Some Attention to Usability

Having survived numerous feature additions and other abuse, the tournament setup page was starting to show its age. The time for surgery finally arrived. The new layout captures all tournament settings on one page without any scrolling necessary, and the description is finally seeing its dream fulfilled as a WYSIWYG editor.

Sharing User Management and Score Reporting Permissions

December was Challonge's strongest month yet, but development-wise, it was pretty quiet.

To kick off the new year, I finally implemented some basic privilege sharing for tournaments. Organizers can now share their user management and score reporting superpowers. The scenarios for more complex permission sharing are pretty scarce, so I'll stick to this for now until user feedback sways my opinion.

An access level column was added to the dashboard to reflect the permissions update. At the moment, there are just three access levels: report your own scores (1 bar), score reporting and user management (2 bars), and organizer (3 bars) -- all are reflected in the screenshot below.

Also in today's update were a couple bug fixes and other small tweaks. More to come!

Login with Facebook, Tournament Sign-ups

If you haven't already noticed, we now allow users to log in with Facebook. This lowers the registration barrier for Challonge! itself and tournaments that use our sign-up feature. We're currently just using Facebook for authentication, but if we add additional features for their API, we'll allow existing Challonge! users to connect their Facebook accounts.

Also related to tournament sign-ups, you can now require users to sign up for your tournaments with Challonge! accounts. Previously, there was no way to disable the "lame" name-only sign-up option.

I'll keep development promises to myself for now, but there's some good stuff in the works for early 2011. Stay tuned!

Rails RegExp Fragment Expiration

Challonge.com caches various bits of tournament data (including the brackets) as files. To avoid showing stale data, various events expire these fragments. In Rails, expiring fragments is done by either passing a unique identifier (for 1 fragment), or passing a regular expression (for multiple fragments).

Here's the catch with the regexps: ALL fragment paths pass through the regexp, even if the regexp specifies a directory path (e.g. /tournaments/592/.*). So, imagine a system with several thousands of fragments in roughly a thousand subdirectories. Now, expire fragments using a regexp every second or so. :-(

Needless to say, Challonge's server is much happier now with the regexp fragment expirations removed.

If you've managed a tournament with us before, you'll notice that adding/removing participants is now incredibly faster than before.

User Interface Update - Stage 1

The first stage of UI updates has been applied to challonge.com. Tab controls were polished a bit, and various updates were made throughout to improve usability (language, layout, help bubbles). I'll probably jump back into multi-stage tournament development before returning to the UI, though the home page is in dire need of some marketing material (screen shots, extended feature list, etc.).

Here are a few before-and-after shots of the tab controls:

CHALLONGE! Disc Golf

As CHALLONGE! looks to enter the mobile app space, jquerymobile seems to be a nice fit for people who are connected. It's still in alpha, so I wanted to first try it out on a side project.

So... CHALLONGE! Disc Golf - an app for tracking disc golf scores. Yeah, kinda obscure, but relevant in my life enough to keep my interest in the project. For a demo, check out my disc group.

I've only tested the site with Firefox, Chrome, and WebOS, so comments from other mobile users are welcome. Note, the graphs are not part of jquerymobile; instead, I tried out Flot for the first time.

Look for a redesigned CHALLONGE! mobile site once jquerymobile becomes stable.

Attachments, tips, and more hype

If you were to graph my Challonge development effort, it would closely resemble a sine wave. My wife and sleep schedule enjoy the troughs.

You may have already noticed, but match attachments arrived in Challonge bracket. Matches are limited to a max of three 250KB files for the time being, but you can add links to the big stuff. These attachments are perfect for game replays (.SC2replay files were the feature request), screenshots (great moments or victory proof), and links to videos or live feeds. Also, while the UI change was minimal, I spent a good amount of time figuring out where to put the attachment links. The update added some real estate for additional match-related features (voting being the biggie).

You know how full match scores and edit score links show up when you hover over a match (for the tourney admin at least)? That feature was overhauled with a different javascript library, so not only are the pop-ups more responsive, but the amount of code is significantly less. With it being lightweight, I added it to the base javascript bundle for Challonge, so this paves the way for help bubbles and more clarity throughout the site.

The hype: match voting, multi-stage tournaments, ladders, API