Just a little change to the about page, linking to member pages:

http://www.jugglingdb.com/about/

I hope to keep the list a little bit more up-to-date in future!

Regards,

A new Juggling Shopping Comparison site was launched yesterday:

http://www.jugglingdb.com/shop/

So far there have been ~1500 products viewed, and 37 product reviews submitted. Hopefully it will continue to be a great success. All feedback, suggestions, bug reports are gratefully received (as ever!)

Regards,

I have upgraded the rec.juggling portal to the latest version of PHP Headiner:

http://headliner.sourceforge.net/history.php

Thanks to all who have spotted bugs and requested features. Please let me know if you spot any bugs that might have been caused by this upgrade.

Thanks,

I have released PHP Headliner 1.00. Yay.

I have also updated its homepage:
http://headliner.sourceforge.net/

Hopefully it will gain some more interest. I have also had an email from someone who is very interested in the video database. I smell another spin-off project on its way!

Regards,
Colin E.

The Juggling Records Database (JRDb) has been resurrected from data found on the Wayback Internet Archive. The all new records database is hosted here:

http://www.jugglingdb.com/records/

Regards,

The first phase of the members section overhaul has been completed, the code has been re-written from scratch. Not many new features, however it integrates better with PHP Headiner and the video database, you can add pictures and a description.

More to come....

Regards,

I have re-written the IJDb search engine using the search code I developed for PHP Headliner. It now searches somewhere between 10-100 times faster. Yippee!!!

I need to do a bit of work tro make multilingual searches work and to ctahc some common errors. However, it is a big improvement on the previos search code.

Also, The Void pointed out in a previous pos that the search is not very thorough, previously missing out videos by 'olivier' when searching the video database. The new search algorithm is much more thorough and inspects many more fields, providing much better results:

http://www.jugglingdb.com/search/search.php?search=olivier

Regards,

After a couple of months of development the new rec.jugglingportal, based on PHP Headliner, has been released.

I have finally got round to doing a bit more work on the IJDb news portal. A few bug fixes and other stuff behind the scenes. You can also post through this interface at last! (One day late for the BJC - sorry LP ;-)

http://www.jugglingdb.com/test/newsreader/

Regards,

As The Void asked so nicely:

http://www.jugglingdb.com/videos/index.php?random=true

I was quite surprised at how many video I have actually seen when a take a random selection!

Regards,

The new IJDb Jugglig Compendium has been launched:

http://www.jugglingdb.com/compendium/

The Compendium combines the old Jugglng Help and Articles sections into a single resource.

There are still a few loose ends to tie up, including context menus, searching the new compendium and more helpful redirects for links ot the old articles. However I expect to tie these up in the next few days.

Regards,

I have been making steady progress on the task of creating a new news portal for the IJDb. One of the new features that I have been very keen to implement is that of marking articles as read. I also want to make the new interface a lot faster than the old one. It was not an easy task to acheive both of these.

I am now at the point where I would like a few people to alpha test the interface:

http://www.jugglingdb.com/test/newsreader/

Remember to log in and use the 'remember me' feature so that it will mark the articles that have been read.

I am not to interested yet in comments regarding the interface, browser compatibility etc... I am far more interested in having a few people use the interface to see what the impact is on performance.

I will update this alpha installation and keep you guys informed of progress. I will also be asking for much more feedback about usability, features, and interface style as it progresses a little closer to the finished product.

Regards,

I have finally got round to adding the facility to remember your login, via cookies. The current duration is set to 2 weeks.

Regards,

Thanks to the fantastic efforts of Gothy, the IJDb is now available in Greek:

http://www.jugglingdb.com/?lang=el

Bringing the total number of languages that the IJDb is avilable in to a grand total of 12!

I am still interested in volunteers to help continue the translation effort in the following languages: German, Spanish, Japanese, French, Catalan, Italian, Hebrew, Russian, Danish, Dutch

If you only have enough time to translate a few lines of text, your contribution would be most welcome.

Regards,

Little Paul recently pointed out that the siteswap highlighting within rec.juggling has needed a bit of attention for a long time:

http://www.jugglingdb.com/dev/index.php?topic=218

I have re-written the regexp's to remove some of the annoying problems such as matches failing at the start of a line. Also, vanilla siteswaps (without multiplexes) are now validated. Even better, patterns with throw heights above 9 are now matched, so everyones favourite db97531 is recognised.

