Site updates

This is an archive of (recent) site updates, for posterity, because it made me sad to trim the existing list of changes. If you are interested in the latest information about the Club or tiddlywinks in general, please check the News pages. Actual tiddlywinks news is not replicated here, for (relative) brevity, whereas the date on the link on the home page refers to actual news, so it may be before or after the last item below.

Compatibility and aesthetics (2024-09-17): It was reported that the drop-down navigation menus don't play nicely on Safari in combination with the text substitution hack for narrow windows; it appears this was also broken on Lynx, and the navigation links didn't work at all, which is likely because you're apparently not supposed to put divs inside anchors. Changed the way this works (the text is now substituted in JavaScript), so hopefully it will behave better.; The pub crawl keys were... ugly. Changed them to underlines in the colour of the map lines, rather than looking like links.; Got tired of explicit horizontal rules in the news page announcements section, and implemented them with borders.
Colourised the pub crawl keys (2024-05-09): In case this makes it easier to find them on the map...
Added Open Graph links (2024-05-05): Finally noticed that previews weren’t showing in Teams, and realised why. (Almost) every page now has OG headers, done manually, so there are probably typos.
Nick Ashley 2024 (2024-05-03): Having separated out the Nick Ashley by year so it can be referred to properly, the rules have now been updated.
Search (2024-03-14): Added a search box (running entirely in the client, so a bit slow).
Filtering results (2024-03-13): Results now filterable by tournament type.
Backdrops for Apple (2024-03-08): Realised that my backdrops don’t include sizes for Apple, despite using one; added those as a separate set.
SVGs, halftoning and cuppers, oh my (2024-03-03): The SVG logos have been tweaked, so the rasteriser can now (sometimes) replace the foreground colour and add a glow; Firefox sometimes seems recalcitrant. I removed the ability to rasterise the CUTwink, because life is too short.; The logos with halftones glow have been updated and given a preview system, with more background options.; A “realistic” pot-of-winks SVG is now provided.; Cuppers was getting tedious to update, so now some Javascript handles the score table (notably inclunding PPG); it noticed that we’d actually got some repeats, and at the time of writing I don’t know how to handle them.; Fixed the quotation marks on the home page carousel.
More icons and updates (2024-02-23): Added monochrome Windows 8 tiles and a Safari mask icon, and made the normal coloured favicon responsive to dark mode.; The score predictor now automatically pulls ratings off etwa.org, and is now linked under The Sport, where the timers now live too.; Cuppers and pub crawls now have redirects so the year can be referred to indefinitely.
Navigation rewrite (2024-02-20): New navigation scheme. Looks much like the old one, but a bit less unwieldy, and now allows jumping anywhere in the top two levels of the hierarchy without going through intermediate pages (at least if you have hover ability).; Also now have the image-to-winks utility and updated favicons.
More logo iteration (2024-02-14): Fixed the PNG logo generation (a bit) and added “CUTwink”.
Logos and crawls (2024-02-11): Apparently the update to the PoW ratios in 2023 was a factual incorrection, so they’ve been regenerated again, now with an automated process (that takes hours). Also added a pub crawl map generator to simplify updates.
More types of recognition (2023-11-20): Changed the colour coding so CUTwC tournaments appear in Cambridge Blue — the previous green colour-coding to link to the “Club” section of the web site was a bit obtuse.; After a concern was raised, changed the description of the Joogs and its association with Liz Whitfield. Also changed the drinking games to use gender-neutral terminology (I hope), except for Conjectures, which is quoted; the traditional Bristol move in squop-bristol has been obscured and an alternative proposed, again after a concern.; Swapped much more of the site to directional quotes (drinking games, announcements, results), hopefully; cleaned up some of the formatting of result tables.
Recognition (2023-10-01): CUTwC has had a reply from His Majesty Charles the Third, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His other Realms and Territories King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith — or at least from his Diary Manager. This asserts that he is grateful for our invitation and wishes us well, but is sadly unavailable to play in a charity match. This does, of course, mean that he has “recognised” us, at least until someone complains.
