Which is better?

April 19th, 2012  ~  JRG  ~  7 Comments 

Which of the following suit symbols do you prefer?

♠ ♥ ♦ ♣ or ♠ ♥ ♦ ♣ 

I’m currently doing some work on bridgeblogging.com and one aspect of that involves looking at the “Bridge Tools” that bloggers can use. So, I have a question and would love to hear your comments.

Bidding boxes (I’m not sure if it’s all of them), show the suit symbols with diamonds colored orange and clubs a shade of green. There are decks of bridge-sized playing cards that also have the symbols colored that way (i.e. spades black, hearts red, diamonds orange and clubs green). I seem to remember being told that in some countries (Europe?) they are used in the bridge clubs.

The idea behind this is to help people avoid getting the spades and clubs (both black), and hearts and diamonds (both red) mixed up, especially when sorting their hands. I don’t know, and probably won’t bother investigating, whether there is some advantage for some groups of people — perhaps people with poorer vision are helped by the color difference.

I don’t care for them very much, but that may be mainly lack of sufficient exposure (I have played with them, but I don’t remember where — maybe Turkey in 2004?). I imagine we would all get used to them if they ever become the norm.

I suspect that people either LOVE them or HATE them. I’m curious how you feel about them. Would it irritate you to see blog posts with orange-colored diamonds?

Can You Help?

December 22nd, 2011  ~  JRG  ~  8 Comments 

Readers of blog posts have reported not being able to see the suit symbols in some posts. If you cannot see some of the suit symbols in the grid below, then you can help us resolve this issue by giving us some information (details after the table).

TEST	Spade	Heart	Diamond	Club
Image
Symbolic Entities	♠	♥	♦	♣
Numeric Entities	♠	♥	♦	♣
CSS Generated
Unicode	♠	♥	♦	♣

The easiest way to provide us with feedback is to post a comment. If you do not see the symbols in some of the rows of the above table, please tell us:

• Which rows you cannot see the symbols in
• The browser (e.g. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera…) you are using and what release (a.k.a. version) it is
• What system are you using (i.e. Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, other) and which version it is (e.g. Windows 7, Snow Leopard…)
• If you see “funny symbols” instead of the suit symbols in a row(s), please tell us that as well.

Improving Performance

November 24th, 2011  ~  JRG  ~  No Comments 

We are currently working on improving the speed at which our Home page loads. Even though the page now has those extra pictures it should be loading faster. We have done a couple of things to accomplish this. If you are encountering significant delays, more than with other sites on the web, please let us know. Write to support@bridgeblogging.com

A Bridge Hand

November 6th, 2011  ~  JRG  ~  No Comments 

Part of the migration to the new hosting provider was upgrading the software. Part of that meant porting Luise Lee’s Bridge Tools so that you could continue to enter hands, auctions, full deals, etc., as you are used to. This post is just a demonstration that this actually works!

Here is a bridge hand for you:

Dealer: Vul:	North ♠   K7 ♥   KJ93 ♦   T763 ♣   KJT
West ♠   853 ♥   7 ♦   AK5 ♣   A97654		East ♠   AQ9 ♥   8652 ♦   J98 ♣   Q32
	South ♠   JT642 ♥   AQT4 ♦   Q42 ♣   8

That was a full deal, now to try just the East-West hands:

West ♠   853 ♥   7 ♦   AK5 ♣   A97654

East ♠   AQ9 ♥   8652 ♦   J98 ♣   Q32

and now the North-South hands:

North ♠   K7 ♥   KJ93 ♦   T763 ♣   KJT

South ♠   J642 ♥   AQT4 ♦   Q42 ♣   8

Of course, sometimes we have to bid hands as well

Here are the suit symbols: ♠ ♥ ♦ ♣  whoops! There seem to be a couple of problems. The colour gets set incorrectly (or, should I say, it doesn’t get reset to black) and the font-size for the club symbol is off. Actually, now that I look a little closer, it appears the symbols are in increasing font-sizes.

Well, at least it appears easy to reset the color of the text from the editor buttons in the toolbar!

 One of the things we are trying to do is ensure that copying or moving bridgeblogging,com to another hosting provider does not trip up over URLs pointing where they shouldn’t. That is particularly true for the images that appear in bridge diagrams.

West ♠   AJxx ♥   KT9x ♦   Qx ♣   AJx

East ♠   KTxx ♥   Qx ♦   xx ♣   KQxxx

 Now for another test…

North ♠   A J x x ♥   K T 9 x ♦   Q x ♣   A J x

South ♠   K T x x ♥   Q x ♦   x x ♣   K Q x x x

Moving to a New Hosting Provider

November 6th, 2011  ~  JRG  ~  No Comments 

Hi,

My current assignment is to move bridgeblogging.com off one hosting provider (i.e. the web server of one company) to another. There are various reasons for doing this. You may have read about them when Master Point Press was moving other web sites.

In any case, as we do this move, we will be upgrading the version of WordPress (the software being used to manage this site). It is a major upgrade that has technical improvements, particularly to the way in which multiple blogs are hosted on one “site” — which is the whole reason bridgeblogging.com exists!

There are also improvements to security. We would also like to make some improvements to the responsiveness of the main site (individual blogger’s “sites” respond fine, but there is an issue with our Home page). However, working on that will have to wait until the migration to the new hosting provider is complete.

This, by the way, is the first post on the new hosting provider. The site is running with a special URL we are using for testing. So regular bridgeblogger.com visitors will not see it for a while.