BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

Today is the day of no serious work, so I've decided to release only four new smileys. More important events are scheduled for tomorrow:

• Yes, October is over, maybe we should announce a new month action. And there will be one. Closely related to the second point.
• A new membership level will be added.
• The automatic activations of new memberships (paid through PayPal) have been successfully tested, so we will implement the same system for membership renewals and Brains soon.

   

Due to recent (and repeated) issues with the database server, we want to perform several optimizations, software upgrades and database maintenance tasks. In order to make the least possible interruption of the services, the short outage of BrainKing sites is scheduled to Tuesday 31st October 2006, 7:00 a.m. GMT+01:00 because it is the time of the lowest traffic, according to our statistics. The whole operation should not exceed 1 hour.

The previously announced list of translators has been improved by the status of all localizations. It is separated to two categories - short entries (common BrainKing lines) and long entries (game rules, help page answers, user agreement, etc.) and shows the percentages of completed translations. Of course, the English one will always display 100% because it is the base for all other localizations.

All right, this feature should make the image handling improvements completed. If you are a Big Boss of a fellowship, you should see a new link change flag at the top of the fellowship page. Its purpose is obvious, just use it if you want to set a new flag for your fellowship, the process is the same as for profile icons and photos.

And since there is nothing else to say to this subject, I write no more lines today.

Administration and maintenance is one of the worst nightmares of a developer. If he has to spend hours tuning the servers to get the optimal performance or answer tons of e-mail from the users, he would have almost no time left for a real work. Fortunatelly, computers can be kind of smart and do the job themselves, if they are programmed for that. That's what I have done this morning.

You might have noticed that the BrainKing site has been down for several hours today. It was caused by a malfunction of the database server, nothing critical, BrainKing has detected the situation and turned off timeouts, no problem. However, when a new user comes to the site and sees no apparent reason why timeouts don't work, he is confused, sends us an e-mail and we must respond.

The BrainKing's Main Page now contains a message box with the timeout status description. When the scheduled time of reenabling is reached (usually 24 hours after the system recovery), BrainKing automatically turns on the timeout checker and removes the message from the Main Page.

By the way, there was a bug in the autosave feature, it didn't save the non-ASCII characters properly. Now it is fixed.

Yes, we have this feature since the very first non-English and non-Czech localization of BrainKing had been released, but it was always visible to the translators only. However, we think it is a valuable information for everyone because the list contains all started translations, not just the 15 finished ones. It means that if you wish to have the site translated to a language which is not supported yet and want to contribute, the first thing to do should be a quick look at the Translators page to find out if the work is already started. Then you can contact the users who are doing the translations and ask if they need any help - or report bugs, typos, etc.

The link can be found at the top of the more about languages page and I will probably add it to some other pages, in order to make it better visible.

By the way, BrainKing is capable to maintain any number of localizations - don't hesitate to offer a cooperation to translate the site to your native language if you really want to.

The BrainRook.com site seems to be popular, the number of visitors is growing every day. I like it because I always wanted to provide a good resource of game related information and it is even better when the information is submitted by game enthusiasts themselves. Just a side note, one of the most frequent phrase which returns BrainRook as a result in search engines is reversi strategies. Would you expect that?

But the purpose of this entry is not to analyze search engine optimization, although it could be a good there of some future ones. There is a small problem with publishing of the submitted articles because they are usually sent to me in a format which cannot be used directly. It leads to delays, long intervals between receiving an article and releasing it on the site, etc. That's why I would recommend to follow these instructions, if you want to have your article published as soon as possible:

• Instead of sending a Microsoft Word file, try to create a simple HTML page (with or without images). It will save many minutes of copy and paste work.


• Create an author account on BrainRook.com (if you already don't have one) and submit a draft of your article directly. You can upload all images you need and insert them to the article body. When you are finished and click Save, the article will be stored but not published yet. Then I will log in and publish the submitted draft.


• Make sure your article is understandable, easy to read, without typos and descriptive enough for an average visitor. Submissions which don't fulfil these conditions are usually rejected.

Of course, it is still possible to send an article in other ways (e-mail, message on BrainKing.com, ...) but it would always take more time and my response to the question "why isn't my article published yet?" will be obvious.