Logos and tweaks (2023-05-22): As of last week the "pot of winks" has been re-rendered to be the actual shape of a pot rather than stretched tall. The original was supposed to have the measurements of a pot, so it's a bit odd that it turned out so wrong, but now there's plenty of bonus maths making sure that, for a given wink size and fitting in the cone of the size of the pot, the outer winks are aligned with the top and bottom correctly. It probably now looks right, even if not necessarily better. There's also a bonus "lines" logo on the alternatives page.; The submission system now does a bit more work for the scores automatically, and uses dotted lines to separate halves of a game; it might be slightly more readable.; The Varsity results use a slightly nicer way of defining the styling — although this isn't automated.; The shots page has some bonus material on squopping and bringing in, having seen that Oxford were using some interesting approaches.
Results improved (2023-03-02): Standardised on a thing for individual pairs tournaments that shows your name in lights when you hover, so you can find yourself in other games.; Made the site default to "Archivo" (hosted locally) for the sole reason that inconsistencies between fonts make it painful to kern fractions, which is an annoying 300Kb or so.; Made fractions (mostly for p.p.g.) nicer.
Improved SVG to PNG (2023-02-14): Added the ability to include a mat (not matte) background, and idiot-proofed against very large sizes.; A heart of winks appears whenever it's Valentine's day.
Autoscroll calendar (2023-01-15): It was noted that on a small screen you can't see that clicking on a calendar date shows what's on that day; the news page now scrolls to the bottom if you click on a date so the updated day information is visible.
More calendar tidying (2023-01-10): The calendar is now a bit more space efficient, the year for nearby months does the right thing, and out-of-term dates are shaded.
Calendar cleaning (2022-12-14): Made the calendar entries a bit less of a PITA to edit.
In memoriam (2022-09-09): Queen's head in winks to mark the death of Elizabeth on September 8^th; centralised a "mourning" mode to simplify future times when the web site is blacked out. Had also recently played with superscripts to reduce the uneven spacing in results.
Carousel cleanup (2022-06-17): Cleaned up the carousel to remove the need for manual renumbering. Had to add a drop shadow for Bertie's quote to be visible, so did the same on the Varsity teams splash image - also rearranged them since the COVID one could probably be less prominent now.
Minor font size independence (2022-05-27): I said it was bugging me: I've fixed the external link sizing to match the font size, and also made the canonical site names list wrap automatically. Much of the other styling remains based on pixels, and would take more lengthy analysis to adjust effectively.
Efficient procrastination (2022-05-26): Previous cleanup of styles for dark mode handling had managed to break the dark mode toggling, which is now fixed.; Having got tired of adjusting the width of the future and past elements, they're now configured using flexbox. The dividing line turned out to be possible with a border and negative margin despite the surrounding overflow auto; I jumped through some hoops to allow the divider to be implemented using a flexbox gap thinking this wouldn't work (the background needs to be set to a colour, so the future and past sections needed to replicate the backdrop, and then I needed a listener to set their background positions after they'd done rendering to hide the seam, which led to a minor shift after the page had loaded - bit of a hack, and fortunately unnecessary, even though it could have been avoided of background position could inherit from parents or if stencil masking of parent element backdrops worked properly...); The score submitter now automatically copies players across when a score is entered if there wasn't already someone in that position, which should speed up tournaments that are't the Joogs.; Still haven't got around to fixing the sizing to use something that's compatible with the user having unusual font sizes configured; I feel bad about that. (It's not too bad, but things like the external link icon should resize.)
Cleaned up seasonal (2022-05-03): Finally stopped having to duplicate the slideshow contents, which was bugging me.
Score predictor (2022-03-22): Inspired by the need to handle forfeits in the Cuppers tournament in a way which is fair to all the teams involved, there is now a utility which, given a set of games and result, will try to predict the results of other games involving some of the same players. It wasn't actually needed for Cuppers this time, but it's available for future use.
Links (2022-03-16): Added internal ids to the jargon list to allow references. Updated "nurdle" to look less like Wordle, just in case the NY Times gets litigious. Switched the site to just two themes rather than duplicating (by checking theme in JS and setting a class on html like the force modes) so the styling doesn't appear twice; this gets around some "important" stuff that was interfering with nurdle animation effects.
Tweaks (2022-03-10): Nurdle further updated (to match Wordle better); also added automatic counting to the winks purity test.
Modernising (2022-03-08): Finally remembered to put the President on the slide show. Also added Nurdle.
Fixed live visualiser (2022-02-09): Chrome has a security feature that you now can't enumerate video/audio devices before you have permission to use them, so you have to request video/audio in general before you can pick a specific option — if you enumerate first you'll get null device details, and you then can't select from the enumerated list to enable anything. This is possibly dumb, and another example of reasonable user interfaces being broken by working around abusive developers (apparently unique video device IDs were being used by advertising trackers).; Tweaked the COVID wording to indicate that we're slowly emerging from lockdown.
Winks timer updated (2022-01-28): Now with explicit setting of dark mode, having noted that this would reduce power requirements when running on a phone during a tournament. Also added a countdown timer for Cuppers registration, with changes to the default navigation since Cuppers is replacing the Nick Ashley this term.
Logo bitmap generator (2021-11-28): The logo page now has a bit of javascript at the bottom which lets you generate a bitmap from the SVG logos at any requested size (supported by your browser), in case that format is more useful for anyone.
Safari rendering bug (2021-10-06): The "elink" mechanism caused a rendering bug on Safari (and other iOS browsers) where the shape of the href element doesn't allow for the size of the image if the line wraps immediately afterwards. This doesn't hit Chrome/Edge/Samsung Internet/Opera or Firefox. IE doesn't handle these anyway. Pending a fix, disabled the "elink" graphic on Safari-derived browsers. Oddly this doesn't seem to be anything to do with the generated content (the image is in an after:: style) - inserting a null image with a content: field still breaks, and so does manually (and impractically) inlining the actual image. Safari renders it perfectly without the line wrap, but it's only informative anyway, so better to avoid the glitch.
Inclusivity and chat (2021-10-05): Added a chat function for the virtual Freshers' Fair. (Not policed, so it will be disabled when there aren't people available to cover it.); Expanded the "The Club" page with diversity/inclusivity statements, and added pronouns to the Committee page.
Wide screen and cleanup (2021-09-30): Had a report that on a "normal" desktop monitor the page required unnecessary scrolling, especially with the new "contact us" section at the top for the start of term; added a side-by-side view for short but wide screens (oops). This required removing the slide show entirely for Internet Explorer (which I may already have done and forgotten) and the Kindle browser.; Realised I'd not been testing the dark mode properly for the footer image, and having done so the scale factor was specified incorrectly and the image resolution was "too low"; fixed both.; Lighthouse doesn't like "document.write()", so the attempt to get screen readers to pronounce "CUTwC" as "cut wick" now uses a slightly different system; this is still hamstrung by the inability of screen readers to pronounce a logo without saying "image" as part of it, or to treat text with an inline image as continuous. I've tried.
More cleanup (2021-08-03): Per some diagnostics, cleaned up a number of links which were either broken or at least redirecting.; Also added a list of winks terms (for drinking games purposes) and, not linked, an HTML/JavaScript-based timer.
More logo tweaking (2021-07-22): Re-did the gamma-corrected pot-of-winks logos with better filtering.; Added greyscale versions of the pot-of-winks.; Added a "CUTWC" text logo made from CSS borders (because email).
More button tweaking (2021-07-07): More efforts to make the text in buttons/links look centered properly on both desktop and mobile. It's not quite consistent, possibly because of the size of the 3D effect and gamma.; Lighthouse is complaining about SVG images being too low resolution again, which is gibberish. Apparently it's supposed not to check SVGs, but it's confused. Hopefully this won't reflect badly on us. I've slightly delayed the slideshow loading to shut it up.
Gamma corrected scaling of logos (2021-06-23): I'm embarrassed, but in my defence ImageMagick has stupid defaults.
More logo tweaks (2021-06-22): Moved the logo page, added guidance for use, WebP versions, etc.
