BrainKing Knowledge Base

It is a common problem of the present time that many people think that every web page must start with "www." prefix. It is not the best approach, especially when one tries to optimize the site address and content as much as possible but the secondary option to reach the same content negatively affects the overall site rank in search engines. I have been thinking about it and compiled a short list of points:

• BrainKing.com is shorter than www.BrainKing.com and easier to type if the site is not included in the browser's bookmarks. Furthermore, if the site URL is contained in the browser's history, typing a "b" usually brings the right URL from the list of previously visited pages but "w" would bring up a much longer list of almost all other sites.


• Some people are confused by the "www." dogma and think that everything related to the internet must follow the same scheme. For example, they register their BrainKing account with www.name@domain.com which is, of course, incorrect and they will never get a single e-mail from us.


• When a site is registered to all important search engines with BrainKing.com address (instead of www.BrainKing.com), the engines increase its rank only if they found a link to the same address (BrainKing.com) on other sites. There are services which take these two domains as the same one, but not all of them.

There could be more points to this theme and it's not important to list all of them. The conclusion is clear - we always promote our site with BrainKing.com address (or BrainKing.cz, BrainKing.de, BrainKing.sk, BrainKing.es, BrainKing.hk) and if you plan to support us by linking to BrainKing from your own pages, please make the clickable link to http://BrainKing.com (or any other mentioned domain) only.

Thank you for reading.

One of the best advantages to use a CSS file to define BrainKing's look and feel is that it is very easy to change a particular element on all pages at once, by a simple modification of the corresponding row at the style file. Which is, uh, a great feature for a developer who can launch a local version of BrainKing on his computer (only me, of course), because the officially supported styles are linked to the pages with a relative URL, which means that they are always loaded from the same server as BrainKing itself.

Luckily, we are flexible to address user requests and I have just added an option to specify a URL of your own style, no matter where it is located. If you are a BrainKing skin developer and want to test your creations as quickly as possible, please go to the Settings page and find the new field External style URL just below the list of already installed styles. If you post a full URL of your style file (e.g. http://my.site.com/styles/my-brainking.css), select the Activate external style checkbox next to this field and submit the changes, you will see all BrainKing pages with your own design. Simple and effective, huh?

Please don't forget that when you activate an external style, the style switcher won't work. If you want to switch back to BrainKing internal style, uncheck the Activate external style option.

By the way, good news for all who want to use the tournament templates - the system has been improved and the templates are now stored with tournament names and descriptions as well.

As you probably know (or, at least, we have been writing about it several times), the new BrainKing look and feel system can support an unlimited number of alternative styles. It means that if you are not satisfied with the current offer of three basic options (Castle, Simple and No fonts), you can use your skills to create a new one and submit it for an approval. It is the most straightforward way how BrainKing can be customized, by users for users. Who knows your needs better than yourself?

However, we understand that not everyone is a programmer or designer and knows how to work with CSS files. It would be nice to have a web based tool, ideally built in BrainKing system, which would describe all required parameters of the BrainKing style template and allow users to experiment with the style changes on the fly. Actually, this idea seems to be very interesting to me and I have already started to think about the tool structure. We already have a system of a similar kind, the Translator Tool - when a translator submits a new entry or edits an existing one, the result is instantly available and visible.

Of course, this work won't be finished tomorrow. For those who know something about CSS and would like to contribute, I recommend to use these great Firefox extensions:

• JSView - displays a list of all external JavaScript and CSS which are loaded by the current page, a good way to recognize the most recent version of BrainKing style.


• Web Developer - an excellent tool to highlight various aspects and parameters of the current page's DOM properties and pinpoint any CSS related problems.


• Firebug - a neat add-on which allows to modify any CSS properties on the fly - a must have for all CSS designers.

Since people keep asking how they can be involved in the BrainKing development and improvement process, I think I will create a special category for the related blog entries soon.

We think that there is no BrainKing problem which could not be solved, easily or hardly. The most usual source of a problem is the problem report itself because many people tend to tell us only that something is wrong and then we have a hard time to find out what exactly is the report about. I think it cannot hurt to summarize it again:

• If there is a problem with a game, give us the game ID. It can be found below the game board.
• If there is a problem with a user account, give us the user ID. It can be found on the Profile page.
• If there is a problem with a tournament or team match, give us the tournament/match URL. Simply copy and paste the address from the location bar of your browser. I know it is not the best solution, I will add this kind of the ID information to the corresponding pages soon.
• Always add information about the browser you use. It is very important.

And enjoy the new smileys: