Hi,
Welcome to the 2nd sudoku.com.au newsletter :)
So, what has been happening?
Photo Gallery
The biggest change this month has been the addition of photo galleries for all members. Now, rather than go through Flickr, you can load photos directly up to sudoku.com.au and people who visit your personal page can see them. To manage your photo gallery, just click the 'Update Details' link, and then 'Manage Photos' (or you can upload new photos with the 'Upload Photos' link.
The smaller the size of your photos, the quicker it is to load them onto sudoku.com.au (and the quicker people can view them). To make it easy to shrink your photos, I have written a small application which can resize all the photos in a directory in one go.
http://gathadams.com/2007/04/16/batch-image-processing
The photo gallery still has plenty of work to go, so feel free to let me know of any improvements that can be made at this stage.
Invite a friend
It is now easier to invite your friends to come and check out sudoku.com.au. Just click 'Update Details' and there is now an 'Invite a Friend' button. So what are you waiting for? :)
Blank Grids
There has long been a page where you can get 4 blank grids per page - but I recently added 1 big grid as another option. CHeck it out here:
http://www.sudoku.com.au/blankgrids.aspx
or choose 'Blank Grids' from the main menu.
Signing out and Signing in (or 'what happened to my membership?')
When you join up to sudoku.com.au as a member you choose a username, from and a password. When you sign into the site a small cookie is stored on your computer indicating that you are a member, and this cookie will automatically sign you in if you leave and come back a few days later. This is quite helpful, otherwise you have to sign in using the username/from/password every time you visited.
Occasionally, this cookie can be deleted or corrupted which means that when you visit the site expecting to be still logged in - you aren't. You can check if you are logged in by looking at the top left of the page, just underneath the 'Sudoku Puzzles' heading. If you see 'Sign In' and 'Join', then you are not logged in and you can click the 'Sign In' link to fix this. Also, when you are not logged in, when you post a comment your 'Name' and 'From' fields will not be automatically filled in.
When you sign in, as well as providing your Name, From and Password, there is a tickbox which says 'Remember Me'. If you don't want the auto-login cookie set on your computer (possibly because you share a computer with other people who also visit sudoku.com.au or you are logging in from an internet cafe) then leave it unticked.
Talk to you all next month!
Cheers,
Gath