Bill's Poker Blog » Tech Ramblings

Changes Afoot At Bill’s Poker Blog

Bill Rini — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 17:16:05 +0000

If you’ve stopped by Bill’s Poker Blog over the last couple of days you’ll notice that I’ve updated the design a bit. It’s still a work in progress that will probably last awhile but I’m rolling it out in little stages rather than save everything up for a huge re-launch sort of thing.

One of the biggest changes is that I’ve aggregated all of the email subscriptions from various poker-related websites I run into one mailing list. That means that if you signed up for email updates on Bill’s Poker Blog, Poker Job Search, RakebackReport, or PokerFilter then you’re on the new mega-list.

One of the reasons for bringing all of the mailing lists together is that I’m consolidating websites. There will still be a Poker Job Search, RakebackReport, and PokerFilter but I’m trying to tie the sites more closely together and share content between the sites since the topic matter overlaps.

Eventually, I hope to offer exclusive content via the email updates that won’t appear on the blog. Bits and bobs that are too big for a Twitter update but not quite enough a regular blog post.

Another reason for consolidating email updates is because there was a large amount of overlap between the email update lists from all of the sites. So for those people, instead of subscribing to multiple email update lists they can get all of the same information in one email.

RSS subscriptions for each individual list will continue to exist and if you just want updates from a single site without the rest, you can subscribe via RSS and get just those updates.

If you do opt for the RSS option, please just click the “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the update email and you’ll be removed from the email list.

You can find the individual RSS feeds here:

Bill’s Poker Blog RSS Feed
Poker Job Search RSS Feed
RakebackReport RSS Feed
PokerFilter RSS Feed

If you get a chance, give me some feedback on the new website (good or bad). Like I said, it’s still a work in progress so things will keep changing as I take in feedback.

Installing GeoIP And Geo Target Your Affiliate Ads

Bill Rini — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 07:07:55 +0000

I just wanted to do a quick one for affiliates out there that might be looking at how to geo target their affiliate ads now that US players can’t play on many of the sites they promote. I’ve been using similar code on my Thailand Friends website to keep people from certain countries from registering and spamming the forums.

First off, I’m assuming you have your own server and that it is running some variant of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP and understand at least a little bit of PHP programming.

First off, get yourself GeoIP C API

wget http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/api/c/GeoIP.tar.gz tar -xzvf GeoIP.tar.gz cd GeoIP-1.4.7 ./configure make make check make install

Next get the PHP PECL extension

wget http://pecl.php.net/get/geoip tar -xzvf geoip cd geoip-1.0.7 phpize ./configure make make check make install

Change your php.ini and update (normally located at /etc/php.ini)

Add the following line:

extension=geoip.so

Download Geo Lite City database

wget -N -q http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCity.dat.gz gunzip GeoLiteCity.dat.gz mv GeoLiteCity.dat /usr/local/share/GeoIP/GeoIPCity.dat

No restart your Apache webserver. On RedHat Linux the command is:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd restart

Now create a test file. I’ll call mine geoiptest.php

Insert the following code between your php tags (sorry, for some reason it keeps filtering out the open and close php tags.

print_r(geoip_record_by_name('101.108.22.245'));

Run that either via a web browser or from the command line (i.e. php geoiptest.php). You should get something that looks like this:

# php geoiptest.php Array ( [continent_code] => AS [country_code] => TH [country_code3] => THA [country_name] => Thailand [region] => 40 [city] => Bangkok [postal_code] => [latitude] => 13.75 [longitude] => 100.51670074463 [dma_code] => 0 [area_code] => 0 )

As you can see, you now have access to the continent, two and three country codes, the country name, and the city. There’s actually more there but I tend to focus on these. I guess in some areas you could target down to the zip/postal code but I don’t have any need to get to that level.

So, let’s look at how you can use that.

$myip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']; $mygeo = (geoip_record_by_name($myip)); if($mygeo['country_code3'] == "USA") { SHOW USA AD } else { SHOW INTERNATIONAL AD }

The $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] gives you the IP address of the person visiting the page. You take that and feed that to the geoip_record_by_name function which returns an array which you can reference using $mygeo.

From there you just need to figure out the IF/ELSE combination you need. For instance, if you are targeting France you would nest another IF statement in there so you show your .fr ads to your French traffic.

For a complete list of country codes you can check out this site. Or you can google for 3 letter country codes.

