toepoke

It's nearly Valentines day !

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:43:40 -0800

Hi,

Just a reminder that a week on Tuesday is Valentine’s day everyone.

If you play on a Tuesday night …. you might want to keep this in mind ;-)

Kind regards,

Team TP.

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Website downtime

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:35:34 -0800

Hi all,

We’ve been informed by our hosting supplier that our site may be down between 10pm and 11pm on Tuesday 7^th February 2012 to apply software updates.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Kind regards,

Team TP.

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It's [nearly] Christmas !!!!

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 05:59:00 -0800

Hi everyone,

It's that time of year again. The countdown to finishing work and having a few days (or weeks if you're lucky) off before the new year. The work Christmas parties are starting and the numbers for football are getting low.

In our ongoing goal to remove the faff you should always have 2 weeks of games ongoing at at one time. You will also have a little cancel game button on each match.

So if your pitch is shutting down for Christmas, just cancel your games and have a couple of weeks off. Put your feet up, eat too much and watch too much telly.

Have a good Christmas and New Year everyone!

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Enhanced timetable, improved side picker, plus more in toepoke.co.uk this week

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 06:24:00 -0800

Wow it's been a few months since we last blogged about a new build! You may not have noticed, but we having been pushing a few changes out. So in case you've missed them here's the details ...

Timetable changes

If you've not changed your reminders timetable lately you might remember it looking like this:

From a functional perspective it does the job, but let's face it ... it's never been the prettiest of things to look at!

Well as you can see we made a few changes on this screen. It still does everything it used to do, but now it doesn't hurt your eyes to look at it!

We think a lot of the core functionality is in place for the website and it's time to pretty things up a little. Disagree? what else would you like to see?

Getting the message across

If you read the tell me more section of the website we'd be surprised if you signed up ... it was awful! We've given that a big overhall and hope it gets the message across better. Why not have a look and let us know if it hits the spot?

Side picker enhancements

Find it hard picking sides? Your mates giving you stick because it all looks one-sided? Whilst we're trying to build the best 5-a-sside football organiser in the UK we're no experts on getting the sides fair either .

We've got more than a few ideas on how to make this a easier. This one's just the first. From today if you click on the team name we'll show you the average age of the players on that team. Not much, but it's a start!

Also when you click on a player, their age will appear in the profile too, so at least we can now use age as a guide when picking the sides. Not that age is the perfect indication - after all I'm as rubbish at football now as was when I was 15!

Fixes

Cancelled matches were still being shown ... even after 6 months! These now disappear after the match [would] have finished.
The Updates check box wouldn't save when it was changed.

Our sincere apologies for this and humbly request you to check you are happy with your settings. We intend to start e-mailing updates in the near future and wouldn't want you to get a message you didn't want.
Fixed a broken link in the e-mail you get when you're accepted into a game.
Some small text changes to improve readability.
Fixed annoying bug which would send an e-mail to the managers saying someone had dropped out of the match after the deadline. When in fact all they'd said was they weren't playing.

Managers will no longer get this message, but they'll still get an e-mail if a player has genuinely dropped out of the match.
When viewing the side picker screen, players would see everyone listed according to when they put their names down to play. Players will now see these listed alphabetically; Managers will still see them ordered by the time players put their name down.
We've fixed annoying bug number 2 where the wrong number would come out in one of the e-mails which made it look like you always had enough players, when in fact this was a complete lie .
Fixed an issue with the sign-up process which prevented new users joining a squad in certain scenarios.
Fixed issue when clicking a link in one of the e-mails multiple times.
Fixed lots and lots of little problems we won't bore you with !

Until next time.
Team TP.

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Advertise your game with a toepoke poster !

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 11:01:00 -0700

Hi,

Just a small build this month, enjoy!

Advertise your match

Got a noticeboard at work? Why not ask to put up a poster advertising your game to other people, and use the toepoke poster builder!

New icon on the game menu:

And you get a new screen where you can download a poster you can print out.

Fixes and Features

As promised the game screen now shows your unique game number (so you can tell your mates to use toepoke.co.uk/xyz.aspx to sign-up).
Players who have just signed up are now told they might be places available for the next game (as they may have been too late for the normal invitation e-mail).
Tweaked the faq screens so they're a bit easier to use, and arguably a little prettier.

Until next time.
Team TP.