This functionality is all wrapped up within the PHP SiteSwap class. If anyone wants to grab a copy, or just wants to snoop, take a look here:

http://www.jugglingdb.com/lib/siteswap_php.txt

I have finally decided that it is time to launch the new look for the IJDb. There are still a few outstanding issues, for example I haven't added a search form. However, I was getting sick of waiting and wanted to move onto other things. I will continue to make small improvements to the layout. If you spot any problem - please let me know.

Also, I have added a context menu, See the following examples:

http://www.jugglingdb.com/articles/index.php?id=58
http://www.jugglingdb.com/articles/index.php?id=13
http://www.jugglingdb.com/events/

etc...

Again, all comments/suggestions are welcomed.

The IJDb Developers' Forum has been resurected with a home grown codebase. It now boasts threaded discussions and an RSS feed.

Unfortunately the Developer's Forum has been shutdown due to an excess of blog spam.

On Luke Burrage's request I have added a Developers' Forum to this website. Hopefully this will promote a community feel among the editors and contributors - perhaps even bringing in some new volunteers.

I have just added a few new features to the IJDb to provide greater access to the vast quantities of juggling related data that this site contains:

• RSS feeds for rec.juggling, juggling videos and IJDb chat.


• XML feeds for juggling events and clubs to allow other sites to synchronise with thsi site's content.


• ZIPep up copies of the events and clubs listings for people to take on their travels.

Colin E.

The all new IJDb Video Database was launched on rec.juggling. The new database automatically crawls juggling sites looking for videos and catalogues them in a Wiki style user-editable database. It is the best thing since sliced bread.

The globe applet has been updated to incorporate a few changes to the coordinate data made by Jason Lee Quinn. Also the applet has been compressed into a JAR file for faster downloading times.

Also, an all new juggling videos database is on its way ...

Occasionally a message will appear on the NNTP serverthat this site uses which is malformed. This can cause the hreading of messages to fail. Unfortunately in the past feww months this has started happening more and more opften. I have investigated the problem and found the culprit, Google Groups! Ever since the Groups Beta replaced the old implementation, threads have been breaking all over the place. After looking at the messages posted via Google Groups I have found that they break the message format defined in one of the NNTP RFCs (1036 2.2.5).

I have emailed Google Groups to let them know that this problem exists. I have also changed my software so that it can read Reference fields from Google Groups messages.

- Colin E.

Thanks to the efforts of Masaki Nishikawa, the IJDb is now available in its 11th language, Japanese.

I have added RSS feeds which provide up-to-date infomration on activity within rec.juggling and the IJDb chatroom.

Only a very little enhancement. If you are not logged in as a member and you want to reply to a rec.juggling posts previously you had to login then navigate back to the post you were wanting to reply to. The IJDb now redirects you to the correct page. Marvelous (thanks for the suggestion LP).

I have been a little busy recently with a few side-projects. One of them, SiteTranslator, is an object-oriented tool for creating multilingual websites. It evolved from the techniques I developed while creating this site. You can see the resultws at the SiteTranslator SourceForge project page.

You can now rate the websites in the IJDb links section. I have started the ball rolling by rating a few sites...

I was concerned that the top ten links were heavily biased towards links which had been in the database for the greates period of time. The Links database top ten now shows results based on hit count and average hits. Jon Relf (Orin) will be very pleased to see that he now has the number 2 spot aswell as the number 1 when you sort by hit rate.

The Vendors and Local Clubs sections of the Links database have been linked to the Clubs and Vendors databases.

The statistics page has been updated to include language and visitor graphs.

You can see the new globe applet preview. I like it.

As I am now more actively involved in the IJDb development I have updated the to do page. You can now see what is currently being worked on or considered. You can also add your own suggestions at the bottom of the page.

OK, so it isn't very exciting ... I have implemented an automated link checker which checks every single link within all the IJDb database tables every week. Any sites that persistantly fail are flagged so that the various section editors can deal with them. I looks like approximately 5% of the ~4000 links are currenlty pointing to sites which no longer exist. Over the next month or so, this should improve.

I am slowly getting back to work ... the following changes have been made:

• Changed the flag rendering code so that it looks tidier or Netscape browsers.
  
• Created a cut-off so that only 20 comments are displayed per article by default. This has made some of the more popular aticles load a lot quicker.
  
• Fixed a bug in rec.juggling where posts are replicated hundreds of times.
  