WordPress Contributor Role Vulnerability

Bill Rini — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 07:38:38 +0000

Since a lot of poker blogs out there are powered by WordPress I thought I would help get the word out about a vulnerability that exists if you allow users to register on your site. On another (not poker related) blog I run I’ve been getting occasional posts in Polish. Which is odd because when I look at the poster he is listed as having “Contributor” permissions. That means he should be able to write posts but they can’t go live to the world unless they’ve been approved by me. How are they ending up on the website without my ever approving them? I don’t know but in investigating the issue I’ve run across a few other sites that have run into the same issue, including the same person (klamka13303) doing the posting. Their research seems to indicate that over 300,000 blogs have been hit by this guy already.

If you are running WordPress you should take a moment and log into your admin control panel. From there go to Settings>>General. You will see the following options:

The safest route seems to be to disallow registration. If you’re the only person who posts on your blog you probably don’t need people to register anyway so it shouldn’t be too big of a deal. If you need to have people register on your site I guess your second option would be to set the default New User Default Role to “Subscriber” rather than Contributor. I’m not sure if that stops the exploit but in theory they wouldn’t even be able to create or save a post. Then again, they’re not supposed to be able to publish their own posts as a Contributor which is why just disabling user registration seems like the most prudent option if you can do it.

Another Link Exchange Winner

Bill Rini — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 18:25:59 +0000

You would think that in a competitive market space that people would actually get better at what they do. Instead they just stay the same level of FAIL.

Here’s an email I got earlier today.

Hello there, Team/Owner of billrini.com!
My name is Stanley and I deal with promotion for my casino-related website. I am quite open to link to your site, though I would appreciate a link back.
This can be interesting because :
We could share some great content and our visitors could benefit a lot.
On the other hand,you might know Google ranks websites according to quality of their backlink structures. The more number of relevant links point to your website the higher position in Google SERP it takes.
I found billrini.com in Google SERP. It’s really well-done! You have made a great job.
I myself own several websites which I promote permanently. They have fair backlink profiles, few OBL’s and rank quite well in SERP too. But what is more important – their content is unique.
This could be really cool,please contact me and we’ll figure something out.

Good Luck with your website!
Best regards,

Stanley Chamberlain.

Mascoutah, Illinois 62258

I would like to point out a few things: It’s not a spam letter; It’s a real offer of webmaster. But if you would not like me to mail you again,just click

http://xxxx[deleted]

Okay, so let’s break down what’s wrong with this.

Hello there, Team/Owner of billrini.com!

Again, the same complaint I have about every one of these spam link exchange requests, whether or not anybody else agrees with me, I tend to think of myself as an important enough that you could take the time to address me by my name, Bill. It’s right there in the name of the domain and in the name of the site (Bill’s Poker Blog)!!!

I am quite open to link to your site, though I would appreciate a link back.

A link back to what? You didn’t provide one single link back to your site AND you sent the email from a GMail account. I have no freakin’ clue who you even are.

I found billrini.com in Google SERP. It’s really well-done! You have made a great job.

Exactly, so why would I even want to exchange links with you? You haven’t really laid out what the benefit is to me. You’ve, so far, insulted me by not addressing me by name, haven’t given me a chance to evaluate the quality of the link I’m going to get back, and made several gramatical errors in one sentence.

I myself own several websites which I promote permanently. They have fair backlink profiles, few OBL’s and rank quite well in SERP too. But what is more important – their content is unique.

What does promoting a site “permanently” even mean? And if you had to explain to me how Google ranks backlinks, why would you think I would understand a backlink profile or OBL? And I’m not really sure you’re doing a great sales job saying that you have “few OBL’s” because if you were you are telling me that you have few organic back links and that nobody voluntarily wants to link to you.

This could be really cool,please contact me and we’ll figure something out.

Cool for who? Stanley the anonymous, grammatically challenged, and overly optimistic guy from Mascoutah, Illinois or for me? I’m not sure you know this Stanley but a sales pitch should include at least a few benefits for the person you’re pitching. Maybe you could tell me how your original content is so kick-ass that I should be thanking you for the privilege of linking to it. Maybe you tell me that golden coins will shoot out of my butt if I link to you. I don’t know. But, you’ve certainly done a piss-poor job of selling me on a reason why I would want to or should link back to you . . . including the fact you haven’t provided a link even if I wanted to link to you.

Stanley, you know what would be really, really cool? You give me $100,000 right now.

See how that works? Without stating the benefit to you, that pitch sort of sucks, doesn’t it? If I said, send me $100,000 and I will give you the deed to the Playboy Mansion then we have a really cool deal. But your pitch seems to be heavily stacked in your favor with few benefits for me.

