December 24th, 2009 / No Comments » / by Dan Quirk
It always helps to smile in a picture… nevermore so than now, as in the near future we’re going to be using them across the site, so that wherever you appear, in a team, posting a message etc. people can instantly see its you. Thus far we’ve only used them in the directory as we’ve been concentrating on features, but with a lot of these in place ( or soon to be ) we’ve also been sprucing up the interface generally.
As a prelude to this we’ve implemented a new picture service, using gravatar. We’re big fans of technology that genuinely makes things easier here at Clubhouse HQ and gravatar does exactly that. Why should you have to upload the same image at every site you use? Gravatar – Globally Recognised Avatar – provides a great service which allows you up upload your avatar (image) once and use it wherever you go ( providing the site supports gravatar). Its really simple, an image is linked to an email address, whenever we need your image we make a call to gravator with your address and they pass us your currently selected image. If you don’t have a gravator they provide us with what can only be described as a “funky” image… you’ll see what I mean. For all those who have already uploaded images through our old system you don’t need to do anything, we’ll continue to use these images, when you want a new image simply setup your gravator account and we’ll start to use that.
So, “When will I see images across Clubhouse?” and “What else have you been working on?” I hear you ask. The short answers are “soon” and “a lot”. Expecting a little more detail? Well this will bring a smile to your face, the answer is and ( with no trace of irony ) “it’ll be here soon”.
Up until now our priority has been features and we’ve operated very much on a “bleeding edge rolling release” policy, agile rapid development has meant features have been released literally as they were completed ( or even before ) with little QA or documentation. We were more than happy to operate like this as there is little point in spending months/years in development to release a polished product which doesn’t fit the bill or simply doesn’t work. Equally so called “early adopters” to new services are happy to accept a bumpy ride as they can see the potential and are keen to help ( I’d like to take the this opportunity to thank all of our early adopters who have reported bugs, suggested ideas, and offered their support and advice, your help has been invaluable). This policy has allowed us to progress much faster by relying on intuitive design and curious users rather than documenting everything. Within this environment, particularly in the first year during which we were really getting to grips with the exact nature of the problems and how best to approach them, it would of been fruitless to try and set out a detailed roadmap. Features were tested in production and therefore often documented long after they’re initially released, once the final implementation was decided on. Exactly what has just happened with the implementation of gravatar in fact…
Its not the only way to develop software as there is “bleeding edge” and then “BLEEDING EDGE” but while its been a bit bumpy in places hopefully you’ll agree we’ve managed a nice balance between progress/stability and ended up with a fairly stable, battle hardened service. Unfortunately there are some drawbacks, sometimes the project isn’t always as balanced as it could be with some areas inevitably getting more time than others. I think this is certaintly the case with Clubhouse and for this reason, amongst others, the time has come to change our approach.
We have now reached the stage where early adopters are a shrinking percentage of our users, while features are still a priority, ultimately, stability is now the sought after commodity. This, more than anything, naturally signals the end of “rolling release” policy. Consequently we have been gradually shifting our policy since v1.2, so from now on Clubhouse will be a “versioned release”. This means features will spend much longer in testing and QA, be documented upon release and ultimately be much more stable while taking a little longer to reach the outside world. This will allow us to make Clubhouse much more transparent, you will no longer have to actively ask what we are doing or when something will arrive, amongst other things we’ll provide a roadmap and a detailed changelog showing both what we’re working on and whats changing. This transparency will allow every Clubhouse user to actively influence its development and direction if they so desire. You’ll start to notice these changes in the new year where I’ll be blogging on them as they’re gradually introduced culminating in the release of v1.4 in early 2010.
Happy holidays!
Posted in: milestone, news
November 3rd, 2009 / No Comments » / by Dan Quirk
Répondez s’il vous plaît…
It has been a source of debate at Clubhouse HQ, that recently some clubs seemed to end up with a few invites which took longer than you would reasonably expect to get a response. We were almost certain this couldn’t be a technical problem as clubs had been using the invite system, to get their members on board, for a year or more and reported no issues. For the majority of clubs invites were taken up pretty quickly and without trouble, we therefore put it down to peoples hectic schedules and a few simply taking their time. Suspicion still abounded the office though, we couldn’t believe such highly organised, successful clubs could have members who would take so long to respond…
Thanks to some recent feedback we have been able to track down the problem. It turned out that a small minority of mail clients we’re breaking the invitation link because of it’s length. So a link in the email to activate the users account would have some of its information trimmed when the mail client wrapped the text onto the next line, like this
http://brooklandscc.clubhouseapp.com/user/activate.railsi=1&hash=WPH
QCASRUECXH
which when clicked, obviously wouldn’t work. To an unsuspecting user this would simply redirect them to the login page which could appear confusing. To avoid the possibility of this happening we have introduced a Url shortening service, so the link will now look something like
http://bit.ly/RgRhm
Ironically, it appears we hadn’t heard of this before as those people who has encountered this in the past had simply requested to join their club thereby bypassing the link in the invite. Thankfully we now have which should smooth the journey for any new club.