More to follow...

The IJDb has sucessfully moved to a new server hosted by the European Juggling Association (EJA). Most of the site is up and running, with just the JuggleWiki causing a few problems.

On a personal note I will probably have more time available to editing and developing the site. Currently I am doing some tidying up behind the scene :-)

Colin E.

The globe applet which is used to search for Juggling clubs and
IJDb members has been updated.
I am happy to see that this applet has been adapted for many other uses:

• To search an interactve photo album on AkuAku's site.
  
• By a number of blog-ers thanks to headmap.
  
• To search for places of mineralogical interest at Mindat.
  

Colin E.

Fixed bug in vendors that the traffic lights never changed from green.

Afer about one and a half weeks of down-time I have finally managed to fix the bug in my news portal code. Hurrah!

A new section has been added to the IJDb, Juggling Help. This section, editted in collated by Luke BUrrage, is a wide-ranging collection of thoughts and articles from a number of sources. It covers just about every aspect of juggling and circus skills known to mankind!

In responese to a post on rec.juggling, I have created a new members search which allows you to search members by location, name or instant messenger.

After many frequent requests I have finally written a script which checks for dead links. Of the 357 entries in the 'links' section, 12% were broken! These have all been removed. I willl apply this script to the other databases shortly.

Have a nice day, Colin E.

I have waded through lots of emails requesting minor modifications to the IJDb such as dating of articles, adding a few links and being able to edit email addresses in member profiles . That should keep people happy for a while ;-)

Thanks to Stefan, the IJDb is now available in Dutch, making total of 9 different languages!

The rec.juggling Advanced Search page has been updated to show the previous 10 searched performed.

Thanks to the JIS, the IJDb rec.jugging archives have been extended to include the full 12 years of rec.juggling history. New browse and search pages have been created to make full use of this resource.

A few changes have been made to the rec.juggling portal - the current messages viewed in a thread is now highlighted (I have finally found a use for Javascript!) , and you can also view Author profiles.

I seem to have been neglecting this site a little bit recently :-( Thankfully the automation menas it is still going strong.

Just a few minor updates today - emails addresses are now displayed in rec.juggling (to members) etc...

There are a couple of new sections in the pipeline - honest! When the two volunteers who suggested these sections start adding content that is (hint hint!)

I have been a bit busy recently so have not had much time for website updates. However, I have found time to optimise the threading code for rec.juggling. It is now much faster. Exciting isn't it?

Following a brief discussion on rec.juggling, I have updated the script which recognises siteswaps within rec.juggling posts.The performance has been improved considerably (as has my knowledge of Perl Regular Expression!).

A great big thank you goes to Jon for re-formatting the last 3 sections of Ben Beevers book. SS Ben's Guide to Juggling Patterns, online edition, is now finally complete.

The search page has been bugging me for a while now. During the introduction of multi-lingual support some of the database searches were broken. The addition of extra languages tables which needed to be cross-referenced made the resulting SQL queries very complex.

After many hours of deep-thought, I finally came up with the SQL/PHP code needed (buy me a pint and I'll tell you all about it ;-).

Just to keep *Cox* happy, here is the search result for jonglier.

A few days ago I received an email from the webmaster of a mineralogical refernce site. He had adapted the java globe applet which I use for locating juggling clubs to search his mineral database!(scroll to the bottom of the page)

The applet has been enhanced in a number of ways - I shall update the version on this web site shortly.

Having realised I do not have the time to format the remaining 40+ pages of Ben Beevers book, SS Ben's Guide to Juggling Patterns I have decided to publish the final 4 chapters using the horrible 'Save as HTML' option within Microscoft Word. The HTML is a mess - but at least people can read the rest of this amazing book.

An Advanced Search page has been added to the video database to make locating videos more easy.

Tasj Reslow has joined the team of translators to make the IJDb available in Danish.

Scott Seltzer pointed out to me that the IJDb has many broken links due to people mis-typing URLs and missing ou the 'http://' part. A small bit of code has been written which should correct some of the more common problems.

Also, a page encouraging people to Link to the IJDb, which provides icons for visitors to download, has been created.

An article from previous BJC organisers, Consultation on BJC surplus cash, was added.

I am not terribly good at remembering to update the 'What's New' page!

The translations have continued further with Catalan and Italian added. Also a few articles have been added and I have strated work on a 'Palm Friendly' microsite.

