall.  Perl is designed to handle text and numbers interchangably, with very strong searching and matching capabilities.  It's also meant to more closely approximate the way human language works, with constructs based on English grammatical structures: 'do this unless this condition is true' is easier to understand (especially in the midst of computer code) than 'if this condition is false, do this.'  Perl's 'Tim Towdi' philosophy (There Is More Than One Way to Do It) allows programmers to write code that will be easy to understand (or, alternatively, to write code that only a computer can understand!).  Plus, being a modern computer language, it is much faster than QBASIC.  Once I had rewritten the IMP League program Whizbang in Perl, I began to see that the same thing would be possible on a much larger scale for a Unit Web Page.

The solution I came up with was simple and elegant.  The entire web site would be contained in a handful of files, controlled by a single Perl program.  At the top level is the basic template for each page, which contains the bid-box graphic, and defines the top area with the list of departments and the masthead, the title area, and the content area below.  The second level is a file that lists each individual page on the site, with its name, the department it is in, the title to display in the title area, and which types of events to include on the calendar area at the bottom.  From each page's department, the background colours corresponding to each section are automatically set by the style sheet.  The third level is a file called items.txt, which contains items.  Items can be articles short or long, with or without pictures or tables or other elements.  The key is in the first line of each item: information about when the item was added, when it expires, and what page(s) on the site the item should be included in.  The final level is a list of events and dates to include at the bottom in the calendar area of each page.  Each such event is coded to indicate the group (tournament, special event, club game, beginning or end of a multi-day event, unit board, deadline, etc.), the type of event within the group, the sponsor, and the location.  Along with all this there is a auto-generating file that produces club dates based on the current schedule for the next six months, looking for conflicting tournaments that might affect each date.

The Perl program that takes all of this data and combines it to produce this website took about two months to develop: far longer than the time I took planning how it would all fit together.  I called the program Merlin because of the wizardry it performs in seconds.  When the Grand National Teams District Final happened at the VBC a few weeks ago, I typed up the results and added the file to the list of items, saved the new version, and launched Merlin.  Within seconds I had new versions of all of the pages on my hard drive, and a quick check showed that Merlin had added the GNT results to the appropriate pages.  A few more seconds and it was all uploaded to our server on the Web.  Magic!

When the Monthly Unit Game's annual party night happened at the end of March, I added the results to the list of items, launched the Merlin program, and checked the results.  This was very shortly after the launch of the site, and I had seen the same web Page for quite a while in testing the program.  But now, something seemed to be different, and it took a few minutes to figure out what had happened.  Merlin had removed the item promoting the Monthly Unit Game party, and removed the calendar items referring to it, because a look at the calendar told Merlin that the party was over!  Not that the original announcement was completely lost.  Merlin deposited the expired articles and events into a separate 'expired' file, so that if something is removed too early, it can be recovered.  Also, Merlin automatically stores backups of the entire web page before creating the new versions, and it is simple enough to revert to a previous version, or save versions in archives for a future look back at where we've been.

There are probably many programs out there that do this sort of thing.  But we all know that such programs don't do exactly what you want all the time, and can do a lot of things that you won't ever need.  Look at Microsoft Word: there are hundreds of functions that you will never, ever use.  Writing my own program, I can limit it to what I need, and expand as necessary.  In fact, I have already done so, writing new routines to Whizbang to create code that Merlin can understand, so that the Unit Web Page and the IMP League Web Page are now at the same location.

And because all of the files produced are basic text files, there is no huge section of my hard drive wasted.  The entire site is less than 3MB.  This may change as we add more interesting features, but at present there are a few pages of about 250KB and most are about 1/10 that size.  By contrast, the UPRS (which has lost my focus for a while and I am about eight months behind) was contained in an Excel file which was up to 17MB the last time I checked!  I'll be working on converting that too to a Perl program, which will probably take far, far less space.

The overall goal has been met.  I have a structure in place that allows me to add things in at MY leisure, instead of a final rush to get a printed version out by a certain date.  I have the bare bones of an informative, up-to-date (usually), and virtually complete guide to everything Unit 430 is doing to promote bridge, in a form that will allow me to keep it fairly current -- once I have all of the sections filled.  Almost everything I have done for Unit 430, from the print Matchpointer, to the IMP League, to the tabluation of masterpoint races, to Monthly Unit Games, culminates here.  So check back often, and stick around, explore the various pages!  I'll do my best to make it well worth it.

Navigating the site is, I hope, not difficult. The bid-box graphic at the top of every page gives you the basic outline of the site.  Clicking one of the tabs takes you to that page, but you can also move your mouse over one of the tabs and leave it there for a second or so.  A small box will pop up with a capsule description of the page.  Of course, you can use your browser's back button to go back to where you were, and use the scroll bars or the Page Up and Page Down keys (or the middle-finger wheel on your mouse, if you have one: if not, get one, they are highly recommended!) to scroll up and down on the longer pages.

