Thursday, June 07, 2007
The hell with you cardschat.com!
I figured I'd go out and try to spread the word about my fantastic poker clock a little bit. Mind you, I am not charging anything for the clock, and have made a grand total of $6.34 off my google adsense to date. While ultimately I would like to make some money off the ads, its not a commercial site, and I'm not selling stuff. Even when I get the stats section going, I'm not going to charge for it. Bottom line, I'm doing this because I like writing programs, and I especially like it when people use them.
Anyway, I went out to google some poker forums so I could spread the word. I came across cardschat.com, I signed up, and I posted some info on the clock. I got some pretty quick feedback from two users that liked the clock and planned to use it.
Shortly thereafter, I received an email from a high and mighty forum moderator saying that I was spamming their boards and members were not allowed to post links to other commercial sites. They also deleted the thread. WTF? So as a member of this forum I can't say to someone else, 'Hey, I found this great poker clock, check it out!'. Apparently not.
So I wrote them a less than cordial response indicating that the policy was ridiculous and asking that they delete my account. Of course they obliged almost immediately. I understand that no one wants their forums filled up with crazy SPAM, but these moderators need to learn to exercise a little discrection. I was having a back and forth with a couple other users that had downloaded the clock and liked it. Would a spammer hang around and answer questions? I doubt it.
|
Monday, June 04, 2007
Poker Clock Stats - On the move!
I've gotten excited about the poker clock again. The excitement died down briefly, but I'm right back on the horse. By the way, I hate horses, and this guy is my idol. Anyway, as you may have already noticed, I added a poker stats sectio to the menu bar. Look a couple inches up if you don't know what I'm talking about.
This section is going to be for saving and viewing your stats online. With the downloadable version of the poker clock you'll be able to push your stats to the site. On the site, you'll just need to create an account, setup a 'game', which would be something like, 'Friday Night at Jays', and you'll get a number for that game. Toss that number in the poker clock on your PC, and viola! You just upload the stats from the PC whenever you have some internets available, and you and all your poker buds can see them online whenever you so choose.
Sounds great right? Well, that's because it is.
|
Sunday, June 03, 2007
The future of the poker clock
So I was thinking the other day, if I can't make it to poker one week, how are they going to record stats? The clock is on my laptop and I have all the info. So even if they did install it on another PC and use it there, the stats wouldn't mesh with the ones on my PC.
So, my thoughts as far as a solution go would be to make the stats web based. You wouldn't necessarily need to be connected to the internet during your game, but whenever you were connected, you could upload your stats to the poker-clock.com site and store them there. You'd need to create an account on this site, which introduces all sorts of new work for me. But long term, I think the ideal scenario would be for all the stats to be stored online so you and everyone in your game can come view them whenever you want. Apparently there are some other sites already doing this, so I need to get a move on. I'll let you know when I make some more progress. I know you'll be waiting with baited breath.
|
Friday, June 01, 2007
Poker Clock Updates
The new design for the poker clock is still in progress, but I'm sure it will be well worth the wait when all is said and done. In the meantime I've cleaned up a number of bugs I found, and added a couple small things.
There's a sound that plays now when you knock a player out. You can find it on your PC at C:\Program Files\Poker-Clock\Sounds\mandown.wav if you have the clock installed of course. I've been experimenting with a few sounds from Mario Kart which tend to make for an amusing game.
I figured out that if you actually let the last round run out, the clock would just loop infintely on the roundOver.wav sound. Although that's a pretty nice feature, it doesn't do that anymore.
My next move will be to add a way to go view stats from individual games, so you can flip through them to see who went out first, or check how you did in each game.
|