Watch this space! - Colin E.

The IJDb translation has continued with kind volunteers translating text into French and Spanish also.

As of yesterday some of the pages and passages of text on the IJDb have been available in both English and German. As time goes by more and more of the pages will be translated and hopefully a few more languages introduced.

Watch this space!

A new page describing the globe applet which the IJDb uses for illustrating geographic data has been added. This page also include a download of the full applet source code. View the page here.

A new article, A review of the 15th British Juggling Convention, has been added to the IJDb.

Whilst catching up with the latest chat on rec.juggling I realised that siteswaps appear quite often, see for example a recent discussion about the five ball shower. I though it would be nice if you could just click on the siteswap to see an animation. So I have done just that!

If anyone can come up with a better way for searching for siteswaps in message text using the PHP command eregi_replace, please let me know! - Colin E.

A new article, An interview with Sergei Ignatov, was added to the IJDb.

Following a lengthy discussion on rec.juggling a revised rec.juggling FAQ has been created. The database implementation used for Luke Burrage's Juggling FAQ has been adopted for the rec.juggling FAQ, allowing people to post comments.

The thread mode browsing of the rec.juggling newsgroup has been accelarated. The articles are now sorted by the date of last post, so that active thread stay at the top of the page.

Continuing my mission to improve the usability of the IJDb, I have added a new feature. The side menu has an option that allows you to remove the IJDb frames, giving you a striped-down version of the page. This should be useful for anyone accessing the IJDb from a portable or palmtop - it also makes printing the documents much easier.

After reading an article, The Myth of 800x600, I decided it was about time the IJDb stopped forcing people to view pages at a fixed page width. If anyone experiences browser compatibility problems, please get in touch ASAP - webmaster@jugglindb.com.

A new article, An Interview with Jason Garfield was added to the IJDb, with kind permission from www.malabarismo.net.

Chapters 1-3 of Ben Beever's Guide to Juggling Patterns was added to the IJDb.

A new article providing hints and tips on numbers juggling has been added.

In order to make it easier for people to locate juggling clubs, the IJDb allows you to place a link from your club record to an online map. Please update you local juggling club(s) with this new information.

The 'About' section to which this page belongs has been tidied up a little bit. Not very interesting ... huh?

The rec.juggling.stastics page has had a few bugs fixed and improvements made. The traffic statistics now display the number of posts made through the IJDb.

The IJDb members section is currently being re-designed. The new interface displays far more information relevant to the current user.

The news server connection seems to be having a few problems at the moment - so I have added a server status indicator to let people know if the service is running.

Greg Phillips article, Understanding Siteswap Juggling Patterns - A guide for the perplexed has been added - and new style sheet functionality implemented.

The IJDb now has a Members section. This allows people to exchange contact details with other juggler, also the login allows people to post to rec.juggling. Luke Burrage kindly tested this feature with the first IJDb member posting, Does this work?, to which the answer was, yes! (of course).

Two new articles have been added to the IJDb, Ring juggling - it's not just the numbers and Collective wisdom on Stage Fright.

The rec.juggling browser now has a split-frame view which allows you to view the thread on one side and the messages on the other. This makes thread browsing much easier and faster.

The interactive juggling club locator has been updated allowing people to manually enter coordinates.

Due to popular demand the IJDb now has a page where all the suggestions which are currently under consideration are logged. Also development which is currently underway is recorded. This forms a to do list!

You can now browse past events in the IJDb database with links to event reviews.

Nicole Taylor has started to compile a guide to running and organising the British Juggling Convention. This should be a usefull resource for any convention organiser.

The entire IJDb has undergone a major internal overhaul. The code for the site was beginning to look very very messy - after my computer died and I had to set up the IJDb on a new computer I realised just how messy it was! It took about 3 hours - hopefully it will be worth it in the long run! - Colin E.

A new article, Juggling and Puppetry, was added to the articles section.

A new article has been added, An interview with Ben Beever.

The IJDb has started a vendors database. I would encourage eveyone to contribute by adding their local shop if it does not already appear on the list. [There are only 8 listings so far!]

The IJDb search page was beginning to look a bit sorry for itself - I had not been able to find the time to add search boxes for the new sections that had been appearing. I have now given the search page a complete overhaul, all the IJDb databases are searched from a single page, with multiple keywords and relevance ranking. Give it a try right now!