The most important piece of advice I can give, if any of the site's features don't work for you is: upgrade your browser.  Be sure you have the latest version, or at least one that is fairly current.  I recommend Mozilla Firefox and I code the site based on what it displays, but any modern browser will do the trick at least 98% of the time.  If you are part of the multitude that use Microsoft Internet Explorer (bundled with Windows, but there are alternatives), hit the F1 button now and if a box pops up that says Internet Explorer 7, you're current.  Otherwise, it's time to download the latest version (or switch to Firefox).

One common complaint I get is that the text size is either too large or too small.  Here's a trick: hold down the right CTRL key (not the left side one) with your right thumb and look with your right index finger (while the mouse holds down the CTRL key) for the keys marked 0, -, and + (or right bracket, underscore, and equals, depending on the status of SHIFT...).  You will probably find that + increases the size of the text, - decreases it, and 0 restores it to the original size.  It works on most browsers.

Another piece of advice (especially if the content goes off the right-hand side of your screen: make sure your screen resolution is at least 800 x 600 pixels, preferably larger.  In Windows the way to do this is to minimize all windows, right-click on the desktop (not on an icon, just on a blank area of the desktop), and select Properties.  The Display Properties box will include a tab titled Settings: click on that and you will see your screen resolution.  Most people will have a monitor that can display more than 800 x 600, and the way to do this is to move the slider towards the word more.  The drawback, of course, is that screen text gets smaller.  You will get used to this, but there are ways to make the screen items larger with the Display Properties box.  Within the Settings tab there will be a button called Advanced..., leading to a box which allows you to change from normal size (96 DPI) to a larger size (120 DPI) on most monitors.  This universal setting is far better than changing the text size or the zoom percentage on your browser only, because it affects everything you see on your display.  It may seem like you are increasing the number of pixels on your screen to make things smaller, then increasing the DPI to go back to where you were, but the net effect of these is sharper looking detail that is easier on the eyes.

Another very, very helpful setting for most modern displays under Windows XP or Vista is the ClearType option.  (These instructions are for Windows XP.)  The Display Properties box has another tab called Appearance; click on that, and then click the Effects button.  Another box will come up with an option to 'Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts.'  Check the box and select 'ClearType.'  ClearType can make small fonts on your screen look amazingly sharp.  Most people are amazed by the difference and wonder how they got along without it.  Find out how it works here.

Internet privacy is all the rage these days.  Some people don't want their personal information, including their e-mail address, online, which is a reasonable precaution.  If you are on the Unit Board, we will post your postal mailing address here, but I will not post e-mail addresses, either on their own or as links, or telephone numbers, unless you give me the okay to do so.  I am posting club managers e-mail addresses as links, but I will remove them if you wish.  Winners lists are public domain: the names and scores of any participant in a bridge event may appear on the site.  If you have a good reason to want your name NOT to appear here, I can probably accomodate you, but no guarantees.  In such a case, it would be better for you to find a way with the game director to ensure that your name appears in the game report as some other name.

If the privacy policy above inhibits your ability to contact a club or a Unit Board Member, you can certainly send a message to me to forward to that person.  If you don't want me to see what's in the message, write at the top instructions for who you want me to forward the message to, and then leave your message after a bunch of blank lines.  I won't scroll down.  I promise.

Aside: most people who have expressed concern about Net privacy to me are concerned that their e-mail boxes are getting spam because their e-mail address is on the Web somewhere.  Very few people are looking for privacy on principle or are seeking net privacy because they fear a potential danger if their personal details are discovered.  If you are simply concerned about spam e-mails, you should look seriously into some e-mail programs that work to filter the junk e-mails.  One such program is Mozilla Thunderbird.  It's a separate program, not an application you launch from a web page within your browser.  My experience with getting e-mail within a Web browser is like eating soup with a fork: it's possible but awkward.  With a separate program to collect your e-mail, you can sort it yourself (using natural mouse drag-and-drop motions, not 'click the ones you want, then click this button') into useful subfolders, or even create rules so that it can be sorted automatically.  Thunderbird watches which e-mails you move to the junk folder and over time learns which ones to send there automatically.  In three years I have not seen it make more than a handful of mistakes, and I get about 5,000 e-mails every year.

By the way, the best way to help spread the word about this developing site is to: spread the word!  Make the site one of your 'favorites' or 'bookmarks' or 'quick links' or whatever your browser calls it.  Tell all your bridge playing friends about this site.  (www.matchpointer.com is not that difficult to remember!)  I'm not at all concerned about 'hit counts' or 'Net popularity' or even getting praise for my efforts.  The purpose of the print Matchpointer was to get a magazine with current information into the homes of bridge players.  For a decade I fooled most of you into thinking that the articles were the main purpose of the magazine.  Surprise!  The articles (and their quantity and length) were to get you to give up on reading it all at the club so that you would take it home and keep it handy somewhere.  That way, six weeks later, you would be able to easily find the date of the club championship or the big qualifying game or the next tournament.

Now we have this wonderful instrument called the Internet that, for an ever-growing number of people, can do all that -- without the cost of printing, and in full colour!  Keep checking us out, and I'll keep chucking stuff in.