prettify

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Legal Stuff

Terms of Service and a Privacy Policy were added to Challonge. Thanks to Automattic for the open licensing of their legal docs (and the other great free services they provide). I love how website Terms of Service basically make you the Internet God... until you're in court, then who knows.

And in case you're wondering, the docs offer no surprises. I will never give up private information unless law requires me to do so.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

New Brackets are Up

I'm only part way through the major bracket update (skinnable, scalable stuff), but I chopped off some progress into a new release that's up on Challonge.com. I bundled up the bracket controls to help keep things tidy and added scroll arrows for those who hate click-and-drag. The controls are a little lame at the moment, so they might get refaced down the road.

Most of my grunt work in this release should be transparent to users. More time than I anticipated was spent making the entire bracket scalable, and in preparation for allowing custom color schemes in bracket modules, all bracket lines are now drawn using borders instead of images.

The code is complete for reverting score submissions, but there's no front-end in place to take advantage of it at the moment. I did, however, add a warning message if you select a match winner who did not win the majority of games entered, so this should help cut down on mistakes.

In case you're wondering, I try to keep Challonge looking good in Firefox, Opera, IE 7+, and Chromium (usually covers most Webkit browsers like Safari). If something looks funny in your browser, please let me know... unless you're using IE6.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Behind the Scenes

While no changes have been published to Challonge recently, I wanted to mention a few things that are being developed behind the scenes.

Scalable Brackets will soon be finished. This means you'll be able to zoom in and out when viewing brackets (very snazzy, almost done with this one).

Skinnable Bracket Modules - Colors, fonts, default zoom level, etc. will be configurable soon, so I'll be introducing embeddable bracket modules that can be posted on external websites and fit any design style. I'll probably have to charge a modest amount in blocks of 10,000 requests or so (server load will rise), but these should be pretty sweet and useful.

Improved Participant Management - Just a vision right now, but this one's pretty high priority for me. I want to spruce up the tool for adding/removal people, changing seeds, setting teams, etc. Plenty I could ramble on about this, but I'll spare you.

There are several other items on the horizon as well. If you emailed me a feature request, I haven't forgotten about you!