But the part that had me on the floor laughing was this:

I would like to point out a few things: It’s not a spam letter; It’s a real offer of webmaster. But if you would not like me to mail you again,just click

http://xxxx[deleted]

That just takes the cake. It’s not SPAM but I’ll tell you how to unsubscribe from a list that you didn’t ask to be on. Why would I have to indicate to you that I don’t want future emails from you if I never contacted you in the first place and never indicated any desire to have any sort of business relationship with you?

In a close second place are people who email (link related or not) completely unsolicited offers and then send a pissy followup that I didn’t reply to their original completely unsolicited email. The best of the best though are the ones who include a line like “Let me know if you’re interested” and then they follow up and get edgy about the fact that they haven’t heard back from you. You told me to contact you if I was interested. I didn’t contact you. What the hell do you think that means?

Is this the really what is out there in the online gambling affiliate world?

Strange Spam

Bill Rini — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 08:09:34 +0000

I don’t know why but I’ve been getting a lot of spam both via email and in the comments that are odd in that they seem to have no purpose. Here’s one I received today.

Oil hovers below $78 after US crude supplies jump Predicting an end to Roe v. Wade On the contrary, the contractors deal as they see fit, with those whom they employ, or of whom they purchase.I speak of what is in proof. A contractor came to Washington last winter, and received a draft of $180,000 on a specie-paying bank in New York. This he sold at ten per cent premium, and with the avails purchased funds in the West, with which he paid the producer, the farmer, the laborer. This is the operation of specie payments. It gives to the government hard money, to the rich contractor hard money; but to the producer and the laborer it gives paper, and bad paper only. And yet this system is recommended as specially favoring the poor man, rather than the rich, and credit is claimed for this administration as the poor mans friend. Let us look a little more nearly at this matter, and see whom, in truth, it does favor. Who are the rich in this country? There is very little hereditary wealth among us; and large capitalists are not numerous. Wishing some information that he had not obtained in relation to a surrender of the western posts by the British, he addressed a note to the secretary of state, asking permission to make that particular examination; to which he received the following answer:—- Thomas Jefferson presents his respectful compliments to Colonel Burr, and is sorry to inform him it has been concluded to be improper to communicate the correspondence of existing ministers.He hopes this will, with Colonel Burr, be his sufficient apology. In April, 1792, there was an election for governor of the State of New-York. By some it was supposed that Governor Clinton would decline being again considered a candidate. It was known that John Jay would be the candidate of the federal party. At that period Colonel Burr had warm personal friends in both parties, who were urging his pretensions. Among the most ardent was Judge Yates. In the latter part of February, 1792, he authorized his friends to state that he declined a nomination. The criminal is always a sophist; and finds in his own reason a special pleader to twist laws human and divine into a sanction of his crime.The rogue is so much in the habit of cheating, that he packs the cards even when playing at Patience with himself. –STEPHEN MONTAGUE. The only two acquaintances in this populous city whom Glendower possessed who were aware that in a former time he had known a better fortune were Wolfe and a person of far higher worldly estimation, of the name of Crauford. With the former the student had become acquainted by the favour of chance, which had for a short time made them lodgers in the same house.

So what exactly is the point of it? There are no links or any other sales pitch. It’s just gibberish. Why would someone send that?

iPhone Goodness on Bill’s Poker Blog

Bill Rini — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 03:57:54 +0000

I just installed a WordPress plugin called WPtouch will should make viewing Bill’s Poker Blog on your iPhone a much better experience. If that previous sentence made no sense to you . . . allow me to explain.

Bill’s Poker Blog uses WordPress to manage the website. This new plugin, WPtouch reformats Bill’s Poker Blog in an iPhone/iPod Touch friendly way that should make the site much more enjoyable and easy to use for iPhone/iPod Touch users.

A picture is worth a thousands words . . .

This is what the site normally looks like using the iPhone.

It’s not really readable as-is. You have to zoom in and then you have to get the sizing just right or you’ll need to scroll left and right to be able to read it.

But with WPtouch what you’ll see looks more like this.

All of the content is presented in a format that iPhone users can easily read without zooming in. If you want to read one of the stories you just click on the title and WPtouch reformats the story so you can easily read it on the iPhone too.

You can read and leave comments just like you can normally so you get 100% of the functionality but targeted towards the iPhone.

So, my fellow iPhone users, rejoice.

