The time has come for review submissions.  The guidlines are listed in the document below so fire up that word processor and show everyone your writing chops.

Review Standards for Poker Tech Reviews

Expectation

Your expected to have fun.  If their is a program you are passionate about, good or bad, then write it up.  Inject your passion into your writing and the readers will get a better understanding of the product.  Fame and glory can be yours  as your name and a link to your website will be posted with every published review.  If you find that you have a knack for review writing and your reviews are informative and entertaining, then we just may hire you to write for us on a regular basis.

Rating

The ratings standard for all reviews will be based on a 4 point system.  Each point within the system should represent the reviewers feelings for the product as follows:

1. Below Average
2. Average
3. Above Average
4. Excellent

Using the above scoring system the reviewer must supply a rating for each of the following individual features:

• User Interface
• Feature Set
• Usability

The overall rating for the product will be determined via an average of the three assigned scores.  (ie. A program is given the following scores: User Interface=2  Feature Set=4  Usability=1  Then the program receives an overall score of 2)

Structure

Review should open with a paragraph devoted to the programs function.  Following this the review will be broken down into three distinct sections.  Each of the three sections will be devoted to one of the rated features listed above.  The review should close with a summary where the reviewers final thoughts of the overall program are discussed.
You are encouraged to inject your personal writing style and voice into the review.  The structure is provided as a guideline so that the sites visitors will have a familiar structure while browsing the reviews.

Screenshots

Along with the review a gallery of screenshots will be included.  To facilitate this we ask that you provide at least 4-5 screenshots depicting various operating modes of the program.  If you reference a particular screenshot during the review, you should reference the screenshot by file name so it can be properly formatted when published.

Submission

The review should be submitted in plain text format to submissions@pokertechreviews.com. Upon submission the review will go through an editorial process.  To facilitate this process the review should contain proper grammar, punctuation, and paragraph structure.  Whether a review is accepted for publishing or not the reviewer will be contacted.  If the review is considered in need of follow up, the reviewer will be contacted and the editorial notes forwarded.

I wanted a way to keep track of how much time I spent on the computer working on different things. To this end I began to use a program called Wakoopa. This is a cool program that tracks what programs your using and for what times. I really liked the program but it wasn’t playing well with a program I like even more called Digsby. Wakoopa kept crashing on me and it appears that the problem is with my laptop somewhere as no one else seems to have the same issues I do.

Not really wanting to take the time to troubleshoot I switched to another tracking program called Rescue Time. I like this program even better because instead of just reporting that I’m using “firefox”, it reports what web pages I’m actually visiting. When you spend as much time online as I do this is a huge added benefit.

All of this is just way to complain about how much time I lost this last week because my job got in the way of my site work. I went from being able to spend 14 hours on site development two weeks ago to only 4 hours last week. Fortunately it looks like I’ll be able to ramp up a bit more time this week which should put us into the final stages of development.

As the time to launch draws nearer my excitement is building. It’s about time to start collecting reviews so be on the look out for an announcement later this week.

After checking the analytics for my personal poker blog I discovered something I wasn’t expecting.  The visitors to my site are split fairly evenly between using Firefox and Internet Explorer as their web browser.  That’s a step in the right direction as Firefox should be the standard browser for everyone as far as I’m concerned.  The troubling information was that among those using Internet Explorer exactly half were using version 6 instead of version 7.

It’s possible to style a site for both Firefox and IE7 without too much difficulty.  I was really hoping I could get away with not styling for IE6 separately for Poker Tech Reviews.  Sadly that does not appear to be the case.  This means a little extra work I wasn’t counting on so everyone do me a favor and quit using IE6.  Ok, seriously go download Firefox and make every web developers job a whole lot easier.

I took a bit of a break from working on the main site yesterday and put up a new “coming soon” page over at Poker Tech Reviews.   The countdown page was really rather “blah” so I wanted to present a better face to the public.  Check it out and come back to let me know what you think.

With a design in place it’s time to start coding.  This is the stage I’ve been looking forward to the most and yet also had the most trepidation about.  I’ve decided to go ahead and use Wordpress for the full site.  It has much of the functionality we want built in already and with a few tweaks it should fit the bill.  My concern is that I’ll just about be done with the whole thing and then find some key functionality, I didn’t envision needing, being completely unsupported and having to start over on a different platform.

That’s really just a reflection of this whole process.  New ideas and challenges seem to be popping up and it all comes down to just sticking with the core principles and moving forward.  I’ve been reading a lot lately about how so many startups are crushed under their own weight as they keep adding features and never finishing a product worth launching.  I keep coming up with expansion ideas myself but I’ve decided to push them down onto a list of future features.  We will have some new features and functionality to add to the site after launch so it will continue to grow after take off.

For now it’s time to buckle down and spend some quality time buried in CSS, PHP, and XHTML.

Here are some choices for banners on the PTR site. Feedback would be appreciated.

(click on images for full size)

As you can see from Tom’s post below, we have a logo.

Tom is working on designing the site, I’m drumming up interest and looking into advertising. OpenX is looks like something I’d like to try, but I’m not sure how it works exactly. I’ll be taking a longer look at it tonight.

Also, I’m going to create a banner logo for others to post in their blogs to help us advertise the launch. We hope all of our blogger friends will pump it occasionally for us.

We are still looking for investors, advertisers, etc. If you are interested, please let us know!

Until then, make mine PTR!

As a non artistic person I’m finding the process of site design to be a challenge.  The first draft of the landing page was completed on Saturday, then I summarily rejected it.  It was good for a first effort but it looked too web 1.0 and not enough web 2.0.

In other news I think we’ve nailed down our logo for Poker Tech Reviews.  That’s it there at the top of the post.  We have in red and black.  What do you think?

You may want to note the countdown clock at the right. That represents how many days there are until “The Launch”.

Tom worked very hard to make that. It looks great, Tom!

Judge Ito Sidebar: He might sell give you the code for that, if you are interested.