If you have any members who we’re struggling with their invite perhaps its worth nudging them to take another look, all outstanding invites have been resent with the new Urls so they should be fine now.
Posted in: Troubleshooting
October 7th, 2009 / No Comments » / by Dan Quirk
In the initial weeks following the launch of Clubhouse, on the 1st April 2008, many friends from other clubs wanted to know what Clubhouse was. My standard response was “team selection made simple”, but I always felt this was inadequate. It didn’t in any way get across the essence of Clubhouse in say the same way as if I told someone Google was a great search engine. Most people know what a search engine is and therefore Google being a great one is a useful piece of information. However Clubhouse is unique. Peoples response would therefore generally be, well we already have a team selection system. Most people would have no conception that it could be done any better. Once I’d spent 5 minutes telling them how Clubhouse worked and the effect it had on my Club they were keen to know if their club could use it. To paraphrase my early explanation…
“Many people look to technology and the Internet to help organise everything nowadays but most websites relating to club sport, and unfortunately club websites themselves, inevitably fall into the category of an optional extra. They do not pervade across the club and eventually end up being used by just a handful of people, often the administrators, or even worse no one at all. A typical example of this is a “fixtures and results” or “news” sites. A player can turn up at training on a Wednesday, play on a Saturday, have a drink in the bar afterwards and never look at such at site. As the player doesn’t need to visit the site they inevitably won’t, leading to it being an optional extra. This is where Clubhouse steps in. Clubhouse isn’t merely a site to visit occasionally, it becomes part of the Club, in fact when you’re not there it is the Club. The main function of a club from week to week, is getting teams on the field. This means players telling the club if they can play, and, subsequently, the clubs selecting teams. The club then needs to inform the selected players and deal with any late replacements. There is then the small matter of getting everyone in the right place at the right time. Clubhouse facilitates every step of the process. Players have to regularly visit Clubhouse to update their availability and see if they’re selected, suddenly there is one central point. Instantly a community is created..”
Clubhouse is a little over 18 months old now and for the first year we we’re more than happy to let Clubhouse simply spread by word of mouth while we evolved Clubhouse to a stage where it was genuinely useful for everyone. During this time we only had a basic public information page. The easiest way to grasp the essence of Clubhouse was to speak to someone who used it and during those crucial first winter and summer seasons, where we were observing and learning about what Clubhouse needed to be, we we’re more than happy with this growth. Once we launched Clubhouse v1.0 at the beginning of our second summer season I felt it was the right time to start to spreading our wings and get the word out there. A major part of this was the new showcase where prospective clubs could get all the information they would glean from speaking to someone who used it. As pleased as I was with this I still felt we weren’t quite there. Even the above quote doesn’t get across what its like to be part of a club using Clubhouse, you need to speak to someone using it. I continue to spread the word personally and speak to many people on the phone but I am but one man, so, as mentioned previously, I am happy to announce we have appointed a community representative, Peter Whyley. Peter uses Clubhouse in 2 clubs, Brooklands Cricket club and Altrincham Kersal Rugby Club, and is perfectly placed to explain the “Clubhouse effect”. In case you don’t have time to speak to Peter, he has been out and about canvassing the views of Clubhouse users to bring the essence of Clubhouse direct to you. You can see a short 3 minute film Peter has made here
http://www.clubhouseapp.com/showcase/index.rails#video_standalone
Posted in: news
September 23rd, 2009 / No Comments » / by Dan Quirk
There has been quite a lot of debate recently, both in our support area and on twitter over are decision to only support the current version of Internet Explorer, version 8. While this is a worthwhile debate in it’s own right, and one we have gone some way to address, it has unfortunately got confused with Clubhouse not working in other browsers such as Safari or Chrome. As such people have not reported problems in these browsers and assumed we simply didn’t support that version. Inevitably bugs are introduced as Clubhouse continues to develop because each browser implements the code slightly differently and has its own nuances, which can sometimes be difficult to balance. With periods of rapid development we have long relied on the Clubhouse community to tell us about browser issues. Unfortunately with this confusion there have been bugs in Clubhouse on Safari and Chrome which have existed much longer than they should of, and for that we’d like to apologise. The good news is we have now fixed these bugs so Clubhouse should be working smoothly in Safari and Chrome once again.