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Google Page Speed

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:09:00 -0700

Google Page Speed results for toepoke.co.uk home page. Don't think I'll bother signing up :)

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110728_04_370bc57fd14d86fedccdbd70bbb527bd/

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FANTASY LEAGUE!

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 03:08:00 -0700

Hi,

It’s been a long time since the 2010/11 football season finished. No football for 3 months, with exception to the Womens World Cup, unlucky girls.

With the 2011/12 season almost upon us we thought we’d set-up a Fantasy League for our users. It’s just a bit of fun.

If you’d like to join in, simply:

Sign-up with fantasy.premierleague.com.
Click the LEAGUES tab.
Click Join a league.
Select Private League.
When prompted enter the code 176362-55928
Click JOIN PRIVATE LEAGUE.

Hope to see you there!

Kind regards,

Team TP.

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Big overhall of the side picker screen, plus lots more in todays build of toepoke.co.uk ...

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 04:37:00 -0700

It’s been almost 4 months since the last set of changes to toepoke.co.uk. Apologies for this, but work commitments must come first. So what’s in build 17?

Side Picker Improvements

Following a suggestion the size of text used on the side picker is larger.
When the side picker loads, it now shows a summary of the match we’re playing.
We’ve made it a little easier to see the status of players. If the player’s name is in red this shows they were over-subscribed. So if you play 7-a-side and Nicky here was the 15th person to put their name down, his name will appear in red to illustrate everyone replied before Nicky.
A player’s name can also appear in yellow, which indicates when the side picker was opened this player was On standby. This is useful if you’ve got lots of players and you want to re-work the sides. This way you don’t forget which players were originally on standby.
When clicking the Save & Send button to tell your players the sides for a match you’ll be asked to add an optional note to the e-mail your players get. So you’ll be able to tell them why sides have changed, or perhaps that you’ve had to change the pitch you’re playing on.
When clicking the E-mail Players button to send a message to your players, you can now elect to use your installed e-mail program rather than use the dialog. Simple click the Outlook button to open in your e-mail program.

Navigation Improvements

We’ve added a new way to navigate to your game, simply put toepoke.co.uk/YourGameNumber.aspx into your browser and the site will find your game. To find out what your game number is, simply hover over one of the menu options in the game menu as shown here:

Here we’re showing the number for the demo account, so if you put toepoke.co.uk/3874.aspx into your browser it will show the demo game.

If this strikes you as a lot of work when you could just login as normal, you’d be right; it is much more work! So what’s the point?

Well, if your game is public (see this article for details) you can easily tell people how to sign up to your game. Perhaps on a small advert at your work, or a text message.

And yes, we do need to make it easier to find out your game number! Next build, we promise!

Other Improvements

With the launch Google +1, we’ve added it our social icons at the bottom each page. If you’ve got two minutes spare, please give us click (you can share us on facebook too if you like ).
We’ve tidied up some of the information screens which were all a little bland on low on information.
Upon logging into TP you’ll now get a rundown of what’s been happening on the blog so you can keep up-to-date with the latest features available on the website. Just like the entry you’re reading here!

Fixes

The side picking screen sometimes thought there was nobody on a team and wouldn’t show them.
On the match registration screen the Add Player dialog Cancel button didn’t close the dialog.
It was possible to join another game whilst logged into the demo account, which naturally isn’t what was intended.
It was possible to have the same colour of shirts for both sides in a match. We’ve actually embraced this as you may not care for setting up specific shirt colours for your sides. You may have been playing together for years and it’s never been a problem. As a result all we’ll do is warn you that you have selected the same coloured shirts for both sides.
Again on the side picker screen, if you click the Cancel button after you’ve made some changes you will be warned that the changes will be lost.
It was possible to send a reminder whist in the demonstration, which of course makes no sense.
Fixed the e-mail that goes to managers when someone adds their name to a match. It used to say Cancellation when in fact it meant we had more players. No more tutting to ourselves when we think someone has dropped out at the last minute!
The deadline e-mail (which reminds you we’re reaching the cut-off point to cancelling a match if needed) didn’t give the date of the match (particularly confusing if you play more than once a week).
On the match cancellation screen there was a very small box for putting in a reason why a match is being cancelled. This has been made much bigger and more usable.
On the squad grid and match registrations grid the results weren’t being sorted as indicated. This has now been resolved.
If you added a player into a match, they wouldn’t appear in the registration grid. This has now been resolved.
Users with JavaScript switched off finally get a warning telling them that TP will work without JavaScript, but it’s a better experience with it enabled.

