The Advent Calendar Challenge

There two types of players that exist (passive and OMGILOVEIT, in case you are wondering) in the Advent Calendar Challenge and I am asked regularly by players of both types why I haven’t written a mobile app for it yet. “Think of the benefits”, they’ll both say, and – well – they are right. Something that formats correctly on a mobile device, that remembers your logins, that sends a notification whenever you score or whenever anyone scores – it’d be great.

It’s not going to happen.

For a start, the number of hours experience I have with app development is equal to the number of hours I have spent in space. Granted – I have coded a thing or two in a variety of programming languages over the years (I once was employed doing something vaguely similar) and I’ll probably be able to pick things up, in a rudimentary way at least. But look back at the previous post – less than 50 people play this game every year. There will be a substantial phone-type split within those. I’d have to code at least two apps for 50 people to use 24 days a year. It would be a massive waste of time, even though it would be great. Sorry, it’s just not going to happen.

A better functioning mobile site is a more reasonable expectation and one on which I plan to deliver – just as soon as the long promised site overhaul takes place. I’ve been promising that since 2010 without any progress but it’s definitely on the cards, hopefully in time for next year. It’s just hard to motivate myself to overhaul a Christmas website when it isn’t the season, but it has to be done then as during the season I very much need the site…

But back to the notifications thing. Many cite the lack of such a thing as a reason for their lack of success – they set their guess at the start and never remember to come back. An automatic email is often requested as if it’d be the easiest thing for me to implement (it may well be) but I can offer a suite of solutions, as long as you are prepared to think outside the box a little 🙂

The easiest way I can think of, and one I use myself, is Twitter. If you follow @AdventCC, you will find score, window opening, blog post and ad-hoc updates are tweeted automatically every day (I stripped out guess change updates this year for boring behind the scenes reasons), and within twitter you have the option to turn on ‘Notifications’ on an account-by-account basis. If you enable these for @AdventCC you will get a push notification and/or (if you have set it up) an SMS every time something happens. There might be an equivalent function within Facebook but as I don’t use it I cannot advise. If email is more your thing, give ifttt.com a look – this website (literally if-this-then-that) will perform certain actions when specified triggers occur. Armed with the ACC twitter or RSS feed I’m sure you’ll be able to find a service that will send you an email in there.

So nothing native within the competition website itself, but if you try hard enough there is always a way. Enjoy your notifications however you want them, if you want them – and not a minute wasted by me 🙂

Welcome to the optimistically titled “more depth” section of the Advent Calendar Challenge website. I’ve been hoping to add more content (and/or redesign the whole website) for ages now and I’ve come to the conclusion that a “blog” of sorts is how is to get things moving. I will aim to post every couple of days with an article that either examines statsitics, details an aspect of the history of the competition or explains what on earth is going on. Lets see how long it lasts!

As it’s day 1, I am minded to cast my eye over player numbers over time. I’m told this should be a line graph but it took me ages to get the charts script working as a stacked bar chart and so that it remains!

After a rapid early growth, the graph shows a steady decline is setting in – only once (2012, perhaps an Olympics hangover? Probably not…) have the player numbers topped 50. This year, at the time of writing, 44 players are signed up, comprised of 40 returning players and 4 new players. New players, by the way, are a statistic that varies apparently randomly:

I am not concerned by the wane in player numbers, as yet. Firstly, as it goes it isn’t a significant one. The rules of the competition almost arbitrarily set the minimum number of players as 12, which we are nowhere near (I can’t remember exactly, but I am fairly sure I originally chose 12 as that was the number of players who survived* the first edition, and so that became the benchmark). Secondly I am happy to keep the competition to people I know and their trusted friends, and of that field only the subset who want to play – the overall number might shrink but overall, there’s still a good few people who want to play. Frankly, I won’t be concerned until we only get 11 players one year…

The number of players each year graph is new and now updating live on the statistics page. See, this blog has done some good already 🙂

* thirteen played, but one was disqualified

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