Online Poker and Data Mining

Bill Rini — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 06:08:12 +0000

Paul Nobles from Bluff takes a rather interesting look at the whole data mining brouhaha that’s been going on of late. I started to leave a comment on the Pokerati site but my response started to get a little unruly in terms of length so I thought I would just direct you there to read the original and then give some of my thoughts on the topic here.

First off, I think Paul hits the nail on the head. His analysis of the situation is very good. The reason I chose to respond is that I think there are some additional lines of thought that are worth exploring as well.

Okay, you read my blog, which means you’re probably too lazy to read the entire post over at Pokerati so I’ll summarize Paul’s post by saying:

TableRatings and similar companies are in violation of the T&C’s at many poker rooms by collecting table data and sometimes even hand histories. And although the poker sites say they are against it they haven’t done much to stop it (with the exception of Cake).

First off, having seen this issue via the operator’s perspective, it’s really a matter of priorities and whether or not you want to draw attention to the problem. In many ways it is similar to the problem rooms have with poker bots.

All rooms agree that bots are bad for business but only insomuch as they are bad if people are aware of them. If your average players aren’t aware of poker bots you don’t want to be doing too much to draw attention to the fact that there was a problem to begin with.

This is also one of the reasons so few poker rooms took to sticking the knife into UltimateBet or Absolute during their cheating scandals. The vast, vast majority of players don’t read 2+2, PokerNews, or much other poker media other than poker television programming and such. Crowing that your site can be trusted while UltimateBet and Absolute cannot makes people aware of a problem that they might never had even suspected existed.

So, the average player out there doesn’t even know these data mining companies exist. Should you make too big of a deal about it and bring attention to something that you might not be able to prevent anyway? That’s the million dollar question.

Stuff like this will always be a game of cat and mouse as long as there is money to be made. As soon as any of the rooms makes a change the data collectors will counter. The only thing you can really do is make it too expensive for them to keep up and thus remove the financial motivation to offer such a service.

But, how big of a priority is this? How many customers does TableRatings actually have? How much is it really impacting the game? How noticeable is it to the average player? Will addressing the problem bring unwanted publicity that is more harmful than the actual problem?

These are the kinds of questions card rooms will ask themselves before invest resources in fixing the problem. Believe it or not, despite the massive amounts of money being made by online poker sites, most are woefully understaffed. They only have the ability to focus on a certain number of priorities and where an issue like this ranks for them will be a function of a combination of the personal philosophy of the decision maker and business realities.

Nobles does mention a possible solution of allowing players to change their screen names which is an idea that I know has been kicked around inside the online poker industry for years. The obvious argument against is that your high-raking players will move onto a site where they can maintain hand histories on other players.

Personally, I support frequent screen name changes. Lee Jones, formerly of PokerStars fame and now card room manager at Cake Poker (who, does allow screen name changes) came out in favor of this some time ago, if I’m remembering correctly.

The major problem with this solution though is that it would be very hard for most existing rooms to shoehorn into their existing software. First they have to build the ability in and then they have to rewrite portions of all of the backend tools. That’s actually not as simple as it sounds (if it did sound simple).

Many rooms don’t officially allow name changes as part of their policy but under extreme circumstances will permit a name change. I would guess that at a minimum they have a manual process in place to do it but they either don’t want to open it up to the public for fear of the repercussions or it’s not automated enough or reliable enough to do on any sort of massive scale (perhaps even as crude as opening up a second account and importing all the data and balances over).

There’s also the issue that this does make certain types of fraud easier to commit. Nobles downplays this risk but I think he underestimates the potential based on the argument others are making. Yes, the problems at Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker were internal issues but that does not mean that every poker room has state of the art collusion or fraud detection. UB and Absolute might have been the absolute (no pun intended) worst but look at what it took to catch those players who were OBVIOUSLY cheating.

Additionally, now you’re going to have players who say that they are absolutely positive that Player A is Player B because of some convoluted association they’ve connected together and thus based on their combined stats are cheaters. Poker rooms will end up facing regular accusations of fraud going on on their sites and since poker rooms tend to not release much in the way of details into their investigations it gives the tin-foil hat wearing crowd more ammunition to proclaim that online poker is rigged.

So again, you end up right back at the question of the priority of addressing the issue. Is it worth the costs? Does it create more problems than it solves? Is the company willing to skip features in the next release or two in order to implement a solution?

Each room will make their decision on a case by case basis but up until the last few weeks I’ve only ever heard it talked about as a philosophical debate within the industry. It’ll take a lot more pressure from players before this works its way into the spotlight.

photocred to NIOSH

The Online Poker Industry’s Love Hate Relationship With Rakeback

Bill Rini — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 12:01:31 +0000

Exclusive Report
Learn how you could make a living playing poker.

There’s probably no single topic that divides the online poker industry more than rakeback [what is rakeback?]. Seriously, in many companies rakeback is a dirty word. At one company I know it’s jokingly referred to as “The Unmentionable” by the poker staff because to even say the word rakeback generates a negative Pavlovian response within the organization.

Other sites publicly denounce rakeback but then offer promotions and/or bonuses that essentially amount to rakeback. They might call it value, or commission, or fee but it’s still rewarding players for generating rake.

And lastly you have the rooms that use rakeback aggressively to acquire and retain players. For them it’s a tool they use in order to compete against better-funded poker rooms that can buy up all the media in a market and shut them out of traditional marketing channels.

The affiliates are also in a similar battle over rakeback. Traditional affiliates detest rakeback. They spend a lot of money creating valuable content that they might not otherwise be able to produce if they had to give the lion’s share of their affiliate fees back to the players.

On the other end of the spectrum you have the rakeback affiliates who don’t mind working on slim margins because they can still make money on the sheer volume of players. Also most rakeback affiliates don’t create expensive content (tournament coverage, actual journalists, etc) so they operate with far less overhead than the traditional affiliates.

Who are we forgetting here? Oh yes, the players. The players are a little less divided. Either they know about rakeback and love it or they have no idea what it is and probably don’t even care.

Can’t we all just get along?

In reality, almost everyone has a valid argument. The problem is that the online poker industry hasn’t really grasped the fact that one size doesn’t fit all.

A rakeback affiliate and a traditional affiliate provide two completely different types of functions. A large poker news site is likely to have tons of content that rates highly in search engines and will attract newer players when they search for certain keywords or follow a link sent to them by a friend. Yes, hardcore poker players also use their content but most don’t click on the affiliate links.

But the rakeback affiliate is also providing a function. The rakeback affiliate is catering to a more sophisticated poker player. The rakeback affiliate aggregates valuable (higher raking) players and provides them with customer support, specialized promotions (rake races, etc), and serves as a single interface for the poker room.

So on one side you have the traditional affiliate who can send a large volume of players but the traditional affiliate normally doesn’t even know who they are nor do they tend to have any sort of ongoing relationship with them. On the other side you have the rakeback affiliate who sends fewer players but knows all of the players they send (to the degree that they have their contact info and pay them every month) and maintain an ongoing relationship with them.

Unfortunately, most poker rooms offer only one model of compensation. Send us players and we give you a cut of the rake.

And the poker rooms are stuck in the middle. They don’t want to anger their traditional affiliates by condoning rakeback but they don’t want to lose their best customers to competitors that do allow it.

And because there is no simple answer, poker rooms either take a hostile stance, shamelessly offer rakeback to anybody who asks, or try a middle ground that ends up being so convoluted that even David Sklansky can’t work out the math of how their system works.

So what’s the answer?

I’m not sure I have an answer. I have some thoughts but not necessarily an answer that will work across the board. It’s a difficult problem because you have to raise the switching cost for the players while still keeping the affiliates happy.

One of the other major problems comes out of the fact that most of the existing affiliate models originated from a different era and are outdated in today’s current landscape. The affiliate model was devised at a time when the US was essentially the only market, rakeback was unheard of, the poker player community was rather immature and unorganized, and most sites didn’t have the capital to conduct large media campaigns.

All of those parameters have changed since the inception of affiliate programs but the poker rooms have yet to evolve. If anything they find themselves being in the uncomfortable position of providing a commodity service.

With online poker rooms receiving anywhere from 20% – 50% of their new sign-ups from affiliates and the old 80/20 rule whereby a small percentage of affiliates send the majority of the traffic, the online poker sites really don’t have the leverage to change things on their own.

But by the same token, the traditional affiliates are going to have to come to grips with the fact that a player who they sent to XYZ Poker two years ago when he was a newbie to poker who is now 18 tabling small stakes games and raking $15,000 a month wants some of that rake back. If the affiliate doesn’t cut him a rakeback deal then he’ll quit playing on the site and go to one where a rakeback affiliate will give him a deal. So they can either have 5% of $15,000 or 100% of $0.

To be fair, many affiliates have seen the writing on the wall and are making just such a change to their business model. Many of the coaching sites and educational sites require that you link up your account with them with your account on the poker room so they can track your progress and pay you out bonuses and such. Some of those sites have either already implemented or have discussed offering incremental rakeback whereby players start off with zero rakeback and either as a function of time or MGR are offered a higher and higher percentage.

