Tuesday, September 20, 2011

AQJG, AGA E-Journal and GO Library

Hey everyone!. Back from an awful weekened that i spent in bed with food intoxication : (.

Fortunately i'm quite ok today and will be getting back to work immediately. The first news is that our friends from the Quebec Go Association have been starting to make their contributions. Polly finished the new board yesterday and we will publish it today.

The stones will be arranged as a made-up 9x9 game, although if some Quebecois would like to challenge me to a 9x9 (or if they have one of their own) i can easily change it.

The other news i woke up with this morning is being included in the AGA E-Journal. That's a strange story to me.

I've been trying to contact them through their only official channel, an email address, for over a month.  They never responded any of the several emails i sent. This is something that happened to me years ago when i wanted to publish a series of articles - "The spirit of play"-, and i could hardly get any feedback.

However, somehow Bob Gilman made a note and made it to the AGA E-J, without my notice or consent, and what really throws me back, without collaboration. He made a compact and news-like article without any opinion so i don't have much to complain but he could have gotten a lot more information if he contacted me.

Anyway, at least the first note is made and we will check how it affects the traffic tomorrow by looking at the Google Analytics report.
So far, what we have noticed is that most vistors are american & canadian. I think we should make some statistics on who the supporters are to get an idea of which community is more interested, the american or european.

Of course, that only feeds our curiosity, as the go server aims to satisfy both right off the bat.

This week, we will be focusing on making GoSpeed read SGF files (which it does, but not completely featured yet)and being able to finish a game.  The most pressing tasks so far are on Polly's hands (poor guy) because i got a week head-start when i quit my job. There is a lot of styling and ordering to do, plus picking out the logo, and Polly is after all the Chief Design Officer :).

Feel free to put the heat on him on the comments.



My most urgent task is deployment: making the server run remotely easily. Unfortunately i have a road-block: we are waiting for Polly's credit-card to arrive to be able to use Amazon and start using a remote computer there.

If i dont find other immediate tasks i will go back to the GoLibrary prototype.

GoLibrary is a rather old aspiration of mine of making a site that offers a motivating training system. It is meant to be both a problem solving environment and a go book publisher. I frown when i read about the SmartGo Books, getting deals with editorials before we do.

This time, GoLibrary will start thinking only on solving problems. Its not only about selecting and keeping track of which problems you solved, but also about using a system that makes it very easy and trasnparent to know how you are doing. Details? secret so far :).
The whole point of devoting some time to GoLibrary these days is for november. I will be staying at BIBA(Blackie's international Baduk Academy) along many other strong european players and some professionals and i want to do some prototyping to see how they feel and like the new ideas, both on Kaya and Go Library. (they will be staying there to train, so GoLibrary is a perfect fit).

The power i want to show with GoLibrary, is that its being developed as a 100% independent site. And it will connect to Kaya, use its user accounts and some other information, and it will be widgetized and shown in the main page of Kaya.
It is an example of what it means to integrate a site into the server.

Our consultant has expressed interest in making another site to integrate to Kaya: the tournament organizer. So hopefully we will be able to work actively on both side projects by november.

2 comments:

  1. I read about kaya from the AGA. I just signed up as a founder and look forward to your success!

    ReplyDelete