Plus lots of behind the scenes stuff that won’t be immediately obvious (or worth mentioning).

Once again if we’ve broken anything, or you have any questions or suggestions, please tweet us

Until next time.

Team TP.

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toepoke.co.uk server downtime (28th June)

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 09:44:00 -0700

Hi,

We’ve been informed by our website host that they need to perform an upgrade on the servers we use.

As a result toepoke.co.uk will be unavailable between the hours of 8pm and 10pm on Tuesday 28^th June 2011.

Our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

Kind regards,
Team TP.

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Will Microsoft ever get the internet?

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 09:16:00 -0700

Came across the Media Feature Pack for Windows 7 (SP1) that’s been released recently:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=31017ed3-166a-4c75-b90c-a6cef9b414c4###

So I’m having a quick look to see if it’s worth installing and read the opening page.

So let me get this right. In order to find out what’s in the Media Feature pack I have too:

Copy the http://support.microsoft.com to the clipboard
Open a new tab and paste the link in
Bob back to the previous tab to copy the knowledgebase number
Then bob back to the knowledgebase tab I’ve just opened
And paste the KB number into the search field.
Click the search link
Find the knowledge base article from the results (granted it’s at the top).
Read and enjoy

Microsoft. May I introduce to you, the hyperlink?

</rant>

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Promo video, plus more features and fixes

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 12:59:00 -0800

Wow, been nearly a month since the last build. As stated at the time I was working on a big change and didn’t want to risk introducing issues.

However we’re now in a position to push out some more fixes and features. So what’s new in build 16?

Features

Added a video showing what you can do with toepoke.co.uk (yup, way overdue!).
You can now sort who’s down for a match based on the time they put their name down (so you can easily who got their name down first).
Got rid of the wording on the shirts as you can’t see it anymore as the avatar goes over the top.
Brought back being able to start the demo in player mode as well as manager mode. You may not have missed it, but I have, every time I need to test in non-manager mode !
In the profile on the “pick the sides” screen, you can now click on the name of the player to fire up an e-mail dialog.

Fixes

Fixed some of the issues with menu icons in Internet Explorer.
The share links were promoting deep links into the site, which isn’t really what we want to promote.
Fixed issue with validation on the password reset screen.
Fixed issue where non-managers could modify the match reminders.
Removed some reminders off the screen that are “in development”.

Plus lots of behind the scenes stuff that won’t be immediately obvious (or worth mentioning).

Once again if we’ve broken anything, tweet us off!

Until next time.

Team TP.

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New icons in toepoke release

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 08:49:00 -0800

We're about to embark on some architectural changes on the site which may take a while to implement, so this release is to give you the most update version of the website before we start.

Features

Reworked the icons on screens to make them a bit cleaner, plus a slight increase in performance due to the way the icons are loaded.
Bit of a tidy up on the FAQ and the Glossary pages.
Bit of re-wording on the home page too.

Summary

That's it for build 15, not much there, but we're about to embark on a major change and we wanted you to have the most up-to-date version we can before we start.

Until next time....

About toepoke.co.uk

toepoke.co.uk is a website for helping organise 5-a-side football games with your mates. Every week we'll invites your mates and track who can play and who can't; we'll remind them all to bring their kit and help you pick the sides, so all the boring stuff. Loose the faff, bring back the fun, with toepoke.co.uk!

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News from the blog, social icons and other stuff added to toepoke in the latest build

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 13:41:00 -0800

We've been taking it easy the last few weeks hard at work, even over Christmas to bring you more erm stuff.

So a new build up tonight, as always you can find a quick run down below.

Features

Improved the e-mailing feature on the teams screen (for the geeks amongst you, see the blog for more details.
News from the blog are now brought into the site (details new features added recently).
After the deadline managers are now e-mailed when players add themselves in or drop (useful to know what's going on as you move nearer to the kick off).
Redesigned the footer, adding in social media icons for liking toepoke.co.uk.

Fixes

Fixed issue where if a match was cancelled, the booking reminder for the following week wasn't going out.
Players didn't have a menu icon for invite other people to join the squad
Fixed issue with the footer being broken.