So browser support generally, what do we support? Well it’d pretty simple really, we guarantee Clubhouse works on the latest version of all major browsers, so that’s Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Safari 4, and Chrome 3. Now if it doesn’t please complain!!
Now I hear what your saying, Clubhouse is useful because I can l use it when it’s convenient to me, that means at work, on a train, on holiday, wherever, which often means you don’t necessarily have control over which browser your running. We hear you, believe me. Unfortunately there’s a compromise to be found between functionality and support, and a lot of the older browsers simply can’t handle modern web features. As I mentioned earlier we’ve gone a long way to addressing this and held back in some areas to improve support for Internet Explorer 7. It is only really Internet Explorer which causes major problems, Clubhouse should work smoothly in almost any version of the other 3 browsers. Its just extremely unfortunate that most companies use IE and have a slow upgrade path, often because their inhouse software ironically doesn’t work on newer browsers. We will still continue to only officially support IE 8 ( which is much much improved from 7 ) but unless your picking teams 7 should suffice.
We want to continue to make Clubhouse as accessible as possible, so that it can sit in the background and simply come to the fore when you need it or your club needs to communicate with you, as such we’re going to do 2 things :-
July 7th, 2009 / 1 Comment » / by Dan Quirk
With the advent of Clubhouse v1.2, we are now phasing out support for IE 6 and 7 across Clubhouse from today. In order to continue using Clubhouse without any hiccups, Internet Explorer 6 and 7 users should upgrade to a newer browser:
Download Internet Explorer 8
Download Firefox
Download Safari
The Internet Explorer 6 browser was released back in 2001, and Internet Explorer 7, the replacement, was released nearly 3 years ago in 2006. Modern web browsers such as IE 8, Firefox, and Safari provide significantly better online experiences. Since IE 6 usage has finally dipped below a small minority threshold of our clubs, it’s time to finally move beyond IE 6. Equally in doing so we wish to make a clean break and move to IE 8 so we can deliver cutting edge features.
What are the implications of this transition?
As of today, future features and any improvements made to existing features may not work with IE 6 and 7. If you are using IE 8, Firefox 3, or Safari, you don’t have to do anything — everything will continue work perfectly for you. However, if you are using IE 6 or 7 and you want to make sure everything works, you will need to upgrade your browser to either IE 8, Firefox, or Safari. This is especially important if you are an administrator of a club and wish to pick teams. While the rest of Clubhouse may continue to work with older version of IE the selection process needs IE 8 so you will have to upgrade. All of these browsers are free and all of them will deliver a much better overall experience. The web will be a lot better for you.
Why are we making this change?
IE 6 and 7 are last-generation browsers. These versions of IE can’t provide the same web experience that modern browsers can. Continued support of IE 6 and 7 means that we can’t optimize our interfaces or provide an enhanced customer experience in Clubhouse. Supporting IE 6 and 7 means slower progress, less progress, and, in some places, no progress. We want to make sure the experience is the best it can be for the vast majority of our clubs, and continuing to support IE 6 and 7 holds us back.
Thanks again for your continued support. We look forward to dropping the rusty weight of IE 6 and 7 and improving the overall Clubhouse experience moving forward.
Posted in: Uncategorized
July 7th, 2009 / 3 Comments » / by Dan Quirk
As some of you have already noticed we pushed Clubhouse version 1.2 live over the weekend. This update has been three months in the making and we’re excited to see it all in action. This update is mainly a series of refinements and improvements you asked for after v1.0 rather than any major new features . It can be roughly split into 5 categories:
Availability
- Players can now easily see matches involving teams they aren’t not watching. This allows players to easily see all matches being played on the days they’re making themselves available for.
- We have added a fourth availability state “Not done anything yet”. Admins can now easily differentiate between players who haven’t done anything and those who genuinely aren’t sure.
Selection
- “Other” people can now be added to a match alongside players, these could be referees, scorers, first aid etc. They can add to the messageboard and follow a fixture just like any selected player.