First of all, the image uploading issue should be fixed. I just didn't expect there was something like "image/pjpeg" type, so I have added it to the list of supported types. It should stand for Progressive JPG and I hope there won't be any more problems with that.

Well, I don't think anybody would become as good as a native speaker with this tool, so don't take the entry subject too seriously, but I have found it very useful and interesting. If you use Firefox, try to install the ChinesePera-kun extension, it can be downloaded from this page.
After installing, select Tools / Toggle ChinesePera-kun, open some BrainKing page, switch to Chinese by clicking on the small Chinese flag and move your mouse cursor over a text. You should see something similar to the attached screenshot.

The home page of this extension says a Japanese version is available as well, so when the Japanese localization of BrainKing is released, it can make another neat pair of features.

• March 2003 - Pente, Keryo Pente and Janus Chess were added to the site. I was informed that what other sites call Pro Pente is actually Pente and Pente should be named Small Pente, in order to make it correctly. Confusing? I don't know and I don't care, the only important thing is that the games are supported and playable. About Janus Chess, the funny looking "doggy" picture which was used for the Janus piece had been ripped out of a Janus Chess program, so there is no reason to think that I would create it myself. (actually, I prefer cats) I hope the Janus Chess players weren't too disgusted by it.
  It was also a time of adding the game of Gothic Chess which was removed from the site after two years. The full story with all details will be posted later.


• April 2003 - Oh yes, the BrainKing.info site was created and released. But it was not this current version, we had started with several simple static HTML pages, providing some basic information about BrainKing, its staff, technical background etc. The site was not updated very often, due to its static structure the update process was kind of annoying. I guess this blog system makes the overall experience much more user friendly (and easier to admin, for me).
  The last important event of April 2003 was that I had passed moderating some public discussion boards to other users. The system didn't allow to add more moderators to the same board and there were no other neat features you can currently explore, but it was a good step forward. It would have been virtually impossible for one person (me) to maintain all discussion boards at once. And there are people who like to have a responsibility.

I have got several reports from people who tried to upload a jpg icon or photo to their BrainKing Profile with no success, receiving a short message about a file type not being supported. The strange thing is that when I upload the same image myself, it works. Since there are many possible sources of this small bug, I have added a content type information to the error message, so if it happens to you again, please send me the full message and I guess I will know what is wrong and how to fix it.

Meanwhile, if you have this problem, feel free to send the image to me and I'll upload it myself.

I have also made a simple test, in order to solve the request of people who want to learn how to play a particular game and get more information about strategies, tips, examples etc. The Shogi rules page contains a simple link Shogi: Japan's Game of Strategy just below the table of game statistics. If the page is fully loaded and your browser supports JavaScript, a nice box with basic info about the book should pop up when you hover your mouse button over the link. Since this feature occupies almost no extra space, it could be used on other pages of rules as well (and maybe more pages) to provide additional resources for the selected game. It can be customized in many ways, the only thing we need is a good list of quality books. Feel free to send your tips.

Now, what the "etc." from the entry subject stands for?

It is interesting to observe different reactions from people, regarding this blog site. Although nobody is obliged to read it and all posted information is to provide a knowledge base about the BrainKing site, I occasionally received questions or messages which are kind of repetitive, so it might be a good idea to write the most common anwsers here:

• Why do you write 1-2 entries every day? Are you bored with your life and have nothing better to do instead? Well, I like it. That's all. I don't think that I would be too bored anytime. Information is the most valuable commodity and we want to provide as many good articles as possible. Who doesn't like it, it is only his problem.
• Why do I have to see a new entry excerpt on BrainKing's Main Page? There is no way to remove it once and forever. Yes, that's true. I think it's the easiest way to keep people posted about the new entries which can be very important (sometimes) and not everyone knows how to use RSS feeds. Moreover, the blog notification on the Main Page does not occupy more than 3 lines and a simple click on the close link would remove it until a new one is posted here. It is really not a problem and it will stay as it is.
• Why are the blog entries only in English? Because I and other translators are already too busy localizing the BrainKing site (new texts to translate are added very frequently and so are the new features) and the blog system is not written by me, so it would be too much work to make it behave (speaking of multilinguality) as I wish to. I don't say it will never change.

And I like eBay