There were problems with the web site for users using club specific domains during the morning of Friday 13th June. The actual website, www.bridgewebs.com, was actually working fine. This was fixed in around an hour and I have now received an explanation that there was a problem with the computer holding the club domain names which has now been fixed. Apologies to anyone trying to access the web site. For your future reference, if you do get a problem using a club domain, you could try www.bridgewebs.com and access the club web site via the index of clubs.

The hosting company does have routine maintenance, especially around midnight GMT when they expect most be people to be asleep, unlike bridge players, when this is one of the busiest times for bridgewebs. Their engineers are on standby 365 days 24 hours, so in many cases they quite often notice and fix problems at other times before I see them.

I requested that the EBU provide a link to the latest version of Club Focus Document as well as month by month, so if you have added a link to the the EBU Club Focus on your web site, you can change it to

www.ebu.co.uk/cf/documents/Currentedition.pdf

and this will in future point to the latest PDF version.

otherwise use www.ebu.co.uk/cf/ClubFocus.htm and this will go to the EBU page with a list of editions.

Thank you. Mind you, the notice did not seem to put many people off accessing the web site during the upgrade.

It was possible to do the upgrade with only a minimum of downtime and everything is now back to normal.

IMPORTANT ADVANCE NOTICE

The WEB HOSTING company will be undertaking an upgrade of their computers.

Wednesday 20th February 21:00 GMT
to
Thursday 21st February 01:00 GMT

It is estimated that this will result in the BridgeWebs web site being unavailable for up to 2 hours during this period. IT IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED that you DO NOT undertake any updates to your web site during that period even if you find it is working.

If you normally upload results during this period, it is also HIGHLY RECOMMENDED that you let your scorers know and they DO NOT upload the results until the next morning and let the Wednesday evening players know that the site will be down when they get home and not to expect the results until the next morning.

A suitable message will automatically be included on the results pages prior to this.

The Release notes for the software upgrade is almost 200 pages, mainly concerned with security and performance, but, if any problems occur, these will be addressed Thursday morning.

A Happy New Year to all and many thanks for everyone who supported BridgeWebs during 2007.

The latest release 2.15a is now in use across all the clubs and I have been working on the next release 2.16 for some time now. This has a number of features specifically for County Associations, and some of these have a knock-on advantage for the club web sites. The "What's New" will be updated later in January.

At the same time, I have been working on a complete replacement for the Help pages, incorporating the present help and information relating to all the new features brought out during 2007, various support articles and those features planned for 2008. To avoid you looking for things that do not exist in 2.15a, the new features will be clearly marked. It is being updated daily at present! However, as it already contains considerably more information and is easier to use than the present "Help" pages, it should be of use to you as it stands, so, is being made available today, the beginning of January 2008. You can find it at www.bridgewebs.com/guide and, when complete, probably the end of January, it will replace the help pages, together with the new release.

Any comments relating to errors, inconsistencies or misunderstanding in the guide are all welcome to gwynne@bridgewebs.com.

On occasions the site statistics have been lost and I have had to rebuild them from the backup files. I have not been able to find any particular reason for this, except that the files are getting quite large.

I have, therefore redesigned the way it works to make it more stable. As a result of looking at this, I did find that access to some pages on the web sites had not been logged against each club. As a result, the revised statistics show in the region of 5% -10% more and the whole of the statistics for 2007 have been rebuilt to show this.

The new program is considerably more efficient and can now show 12 months statistics below the charts without any significant impact on performance.

By now I expect that you are all aware of the "EBU Strategy" document released in June 2007. This strategy has many far-reaching proposals affecting clubs and members including a move from a subscription to a Pay2Play scheme. It is early days in this proposal and I am sure there will be a variety of views.

However, in particular, the aspect of an "EBU Free Web Site" and the impact on BridgeWebs needs carefully consideration. If any of you have any points regarding this, please email gwynne@bridgewebs.com.

Release 2.15 has a number of new features. These include:

• Calendar Options
• Facility to "Quick Update" second and third events
• Facility to specify start of club year
• Reorganization of Administration Buttons
• Change to the "Options" for a News Page
• Extended Colour and font "Themes" for News Pages.
• Additional "Left Message Box" on Home page
• Bridgewebs now has an internal "Player" file updated from ScoreBridge
• Members Only Page
• Paging of Results Page instead of one long page

You can find the the details in "What's New"

As an aid to improving the chances of people finding clubs when doing using a "web search", two extra pages have been added to the main bridgewebs site. The first page is a list of clubs by "domain name" and the second is a "Learn Bridge" page listing clubs who specifically provide "Bridge Courses".

If you think the information is wrong or your club runs "Bridge Courses", please go to "Web Administration" - "Site Options" and adjust as necessary. The information for the index pages:- Club Name, Location, Domain Name and "Bridge Classes" is taken from here. If you update this the Index pages will include the correct information the NEXT time that the indexes are updated, usually weekly. If you think the words at the top of the page coud be improved, please let me know.

There has been an intermittent problem with updating the web sites this morning, Thursday 5th April, which meant that if any of you tried to update the web site, you may have seen a "System Error" page.

The extra checking introduced in Release 2.12f, necessary since the problems the last time this occurred, have worked very successfully, let you know not to continue and, as far as I can make out, no web site has been corrupted and members have been able to continue Browsing the web sites. It only affects Web Administration. If you think you may have a problem please email gwynne@bridgewebs.com

The Auto ScoreBridge aspect of ScoreBridge links to Release 2.12e to upload. This also updates the results boxes on the Home page and, thus, writes the home and index pages as 2.12e. This has been happening since this feature was introduced at the beginning of the year (nothing to do with bridgewebs), but had not been recognized as a problem because of the variety of releases and, in time, the self correcting nature of the problem.

This may take a few days to correct to make sure that the Auto-Upload always uses the correct version for the site. (NOW Correct 22nd March)

Meanwhile, go to "Web Administration" and update the "Home" page and this will write the home and site index pages out at the correct release.

Release 2.14 completes the switch to BridgeWebs with all references swapped and one or two tidy ups found during checking it out. Clubs will be progressively upgraded during week commencing March 19th

• Site Style - There are several facilities to change the style of the site and home page including: background pictures, font, font size, more calendar/results on home page
• Competitions - Extra option are now available including; Teams Competition, change to best/minimum factors
• Password - Special password just for ScoreBridge scorers
• Scorebridge - extensions for extra ScoreBridge Upload/Download

• "Tonight from 11pm we will be carrying out essential maintenance on webserver Tom. This maintenance is expected to take 2 hours. During this time no services will be accessible on this webserver. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause"

• "This work is proceeding slower than anticipated. As a result the maintenance has been extended by 2 hours to 3 am this morning. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause"

• You can have multiple tabs
• On the right of the status bar at the bottom of the window is a Zoom button, "Ctrl -" that allows you to decrease/increase the page and see full width of wide results.

• Internal Administration features
• Recognize Swiss Teams format correctly
• Add teams to Knock Out Competition and ability to choose no of teams.
• Option for 3/2/1 competition
• Change in format of Scorebridge Player file

• an "Update Menu" to enable you to quickly choose the correct option to use for updating a page.
• Option to review pages within the "Update" process.
• Options to go backward and forward through items.