More tweaking (2021-06-20): The Nick Ashley now has more colour coding for game types.; The Logos now have links to all the (favicon) image sizes, corrected a size typo, added a dark background text ring, and have links to the light and dark background variations (in case of Powerpoint or something).; Going to cutwc.org/Logos now redirects you to TheClub/Logos rather than giving an error page.; The News page calendar is now a little more intelligent and no longer needs to be told month lengths and start days manually. It will go wrong in 2100, because the extra couple of lines for centuries and quad-centuries aren't worth the effort.; The page about the Club mentions our Varsity success (to try to appeal to novices). The main page on the game and the primer have also been refined a little.
Split out the logos (2021-05-21): Provided more logo variants (on the basis that when we need them we never have time to create them). Moved them off the main "The Club" page to stop them swamping the information that visitors might actually care about; their new page is much like the "press pack" that some companies have for their corporate identity/logos.
More history (2021-05-11): Filled in some historical announcements and pub crawls.
CUTwS (2021-03-04): After some confusion with OUTS(/OUTC), aliases for Cambridge University Tiddlywinks Society (CUTwS.org/net/com/club/org.uk) have been registered and added.
Days of future past (2021-02-25): I didn't have "Future" and "Past" on the home page link to Notices and Results. I don't know why; I used to. Fixed. Also added the old PotWink GIF.
Result borders (2021-02-24): Oops, borders of score tables were black, which isn't dark mode friendly. Also the I'd somehow set the border width to "black", which was unhelpful.
Lighthouse efforts (2021-02-24): Lighthouse seems to be having an off day; I've tried to help. Firstly it complains that the splash images at the bottom of the page (originally 1920xn) are low resolution; macOS renders at double resolution, so this is presumably why. Sometimes it doesn't complain, but I've replaced the light mode image with a 4K version just in case. While doing so I did a slightly better (but still annoyingly not quite perfect) job of matching the photographed mat colour to the background mat colour and balancing out the lighting. It also sometimes thinks the images are too big, and sometimes they are too low-resolution; as it stands, they're compressed within an inch of their lives, which may not be improving the overall quality, but we sometimes get a 100% score (apparently Google is going to start using this in search rankings, so we care). The COVIDdlywinks image is similarly shrunk (in webp form) as the first image that is loaded. Finally, Lighthouse occasionally complains that the SVG text images are "low resolution", which... er... But I've added some image sizing everywhere just in case. The rest may come down to how busy my network connection is when the test is done.
Logistics and GIFs (2021-02-22): Moved the updates to here, rather than being hidden in a details tag on the news page (and periodically truncated).; Added a privacy/T's & C's page with more detail, because the internet is full of horrible people and we should be clear about it.; Disconcerting amount of effort spent on the links at the bottom of the page, mostly because I'd forgotten I'd set a white-space style to stop links breaking, but also because circular edges go wrong on very narrow browsers (iPod...); By request, added some GIFs of some of the shot videos, and a link to some very old GIFs.; Restored a basic style sheet so the contact pages work vaguely properly (the HTML inlines its CSS, but the CGI can't use the include). They now have basic styling in line with the site and are more mobile/screen-reader friendly, although not with the full navigation.; Restored clacks-overhead, having forgotten I'd left it out.
More tuning (2021-02-17): Dark mode had b0rked the scarf swoosh (which was, itself, incorrectly stripy), so I fixed that and tweaked the colours. Added webp and some much smaller images to try to make lighthouse mobile view happy, which it now sometimes is (also now using HTTP 2). The theme icon is now a little less intrusive.
Tweaked colours (2021-02-15): Spotted that the ETwA winks colours were inconsistent; took the opportunity to tweak those used by CUTwC.
Triangles and pandas (2021-02-12): Alex noticed that the triangular selection for hiding the navigation wasn't working properly and blocked the pot-of-winks, so I fixed that. Okay, so I was being lazy and felt bad about the light/dark4 select corner, so that's also now a triangle even though nobody will ever care. (Except that I was right, and it's now a bit inconsistent to select on Firefox on Android, for some reason; rotating to landscape helps a bit.) The "default" light/dark (◐) icon was a funny size on Android, and looks a bit weird compared with the full emoji sun and moon, so it's now a panda, in honour of Timmy's dice. I also found out about wallclock-sync-value for SVG animations, which would solve the problem of the home page title swoosh getting out of sync with the JavaScript... except that nobody supports it.