- Selected players can now be ordered.
- Clubhouse will now highlight conflicts, so if a player is already selected for a match on the same day a warning symbol will appear.
- Alongside the tagging system, which allows players to be grouped, there are now “in-built” tags. These are based on availability and and can be combined with any of your custom tags to instantly see the whether you can field a team.
- You can now see the last match a player was last selected for.
IMPORTANT: The selection page is now using some of the latest Javascript technologies and libraries ( code which runs in your browser ) to achieve these features. Unfortunately it means you need Internet Explorer 8 or Firefox 3 to use the page. If you don’t have either of these we’ll be asking you to upgrade when you visit the page.
Meet/Travel/Play
- You can now add a map on publishing a game if you wish to help players navigate to the ground.
Reminder Service
- We’ve simplified the reminder service. Instead of having a reminder day, Clubhouse we’ll now simply remind a player 3 days before the availability for the day is required.
- We’ve also added another “Final” reminder, so, if a players status is either “Not done anything yet” or “Not sure” once the required by date is reached Clubhouse will remind them again, on that day.
Administration
- Clubhouse now archives matches over 4 weeks old that have been published.
- You can now browse matches by team.
- You can now change the account owner.
- Users can now request to become an admin.
As you can see this new version of Clubhouse includes a huge amount. Consequently there are bound to be a few bugs here and there. We’ve been busy squashing these for the last 2 days as some of you have started to use the new version. Hopefully it is now ready for mass use, but if you do spot any problems please get in touch with support. As ever Clubhouse is a work in progress, and we are working hard to improve the service as much as possible, any feedback or suggestions to aid in this are more than welcome.
Posted in: milestone, news
June 10th, 2009 / No Comments » / by Dan Quirk
With the advent of Clubhouse v.1.0 recently, it seems word has really began to spread that Clubhouse is a great app. In the last couple of months we’ve seen clubs join from Australia, U.S.A, Germany, France, Sweden, Switzerland and Mexico. We were as surprised as anyone to see these clubs join and would like to thank anyone in the Clubhouse community who has recommended Clubhouse. We’re flattered by the attention though we must admit we weren’t quite ready to deal with the myriad of localisation and language issues. We are starting to get to grips with these now and we look forward to welcoming more countries on board!
Let’s see… Welcome! Bienvenidos! Wilkommen!
Posted in: Uncategorized, milestone, news
May 30th, 2009 / No Comments » / by Dan Quirk
Next Saturday the data centre that Clubhouse is served from will be undergoing some maintenance. Therefore Clubhouse will be down for 2 hours from 9.30-11.30 am. Sorry for any inconvenience caused!
Posted in: Uncategorized, availability
April 23rd, 2009 / 2 Comments » / by Dan Quirk
Clubhouse 1.0 included a lot of major improvements and as such many of the smaller additions slipped into the update fairly unnoticed. There are 2 imparticular I’d like to draw attention to, “Message of the Day” and our new support section.
“Message of the Day” is one of the first things you’ll see when you login. As we were developing Clubhouse v.1.0 many of you asked for a feature that could take advantage of the fact that club members look at Clubhouse a couple of times a week to see the teams, post messages etc. What a marvelous opportunity to deliver important information to them while they’re there. Well “Message of the Day” is exactly that. It’s the first thing a user will see and allows an admins to put up a message about the most pressing issue at the club, whatever that be. It’s very simple to use, you simply click edit, write your message and then click save.
Just as your club needs to communicate well to run properly we need to hear from you in order to find out if we’re heading in the right direction. Is “Message of the Day” sufficient? What other ways would you like to be able to deliver information through Clubhouse? While we already have a great community of club admins who constantly point us in the right direction we’d like to hear from as many of you as possible. Thats why as part of our update we’ve implemented a brand new support section. There are 2 distinct sections, a knowledge base where I’ll be posting articles and FAQ’s about all things Clubhouse, many of which will be introduced through a post like this, and a public discussion area. In this area you can post a question, a suggestion or pose a problem. We see this as the ultimate sandbox, don’t be afraid to throw in any idea you have, the more of the community that would like to see something the more priority we’ll place trying to implement a suitable feature. Development by democracy! Do you have a question, problem or suggestion?
As well as influencing the direction of Clubhouse, we’d like to develop a community feel where old hands can help new admins with advice such as the best way get members on board for example. After all your the experts when it comes to using Clubhouse. Ultimately we’d love to see everyone talking to each other and discussing how you run your clubs, how Clubhouse can help and what you’d like to see improved. In the future we hope to have appointed community representatives who can mentor and guide new club admins so as to get the best out of Clubhouse.
