In 1999 I was working as a mainframe programmer, but my departmental friends at Jaguar had also given me some basic knowledge of how web pages were constructed and retrieved. At the turn of the century the cost of running an online relational database was totally prohibitive, so the possibility of storing deals in one for retrieval was a non-starter. I had to find another way.
There was a brilliant young undergraduate called Ben Arnold working in our department and I explained to him my dilemma. He had the idea of storing each article in a “flat” JavaScript text file. He wrote some very clever code for me, but it only worked properly on Microsoft Explorer, which was much the prominent browser at the time. It could be made to work on Firefox, the other major browser, but there the code seemed “temperamental”.
Over the years Explorer and Firefox evolved, Chrome and Safari came onto the scene, and the old JavaScript code has failed to work at all since about 2010. Nevertheless, although I remember Ben very well as he played a vital role in the birth of 7NoTrumps.com, it’s about time after over 25 years and before my eyesight fails, that I finally reconstructed 7NoTrumps.com.
My son Woody has played a very important role in the new life for this site. He designed the card layout template and the stylesheet that works with it. I wrote the generator code to churn out the HTML for the pages from my deal/article database. It all seems to have taken a l-o-n-g time.
I was also quite keen on having feedback/comments functionality incorporated into the new site – essentially a forum for each page. No matter who wrote the original analysis for a deal, whether it was me (especially if it was me) or someone else, then there would often be topics which were overlooked or just plain incorrect. Rightly or wrongly, I decided that functionality that relied purely on a plain text reply from readers would not cut the mustard, so a comprehensive workbench for the forum (with card images etc) will take time to write and incorporate. Something for the future.
The other idea I had for 7notrumps.com never saw the light of day properly because life got in the way. No time, no money and no answers. I still regret not being to able to achieve this because it would have enabled me to give something back to the game which has given me so much. My idea was a web-based database for anyone who wanted to store their own deal records and write their own comments and/or commentary. These comments could be made public or kept personal according to the wishes of the owner, but the anonymised cards would become part of the database’s bank for stats. Comprehensive search functionality (shape/strength/contract/player etc) would be a vital component. I still think that the overall concept is a good idea even though, sadly, bridge is becoming less popular. Maybe one that got away.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the following friends-of-7NoTrumps.com who have contributed
significantly over the years:- Graham Marshall, Anthony Golding, Paul Bowyer, Simon Stokes, Jim Mason, Ric
Wilde, Gary Duddle, Nick Stevens, Dick Pathan, Craig Biddle, Rob Sharpe, Jack Ackrell and many more. Sadly,
some of them
are no longer with us. All of them were very helpful in submitting interesting new deals and pointing out
faults in my analysis of existing ones - often points that I had completely overlooked.
I will always be grateful for their help.