Triangles and pointers (2021-02-11): The Menu hiding navigation in the top left now has a triangular detect region (more closely matching its gradient), which reduces the odds of accidentally clicking it instead of the home link. (I didn't do the same to the dark mode toggle, because it's only present on the home page where the title won't get interfered with, you'd have to scroll to have it interfere with the social link, and the extra area might be useful anyway depending on how your system does scroll bars - also I can't be bothered.) People with pointers should now see the pointer change for these areas, to give a bit more indication they're there.
Dark mode update (2021-02-10): Dark mode is now user-selectable (along with defaulting to the operating system/browser choice) — and some visibility issues have been fixed. It happens that this is the seventh anniversary of the death of my black cat, Pepsi, so this is apt.
A lot of churn to make Lighthouse happy (2021-02-05): Various real fixes, swapped the image of the set of winks, optimised the nurdle boondock generator, and a lot of tedious typing. At the time of writing, it likes everything but the results page (big enough to bother mobile; no easy fix) and the shots page (which has big images that I've already replaced, but because it insisted on a long caching policy it hasn't seen the smaller ones yet).
Added some more images to various headings (2021-02-01): Including at the bottom of the front page.; Also fixed the linking on the Constitution page.; Added a "hide nav" to the mystery meat navigation on the home page.
Squishy text and IE (2021-01-29): By request, the shortened navigation names are seen as inferior to the originals (where they fit), so the choice of banner text now varies depending on your screen size; you'll likely see this if you rotate a phone or shrink a window enough. This doesn't work on I.E., and nor do things like the sticky menus or the external link SVG, so they're disabled on I.E. (also the "minibar" needed fixing for I.E.) — if that 1.1% of the global browsers is you, you're welcome (but use a different browser).; Opera mini is another 1.1%, and the issue with the home page freezing until the browser cache is cleared has been seen again. It runs fine most of the time, and the rest of the web site just works, so I assume a browser bug. (It all goes wrong with extreme saving mode, but that's supposed to mangle web sites.) Full Opera is fine.
Images... (2021-01-29): Added some images to break up the "Primer", so it's a little less of a wall of text. (Doing the same for strategy will take longer.) Also added the 60^th dinner photo to the history page, in the hope of making it less empty.; Tested on more browsers (Android: Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Opera Mini, Samsung Internet, Edge; iOS: Safari, Chrome; macOS: Chrome, Safari, Firefox; Linux: Chrome, Firefox, Lynx), disabled the swoosh on Edge (where it's broken as in Safari). So far (I've not tried IE) only the experimental browser on a Kindle appears to have any problems, and even that's kind of working. There's a mystery colour issue with the results page nav bar under Lynx which is going to bug me, but it's harmless. I did see an Opera Mini issue, but I can't reproduce it.
Yet more polish (2021-01-27): Shortened navigation to work on an iPod Touch(!) If titles seem to have odd names (Constitution → Charter, Committee → Board, The Game → Sport, Drinking Games → Games, etc.) this is why. Also now scrolling the whole page wherever possibe, mostly to get rid of the enormous address bar.; Turned off attempts at swoosh on webkit (unsupported).; Fixed hrefs to work around sticky headers.; Fixed various typos and HTML breakages throughout the site.
Various mobile navigation changes (2021-01-21): Collapsible fixed headers, etc.
Added dark mode (2021-01-20): Based on your browser settings, don't blame me.
Delayed the splash image, looked at the swoosh (2021-01-19): The loading of the splash images (which had a typo affecting the load quality) on the home page was (slightly) impacting the PageSpeed Insights rating. The first image now starts to fade in after the page has fully loaded, which helps a little, gets us to 100%, and might actually be relevant to someone with a really slow connection.; The title bar swoosh on the home page bugged me, because it eventually gets out of sync. I looked at activating the animation from JavaScript, but because of the way it's implemented, this turns out not to be an option (you can't access the SVG DOM of a background image and you can't use JavaScript inside an SVG being used as a background image). I may eventually have to replace the title with a (responsive) image, but since it is a title I'll feel bad about it.