That does seem to be the model that makes the most sense as both an affiliate and the poker room spend most of their money trying to acquire players. Once the player is in the door the longer they remain a customer the more profitable they become.

So where does that leave blogs, news sites, and everybody else who doesn’t have a one on one relationship with their players?

Well, as I mentioned, the 80/20 (probably more like 90/10 in most cases) rule is in effect when it comes to affiliates. The overwhelming majority of affiliates simply don’t send enough players. From a business perspective it would make sense if they ended MGR deals for any affiliate not generating X number of signups per month and then putting in some stringent rules that took any incentives out of trying to scam the room on the CPA deals.

As for the upper 10% or 20%, I think the poker rooms should just buy them out. I know that sounds crazy but over the long run it would likely be cheaper than paying them out as affiliates. I mean, listen, I see a lot of these affiliates around Gibraltar, Malta, and at conferences and many of them are doing quite well. If there’s that much money in the value chain then as long as you can buy the company for a reasonable price then it’s a good investment.

Another alternative would be for the poker rooms to force a rakeback scheme on the traditional affiliates either by policy or via offering so many bonuses that went against MGR that the net effect was the same for the player and the affiliate.

I know some larger affiliates who read that might gasp a bit but as rakeback becomes more widespread within the poker world the players are going to force their hand eventually anyway. When player attrition rates (churn) start increasing most affiliates are going to have to make a choice between making up for that by pumping more new customers through the door or conceding that they have to split some of the profits with the players.

Well, technically, there’s another option which is for the affiliates to hit the poker rooms up for a larger percentage to compensate them for the higher churn rates but sooner or later they’ll reach a point where the poker rooms can’t pay them a large enough percentage to compensate them for the churn losses. Plus there’s the fact that the poker room will likely take note of the lifetime value of the players being sent and put their own throttle on how much they are willing to pay for similar caliber players.

Like I said earlier, there aren’t any easy answers. The industry is maturing and like it or not rakeback will likely be here with us for awhile. Love it or hate it players are going to increasingly demand rakeback. It should be interesting to see how the industry responds.

photocred to adam*b

Rake Races on Cake and Full Tilt Poker

Bill Rini — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 12:23:21 +0000

If you have some time on your hands next week you might want to check out these rake races on Cake Poker and Full Tilt:

FullTilt Rake Race: Apr 21 – 30, $7000 Prize Pool 50 Places Paid!

Cake Poker $21,000 in cash prizes: Apr 21 – 30, $6000 Prize Pool 50 Placed Paid!

Only catch is that these are for new or existing Rakeback Report players. But if you don’t already have a rakeback account at either site . . . why not? Look for both rake races under “Races and Rolls“

Some Upgrades to Bill’s Poker Blog

Bill Rini — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 01:55:53 +0000

If you’re reading this via RSS or email delivery pop on over to the website and check out the redesign. Actually, it’s a bit more than a redesign as I also changed hosting providers and a ton of other things.

As you may note, I went with a professionally designed theme (i.e. it cost money) called Thesis. I know that there are a ton of free themes out there and I could have certainly coded my own should I had the time and inclination but for $164 (for the multiple blog option – only $87 for the single blog version) I got a well thought out and very easy to administrate theme. From a time vs. cost perspective, it was an easy choice as even the free themes often require a lot of customization and if you want two columns instead of three then you’re in the code mucking around anyway. And then if WordPress releases an update that breaks the theme you can’t just download the newest version of the theme and install it because you have to go back in and put all of your hacks into the new theme.

Thesis operates on a completely different philosophy. You can configure the hell out of it via the control panel. You can change it from a 2 to 3 column layout with a click of a button. You can change column widths, add widgets, and make all sorts of changes all without touching a line of code.

Better yet, when you do touch code you don’t touch the theme code. All of your customizations go into special files which Thesis reads and then gives priority to over its own instructions. For instance, you can tell it that before the first item in the second column to insert a snippet of code. Your customization is then completely isolated to your own custom code files which allows you to do an upgrade to Thesis without overwriting all of your changes.

The API for Thesis is very easy to learn and very intuitive. You can combine the Thesis hooks with WordPress hooks to do some very cool stuff.

So far, I’ve been very happy with the new Thesis theme. If you’re interested in finding out about Thesis you can check out the website here.

photocred goes to galfred

Bill's Poker Blog » Tech Ramblings

Changes Afoot At Bill’s Poker Blog

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