Posted in: news
Tags: Updates
April 9th, 2009 / No Comments » / by Dan Quirk
In the world of software something is considered to have reached version 1 when is it feature complete, meaning it can do everything anyone would reasonably expect of it. We’re extremely pleased to announce that today we’ve sent Clubhouse v1.0 live! It’s an exciting moment for us all at Clubhouse HQ because as you all know its been months in the making. Well the moment is here and we can’t wait for you to see it in action. There are improvements across the board, but the major changes can roughly be split into 2 sections :
Those looking to use Clubhouse
A lot of the feedback we have received since we launched Clubhouse was on this issue
“Clubhouse is great, once setup it virtually runs itself but getting 100 people to do anything the first time is tough”.
Consequently, we wanted to improve the conversion process and help club members sign up as easily as possible. Previously, members had to be invited onto Clubhouse. To make this more flexible, we’ve introduced two new features. Firstly, if someone doesn’t respond to their invite we will periodically remind them. Secondly, club members can now come direct to Clubhouse and request to join a Club. An admin can then approve and activate their account. This way, Clubs can allow their members to sign up to Clubhouse in whichever way is most convenient; by gathering email addresses and sending invitations, allowing them to join of their own accord, or a mixture of both. Even if a club member has an invite outstanding and he comes direct, Clubhouse will detect this and activate his account straight away. Simple!
Occasionally, when club admins sent invitations, some wouldn’t make it (known as bounces). Just like mobile phones, people change their “numbers” from time to time or sometimes make a mistake when giving them out. As emails are currently the main form of communication across Clubhouse, we’ve implemented a service which will detect these bounces. So if Clubhouse can’t send an invite email (or any other email) after trying several times over a given period, we’ll notify a club admin so they can change it to the correct address.
Those using Clubhouse
Two strong themes that occurred again and again among the feedbackwe received were:
“I’d like to use Clubhouse for my junior section”
and
“Clubhouse isn’t quite there for a club of my size – with over 300 people I need a way to drill down”
Clubhouse was originally designed for a senior section of a club with about 75 players. Why? Well you have to start somewhere! Unlike senior sections, juniors age groups tend to operate separately, having their own team manager with players only concerned about their team. Interestingly, this is virtually the opposite of the problem Clubhouse solves with senior teams where there is often a lot of player crossover.
Players can now watch the teams that are relevant to them. This means they will only receive reminders and have to state availability for the days on which the teams they are watching are playing. Selectors can also now tag players into groups. So, for example, the U14’s manager could tag all his players so that he could just deal with them. The tagging system is extremley powerful and flexible. For example, within the “u14″ tag, he could then tag by position or any property he wished to. This would enable the manager to narrow down or expand the group of players using any combination of tags. He could, for example, choose to look at “u14″ and “forwards” when picking his team.
This system of tagging and watching allows not only junior sections, but also clubs of any size, to use Clubhouse. Admins can tag seniors based on squads, teams, ages or anything they wish. This allows them to drill down to the players they wish to deal with in an instant. Equally, on the playing side, users can just follow the teams they are interested in, and can easily change this as they get older or play for different teams.
General
Quite a few of our users play mutilple sports and wanted to use Clubhouse for all their clubs. We’re pleased to announce that Clubhouse now supports users being members of mulitple clubs.
As well as listening to all your feedback over the last six months and acting on it, we wanted to improve the process of gathering feedback, and much more importantly to bring in the people who really know about how to use Clubhouse – you! We have a brand new support section where you can start public discussions with all Clubhouse users. We’re still on hand if you’d like to send us a private message, but in order to really find out what exactly Clubhouse needs to be we’d love to see everyone talking to each other and discussing how you run your clubs, how Clubhouse can help and what you’d like to see improved.
Last but not least, we have changed the design of Clubhouse. Like every other update listed on here, this is a refinement rather than a change. We hope you like it!
Just as with anything new there are bound to be a few teething troubles. If you do see a “Something went wrong screen”, please do fill in the feedback form with as much information as possible. This will speed up fixing the problem. Equally, if you have suggested a feature and it has not made it into this update please do not despair – this is not the end, merely the begginning! We will continue to make lots of updates over the next month.
For now we hope you enjoy what you see.
Posted in: milestone, news
