Jamie

Improved Kubbs in Play Graphs

The Kubbs in Play by Turn graphs is one of my favorite kubb game visualizations and every game on the Planet Kubb Wiki has one. I was recently thinking that it could do a much better job of telling a story. Sure it’s interesting to see the number of kubbs in play, but it would be more interesting to see the remaining baseline kubbs as well. This is what we started with:

Now we have the new and improved ones. You can see at a glance which team has Kubbs left on the baseline. Note that a bug was also fixed that incorrectly didn’t show a first turn that didn’t have any hits, that is why the second graph shows 15 turns now instead of 14 like above.

These are a huge improvement!

Game Videos Embedded on the Planet Kubb Wiki

A little tweak today on the Planet Kubb Games on the wiki. Now YouTube videos of the games are not just a link, but are embedded and playable right in the scoresheet. You can now watch the video and follow along with the notation.

See Dallas 2012 Finals Game 1 and Dallas 2012 Finals Game 2 for examples.

Additionally, there is a category for all the games that have video so you can use that if you just want to watch some Kubb games this winter.

Planet Kubb Sites

It was just a couple of days ago that I announced the Planet Kubb Network capability to host Kubb sites for teams, clubs and events. A number of people have requested sites and we already have a great cadre of teams with sites setup or in the process of getting setup!

In addition to great adoption I have also installed language packs for Swedish and Dutch. If any teams, clubs or events outside of the US would like to try a Planet Kubb site I’d love to set one up!

Announcing Planet Kubb Network!

Would you like a website for your Kubb team? Need a blog for your Kubb club or tournament? Planet Kubb is now able to host sites for any Kubb team, club, tournament or individual Kubb blogger! Want one? Go to the site request form!

For a while now I have wanted to make it easier for people to create blogs about Kubb, particularly around their Kubb teams. I thought about writing up something on the Planet Kubb Wiki, sort of a “How To” but nothing seemed easy enough. On the way back from the Dallas Kubb Tournament I wondered if this is something Planet Kubb could do.

The first place to start was my own team, the Kubbchucks. We had our own website using WordPress. Planet Kubb Pitch also was a standalone WordPress site. WordPress supports networks of sites so I changed how Planet Kubb is setup to take advantage of this network capability. We’ve already got Kubbchucks, Sweden’s Sons and the Crooked Lake Trolls on the network with sites! I also reached out to the last three US National Champions, teams with their names on the Stapp King, and they are setting up sites as well! The Ringers are up and running and Team Knockerheads and Kubbsicles are getting setup as well!

Why is Planet Kubb doing this? A big reason is so to make it easier for people to share information about Kubb on the web. We want to get more exposure for the great Kubb teams, clubs and events on the web. To that end, all the Planet Kubb Network sites will be added to the Planet Kubb World feed and distributed via @PlanetKubb and the Planet Kubb Facebook page.

I also think that there is something to Kubb teams. Eric Anderson recently blogged on What’s in a Team Name?. We have an entire section of the Planet Kubb Wiki for teams. Having teams have a presence off the pitch is a great way to develop teams and the sport as a whole.

Some details about the network:

The Planet Kubb Network is run using WordPress. If you are familiar with WordPress you will be right at home. If not, it’s pretty easy to learn to use. You can even use WordPress apps on iOS and Android to blog from your mobile.
Planet Kubb hosts all of the sites, and the site URL must be pickyourname.planetkubb.com.
All of Planet Kubb is backed up nightly and weekly.
You have the ability to export from your site. If in the future you would like to move it somewhere else, you are able to do that with ease.
All Planet Kubb sites have sitemaps and proper indexes for search engines. This is managed by me for the whole network. See Planet Kubb’s robots.txt.
All Planet Kubb sites use Piwik for site analytics. Piwik is hosted by me for the network (running at stats.thingelstad.com). You can see traffic stats right in the dashboard, and if you want full stats I can setup a Piwik account for you as well. This way Google doesn’t get to spy on visitors to all the sites.

Would you like to start a site for your team? Would you like to start a site for your event? Would you like to start a site for your club? There is a site request form that will get you started!

New Planet Kubb Site!

Planet Kubb was launched on Feb. 14, 2012 by taking a river of news Kubb feed that I had made for me and some friends and putting it on the Planet Kubb domain name. The very first site just took a bunch of RSS feeds and aggregated them together. Planet Kubb quickly added Ask Planet Kubb for Kubb Q&A and the Planet Kubb Wiki. In the last eight months there has been a lot of developments with Ask Planet Kubb and the Planet Kubb Wiki, but aside from some minor tweaks the main Planet Kubb site stayed the same.

Planet Kubb was not a great experience for the first time visitor. It was confusing and didn’t even do a good job of highlighting Ask Planet Kubb or the Planet Kubb Wiki. There was just a big barrage of Kubb stuff aggregated. This week that changed, and Planet Kubb now has a much more approachable front door!

The Planet Kubb front page still highlights the most recent things from Planet Kubb World, the aggregator of Kubb content from all over the web. But it now gives special display to the activity stream from Ask Planet Kubb as well as recent items from Planet Kubb Pitch.

I think this is going to be a much more friendly look. It also made a bunch of changes on the backend that is going to allow us to launch a new Planet Kubb capability in a couple of days that I am very excited about, stay tuned for that.