That's everything in build 14. Like the new stuff? Hate it? tweet us what you think

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Add a user interface to mailto hyperlinks with a jquery plug-in, manyMail

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 09:25:00 -0800

Hi,

In an upcoming toepoke.co.uk build we've added the ability to e-mail all the players in a match. Just for simple stuff like arranging lifts, last minute changes, etc.

We didn't want to get into creating a full blown e-mailing system, there's an app for that . Instead I simply used a normal mailto link, which brings up whatever e-mail client is installed.

Now this works fine if the user has an e-mail client installed, but what if you use web based e-mail client? If you're interested in knowing more, please read the full article with demos, code and full explanation of the plug-in

Please note that version 1.0.2 has been released today (01-Jul-11). The article above has been updated to reflect the changes.

Hope you find this useful,
Team TP.

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E-mailing players as well as fixes in new build this week.

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 07:52:00 -0800

Hi,

Found a bug this week around cancelling matches, which given it’s the Christmas period and I reckon there’s a fair few being cancelled, thought I best fix this one as soon as.

Fixes

The cancelling works fine, however toepoke.co.uk decides to create them again, so this is fixed in this build. Apologies for any confusion this issue has caused.
The site would also still send a booking reminder out, even though the match had been cancelled, so this is fixed in this build too.
Profile widget on the set sides screen now appears if you click on a player who’s on standby.
Games wouldn’t save if the postcode of the pitch couldn’t be found.
The dialog for adding a player into a match had a scrollbar, this should no longer be the case (though it is in Firefox there’s always one that doesn’t want to play!)

Features

Changed how the e-main notifications work when cancelling a match. We were telling everyone in the squad, which doesn’t always make sense. Now if the invitations have gone out, only those players who’ve put their name down will be notified. If the match isn’t yet active (i.e. it’s in the future) everyone will be told as they’d be expecting a game to be played.
You can now e-mail everyone who’s down to play in a match, in case you need to provide an update to them. This is sent from the manager who is logged in (rational being you may need to collate and act on any replies).

As always, if we’ve mucked anything up, please tweet me off :)

Until next time,

Team TP.

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Capitalise text inputs with css

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 04:31:00 -0800

When I was build the sign-up screen for toepoke.co.uk I wanted to tidy up the data entry for the player’s name so you get capitalised names.

My first thought was to tie into the jQuery focus event and do a little JavaScript once the user left the input field.

Thankfully I thought a little bit more and remembered the text-transform property in CSS, and wondered if this would work against text input fields as well as heading and p tags, etc.

.tcase {

text-transform: capitalize;

}

Turns out it works quite well, and the above works under most of the modern browsers. Tested and works in Chrome 7,IE 8, FF 3.6, Safari 5, but sadly not Opera 10. Of course the text-transform property is an aesthetic effect, so I can live with it not working in Opera.

Also bear in mind if the user enters their name in lowercase, their name will be in lowercase when the form is posted to the server, so you’ll still need to capitalise on the server-side. Something like the following C# string extension should do the trick. (or see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.textinfo.totitle... as kindly pointed at by Maarten van der Lee below)

/// <summary>

/// Converts the input string into an initial version, so "fred" or "FRED" becomes "Fred"

/// </summary>

/// <param name="input"></param>

/// <returns></returns>

public static string ToInitial(this string input)

{

if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(input))

return "";

return

input.FirstOrDefault().ToString().ToUpper() +

input.Substring(1).ToLower();

}

You can see the above in action on our sign-up page (http://toepoke.co.uk/user.aspx/create). Naturally this can be extended to use the uppercase and lowercase text-transform rules (uppercase is quite useful for postcodes too).

Hope this proves useful for someone.

Kind regards,

Team TP.

Find this useful?

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toepoke now has avatars, plus other changes in this week build.

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 12:47:00 -0800

New build: 1.0.12.0

Hi,

Uncovered a problem with the reminders today. As a result some of your reminders may have appeared in your inbox late, or you have received duplicates.

Our sincere apologies for this, and we’ve put out a new build this evening to fix the problem.

On the upside this means http://toepoke.co.uk/about.aspx/glossary/#Avatar are being released early J.

We've used the e-mail address you signed up with as your avatar (doesn't matter if you'd have one yet, we'll work that out).

