UTF-8? WTF?

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

Released a tiny tweak, handling fancy accented characters properly in iCalendar feeds. (That’s for characters like “á” that are UTF-8 encoded.) Such characters were always handled fine in non-UTF-8 encoded feeds, but more calendar feeds coming on line (such as FFindr.com’s) do use UTF-8 — necessitating a check… so to avoid garbling, it now checks. Blah blah.

And voilà!

That’s the way the email bounces

Saturday, October 24th, 2009

Released a new feature that captains will find useful: players whose emails bounce are now flagged as such, so that the captain will know when someone’s email needs correcting. (This only applies to “hard bounces”, such as when an email address is incorrect and doesn’t exist… and not to things like “out of office” autoreplies.)

A couple other minor tweaks:

  • Doubled the size available to the team chalkboards (at suggestion of PiPr)
  • Now show a link to the team’s Twitter account in emails and on “non-Flash” pages
  • On the in-progress French sign-in page, added a link back to the English

No more fence sitting + premium service

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

Released a handy new feature for captains of the draconian school: the option to prevent “maybe” responses.

This option is up-front-and-centre when creating a new team. To prevent maybes for an existing team, hit Team Options / Game Options tab, and un-tick the “allow maybes” checkbox.

Props to MiGa for the idea (and no comment as to which captain school he attended ;) ).

Another minor feature just released is that of “premium service“: loyal/contributing users get a dashboard free of ads or logos — which gives an extra inch and a half of screen space height to view the team dashboard (handy on today’s vertically challenged laptop and netbook monitors).

Support HappyTC today and go premium!

Bulletin notifications via email

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

Added a new feature: whenever a player posts a team bulletin, there’s now the option to email a notification to the rest of the team.

The notification contains the bulletin’s text, as well as the player’s schedule link so they can get in and view all the bulletins and the rest of the team conversation.

As well, we re-worded and tightened up several HappyTC emails to ensure optimum brevity and clarity.

Props to FaNa for the suggestions, and the continued prodding to keep HappyTC evolving and progressing!

It’s all in the accessories

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

Released a few touch-ups:

  • Tightened up certain font sizes
  • Added snazzy new icons courtesy of FamFamFam.com

SMS your team via HappyTC (using Twitter)

Sunday, September 27th, 2009

A handy new HappyTC feature has just been rolled out — you can now use SMS messages to contact your team mates!

It works like this:

  1. Set up a Twitter account for your team on twitter.com. (You don’t need to enable a mobile device for the team account.)
  2. Sign in to HappyTC, click the Twitter button and provide the Twitter account’s user ID and password.
  3. Tell your team mates to use their own personal Twitter accounts to follow the new team Twitter account.
  4. Tell them to enable “updates to mobile” when following the team account (and they obviously need to add their own mobile device to Twitter).

Now, whenever anyone contacts the team from within HappyTC there’s the option to “tweet” the message as well — which sends an SMS to all following players!

More info is here.

(This assumes you live in a country where Twitter supports sending tweets via SMS… currently that appears to be the USA, the UK, Canada, and New Zealand.)

FFind your tournament calendar on FFindr!

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

A few under-the-hood changes were just released:

  1. Imports of tournament calendars from FFindr.com, the definitive directory of ultimate frisbee tournaments on the web, will now be handled in a custom way. The change on HappyTC goes hand in hand with work at FFindr by Christian Jennewein, creator of FFindr — and the idea to collaborate with HappyTC was his, so props to him! (More on this collaboration to follow…)
  2. Minor maintenance on the HappyTC database, which caused a few minute unavailability this evening.

Sched link redux

Monday, August 17th, 2009

Just released a fix to a problem affecting the “get your sched link email” function on the HappyTC sign-in page. Thanks to user JoZo for reporting it.

Also released some under-the-hood enhancements in preparation for translation of HappyTC into French.

Appreciating a heads-up

Sunday, July 19th, 2009

Appreciate the heads-up from GrSc of tuc.org — an upcoming change to how tuc.org exports its LeagueRunner iCalendar feeds would have added some “junk” to the locations of games imported from TUC. (It’s to do with tuc.org improving how its schedules look in Google Calendar… an enhancement that will presumably be propagated to OCUA and other LeagueRunner users.)

Made a quick behind-the-scenes adjustment to handle that in HappyTC, and no one will be the wiser when tuc.org’s change is released!

Subject: tidy

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

Very small release just now — tidied up the subject lines of player-sent emails.

Before they always had “some team business…” stuck on the end. Now, that’s only there if the player doesn’t type in their own subject: keeps the subject line tidy & uncluttered.

Props to FaNa for the idea.