Added custom link buttons ( ) and improved navigation (2021-01-19): We apparently look a bit dated...
Added a custom 404 page (2021-01-13): There is now a custom page with some navigation and a silly animation for broken links.
Usability fixes (2021-01-11): Tried to make Google happier: CSS is now inlined, there are resolution-aware versions of images and some background loading, etc. It's still only 95-98% happy (even with images cached for an hour), but short of losing image quality, resorting to image format compatibility risks or just getting rid of the images, there's not much more to be done. Also made things a bit nicer in Lynx and added breadcrumbs to the top couple of levels of the site.
Canonical redirect (2021-01-05): All the site name variants now redirect to (https://)cutwc.org.
Added videos (2020-12-29): Some slow-motion videos taken last summer have finally been added to the shots page.
Logos moved around (2020-11-29): "Approved" logos now better named and less buried, and with the corners fixed inside the SVG since outside was tricky.
Yet another logo update (2020-12-29): Another SVG version of the pot-of-winks, this time closer to the geomtry of the ray-traced version.
Slide show updated (2020-12-22): Running purely as an svg animation the front page carousel seemed to be extremely power hungry (it caused laptop fans to spin up) - it looks like Chrome is bad at realising when the animation isn't doing anything, so although the CPU isn't busy, the GPU is. This has been updated to JavaScript and HTML CSS - which also makes it easier to amend; hopefully it still works everywhere; the fades are also sped up a little, which helps. The swoosh of the title used to use 50% of the CPU on WindowServer (on a Mac) alone; it still uses quite a bit during the swoosh, but when it's not doing anything it at least stops doing anything. The swoosh can now get out of sync with its animation, particularly if you suspend a phone with the page open, but fixing that one is a pain for the future.
Hid this wall of text (2020-12-02): Site updates now inside a <details> block to stop it dominating actual news.
Made glow versions of pot of winks, and favicons. (2020-12-01): Safari appears to underestimate the glow radius required for the "pot of winks"; this is a shame, because it's nicer to have the glow effect around the icon rather than part of it. For consistent rendering (and for the favicons), generated the icon with the glow included as well. The home icon now uses this version (and is a little bigger), and favicons now use this rather than the Pot Rampant (if you empty your browser cache); it's a little dark, and may get a further tweak.
Used the "pot of winks" logo (with Cambridge Blue glow) as a home button. (2020-11-29): I realised it looks a little like a series of levels and could be interpreted as history. Then I thought "it works on several levels. Heh." (Surprisingly Google image search doesn't seem to think it looks like an existing image of anything, which means other companies rejected it as ugly.) I also put one of the text CUTwC logos on the home page for a bit of branding.
Moved the logos to the main Club page. (2020-11-26): There's a redirect, so old links should work. Feedback appreciated.
Navigation buttons now have a more plastic highlight, and div borders are now subtly polychromatic (to be hideous but also winks-specific). (2020-11-26): Neumorphism (3D shadow) is an alternative, but doesn't work all that well on a light mat-coloured background; the section headers do use it, but it's very subtle.
Updated the front-page slideshow for the new President. (2020-11-26): I'm a bit worried about it chewing cycles, so don't leave it open indefinitely unless you want a flat battery. I think it's done the recommended way, but animations are just expensive. The rest of the site is fortunately static.
Added the front page slideshow. (2020-11-20): For better or worse...
Updated the results archive (back to 1996, with some gaps partly filled from WW). (2020-11-18): If anyone can help fill in the gaps, that would be appreciated.
Aesthetic revamp. (2020-10-21): The calendar has been updated, and there's also a vastly overengineered (and yet still a massive hack) swoosh on the front page title; let me know if you find it's broken for you, but I'm hoping most people are using web browsers that aren't too many years out of date (and not a dial-up internet connection).
New look and feel. (2020-09-09): The site has a first pass at a new look and feel; feedback welcome.; (Belated by many years) beginning of source control.