During programming, in whatever language, there is one thing I regularly do: Google (the verb). There are not too many problems nobody else ever faced. When looking for the answer on a given problem you come across all kinds of sites, but during the last few months I noticed a new site : http://stackoverflow.com/. Not only did it keep turning up, it seemed to always have the right answer.

Next thing I noticed was that one of the (most interesting) bloggers on my blogroll, Jeff Atwood, was actually one of the co-founders of this site, so I decided to sign up. Two weeks later I can only say I’m glad I found this website. Within a year of it’s creation it has turned into a great gathering place for all kind of programmers, and thanks to it’s badge-system most questions are very quickly answered in a very good way. There is a lot more to the site, but you can find that out for yourself, I’d recommend browsing through the most popular questions.

It’s very hard to believe that you can have a good new idea for a programming website in 2008, but they did. And they made the website, congratz for that. But not only did they make the website, they also made it work. Because like explained in this great post, sites like this “can be thrown together in a weekend.”

Different kind of site than SoccerProject, but I’m quite sure we share a few frustrations…

It doesn’t happen too often, but this time I only got positive forum reactions on the latest change in SoccerProject. Quite a relief acutally

My aim for this particular feature was not only to prevent new managers from spending all their money at once, I also wanted to make life a little harder for cheaters and even slow down the injection of money in the economy by short-life managers. It actually took me a while to find a good and simple solution, but I think this must be the simplest option available. I don’t mean programmatically of course, it’s much more important be easy to understand for a (new) manager.

I always try to stay away from complexity, most of the time simple solutions are simply the best. At first I wanted to gradually increase the budget of starting managers. By means of pre-announced money injections, they would see their budget slowly grow. I wasn’t sure however of how many messages and injections would be ideal in this case. We surely don’t want to overload a new manager with all kinds of info.

Then I figured we could simply create an expenditure limit on transfers, depending on the time a manager has been a member of SoccerProject. I started out by creating some (complex) formulas on how to calculate the weekly raise for the limit. Luckily I then noticed, it would be much simpler to simply use the number of seconds a manager has been on SoccerProject. That meant a very easy check in the code, and a very easy-to-understand solution. That is also the reason the limit will grow by EUR 604 800 each week, there are 604800 seconds in a week.

There is also a nice (imho) little side-effect. Each time a manager tries to make a transfer that limit will have grown. In other words it’s a live-limit and managers will be able to follow the growth. I hope some managers wll like that about it. If not, you can safely ignore this closing paragraph

SoccerProject sends out a lot of E-mails. Subscription, Password reminders, Inactivity reminders, etc. Up until now, all our E-mails (except for the match reports) where sent in simple plain text. Simply very dull in fact. But now ReesinG has rewritten some code and we are able to send HTML-mails, which look a lot better.

Personnally I think this looks a lot better and I hope we’ll make a better E-mail impression in the future.

I must have configured it wrong, since TwitterFeed did not do what I was expecting from my last post. I made some small changes to the configuration, I hope it works this time.

Meanwhile we have a temporary logo for this week. It’s the least we could do for our first lustrum celebration.

Twitter

I’ve postponed it several times, but this week I twittered for the first time. I’ve had my Twitter-account for quite some time now, but I never used it untill now. I can’t see myself keeping this up for a long time, but I will try for the time to come.

Two things I like already. All my tweets end up on my FaceBook account automagically, so no double work there. And if all is configured OK, this post should appear on Twitter as well. Let’s find out …

Long name

I really couldn’t believe my eyes when I noticed it. Apparently all player, staff and referee names in SoccerProject were limited to 16 characters. This might have been enough for most Belgian names, but for other countries this meant that a lot of names were chopped after the 16th character. The fix took me only a small hour, what a shame we didn’t find out earlier.

TalkerBee

Secondly we made an important decision. We will no longer use Talkerbee on SoccerProject. There were several reasons for this, but the most important one alone, really is enough for this decision. We kept getting error reports from users all over the world and those problems were not likely to be solved in the short future, so we were left with only one option : disabling TalkerBee. Personnally I’ve always believed in this feature, but it turned out less succesful then expected. I’m sorry for those managers who did use it frequently, but we feel there is no other choice for SoccerProject.

After the extremely exciting title race in the Belgian Football Championship, we learnt that the Dutch forum needed some extra moderating. I decided to take this chance to add a Belgian and a Dutch moderator. Welcome Prince88 and Lessius.

Meanwhile Turkish translator emo80 silently left the game. Luckily the Turkish top manager Denims was willing ta take over his translating Tasks. Welcome to Denims as well of course !