To setup with your own avatar picture, simply sign-up at http://en.gravatar.com/ and add your photo. If you use a different e-mail address on http://en.gravatar.com/, remember to tell toepoke.co.uk what it is in your profile so we can pick it up (see http://toepoke.co.uk/user.aspx/edit).

Apologies once more. Until next time.

Kind regards,
Team TP.

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Venue searching, public games and more in this weeks build ...

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 10:51:00 -0800

New Build: 1.0.11.0

Hi,

Phew, it’s been a while, so there’s a fair bit in this build, so let’s get cracking.

Features

Design Changes

Bit of tweak with the design here and there, mainly changed the colours of the links to something a little less green!
The team’s email now shows your name in bold to make it easier to see what side you’re on.

Functionality Changes

If you try and send the sides out without making the changes, you’ll now be prompted to confirm. This is to avoid sending e-mails to your teams unnecessarily.

You’ll also now get a loading/saving dialog appear when erm loading or saving a screen :o). Just to confirm, yes you did actually click that button, something is happening :o).

Game Edit Screen Changes

One of the major changes is on the game edit screen where we’ve separated things out a little more (and yes, that little Search button lets you search for a venue for your game J).

Public and Private Games

Some more options have been added onto the game edit screen:

The new options being:

Game profile, which has options of Private or Public.

Private (which is the default for any game you create) means you game is closed and you can only get new players by inviting them explicitly.

Public is the new option, and if you’ve not already guessed, setting this option opens your game up onto the wider internet. So anyone can browse Public games and apply to join. Naturally they don’t automatically get added, the final decision is down to the game manager.

Sex; defines whether your game is open to only men, women or both. Whilst I suspect most games will be run by men, I suspect this option may interest the ladies more than anything, for many reasons. The default is for either.
Age; defines if you want to express a preference for a particular age group. This is more to acknowledge that your games is targeted more to the older audience.

Note that the Sex and Age options merely indicates the demographic (for want of a better word) of your game, the website doesn’t enforce these rules.

Game Browser

Following on from the Public game changes above, anyone can look for open games to join in with, hence a new option at the bottom of the page, find a game.

If you choose to have your game public (and you’ll have to change this for your game, as private is the default option), your game will be part of the toepoke.co.uk directory off this link. If they browse to your game, they’ll see something like this:

New Game Screen

When creating a new game, you can now search for venue for your game (with google kindly providing the results).

Also on the new game screen, we’ve removed the reminders tab as it made the screen a little confusing, so now it just generates some default reminders based on the frequency of your game (e.g. every monday at 7pm). Once the game has been saved, you can still change when the reminders go out from the game edit screen.

Fixes

1. Name on the edit screen should now be saving a capitals.

2. Compressed some of the images a bit more so they should download quicker.

3. Upgraded to latest versions of jQuery and jQuery UI libraries.

4. Match reminders screen has finally been finished, so they should now save when you change them !

5. E-mail address must be re-confirmed after change of e-mail address (ta for the tip Tom!).

6. Removed tooltips for the CAPTCHA controls as they were getting in the way (and as it happens, unnecessary).

As always, if we’ve mucked anything up, please tweet me off :)

Until next time,

Team TP.

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Server downtime at toepoke.co.uk

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 09:55:00 -0800

Hi,

We’ve been informed by our website host that they need to perform an upgrade on the servers we use.

As a result toepoke.co.uk will be unavailable between the hours of 8pm and 10pm on Tuesday 23rd November 2010.

Our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

Kind regards,

Team TP.

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Just a couple of tweaks from this week's build ...

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 14:02:00 -0700

Hi,

New build time again.

Features

Changed how the help works, wasn’t 100% happy with the one I’d written.
On the team sheet screen we’ve dropped the “tell only affected” flag as we didn’t think it appropriate anymore (after all if you just swap two people on the sides, everyone else is still interested).
Tinkered with the content of the outgoing e-mails (mainly the subject line so you can see more easily what the e-mail is about).

Fixes

Re-exported the headers and footers as the compression could be improved.
Fixed issue where the assets weren’t being minimised.
After setting your sides and clicking “Save & Send” this will clear the automatic e-mail for sending the teams out (so you don’t get a duplicate e-mail going out afterwards).

Not much in this one, mainly to fix the minimisation problem.

Until next time, Team TP.

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