The IJDb gateway to the USENET news group rec.juggling is being developed. You can now browse by threaded discussion or by date order. Posting will follow shortly.

Up until now the IJDb has mostly concentrated on jugglers who are already at quite an advanced level. In an effort to make the site more accessible to the casual browser I have created a tutorial called "
How to Juggle". It was flippin' hard work, but to my surprise, I actually had a lot of fun writeing it. Maybe I should write a book?!
Colin E.

Unfortunately a lot of the geographic location information in the clubs database is slightly incorrect, because I have failed to convert from minutes to decimal when faced with co-ordinates of the form 45n22, 33e55. This problem has now been solved. Does anyone care to correct the 315 entries in the clubs database?
(Thanks to Jason Quinn for pointing this one out!)

Fergie's EJC Rotterdam Ramblings have been added to the IJDb.

Boppo's Numbers Juggling Notes have been added to the IJDb.

Unfortunately the NNTP server the IJDb uses for its rec.juggling gateway is still throwing a wobbley. Despite this, I have added a rec.juggling.statistics page with a few interesting graphs and thingies. (Colin E.)

Unfortunately the news server that feeds the IJDb rec.juggling gateway has been having a big tantrum. However the errors it has been throwing up have given me a great oppurtunity to learn the ins and outs of NNTP! When the server is working, all posts to rec.juggling are now stored in the IJDb's mySQL database. The archive also shows the full thread for all messages, as seen here. Although I am not sure how efficient the code is - probably needs more work.

Colin E.

The IJDb front page has been updated to include rec.juggling messages and the JuggleWiki. Also a Juggling Vendors database is being created, you can submit details of juggling or juggling related shops here.

Katje Sabin's articles on the past IJA conventions at Montreal and Primm have been added to the IJDb.

Leif Pettersons article, Madison Renegades, is added to the IJDb.

A search facility has been added to the rec.juggling browser. I have added all the articles from my news-reader cache to give the database a decent number of articles to get started on. The IJDb now archives all posts to rec.juggling so that this database will grow in the future.

A 'quick search' facility has been added to the titlebar to encourage people to use the database search facilities.

The excellent JuggleWiki, a dynamic website where anyone is allowed to make changes, has joined the IJDb. The JuggleWiki was written and is maintained by Scott Dossey.

Katje Sabin's article about this years IJA convention, Madison Diary, is added to the IJDb. Also a new paging system has been implemented so that large articles such as this one can be viewed in bite-sized chunks!

Arthur Lewbels article, A Personal Obituary for Claude Shannon, is added to the IJDb

Colin Wright's excellent Introduction to Siteswaps has been added to the IJDb.

There have been a lot of requests from visitors to this web site for the inclusion of a discussion forum. I am all for this sort of thing, however I do not like most of the web-based forums I have come across. Personally I prefer using the usenet news group rec.juggling, which has been around for many years. I have created a read-only rec.juggling gateway on the IJDb and hope to develop this further into a fully functional news reader in the future.

Colin E.

This page was created :-}

Jon's article, A few thoughts about practising is added to the IJDb.

Andy Parry shares with us the joys of sunday afternoons.

Greg Phillips review of World Juggling Day 2001, is added to the IJDb.

The first IJDb monthly announcement is posted to rec.juggling. These automated messages will inform people of juggling events in the near future, aswell as article additions to the IJDb and other changes.

Scott Seltzers new article, Goal Setting Or The Anal-Retentive Juggler, is added to the IJDb

The IJDb now has a database driven version of Luke Burrage's Juggling FAQ. The software enables people to make comments on each of the FAQ questions. Plans for an 'Ask Luke' section are being discussed.

Luke Burrage interviews himself for the IJDb.

Colin E's article on Juggling Simulators is added to the IJDb.

Scott Seltzer's new article, Juggling Creativity, is added to the IJDb

Charlie Hulls review of the Bungay Balls Up 2001, is added to the IJDb.

The IJDb is launched in the news group, rec.juggling, and is well received.

The IJDb goes live and is announced in the email group, uk_jugglers.

The domain name www.jugglingdb.com was purchased.

Luke Burrages first article, How I Learnt to Juggle has been added to the IJDb.

Scott Seltzer's article, Why Juggling Is the Hardest Job I've Ever Had, is added to the IJDb

After a number of discussions with Scott Seltzer, the IJDb development was started. The first section to be added to the site was Scott Seltzers video database.