I won! My photo was chosen the winner of the March 2011 Monthly Photo Contest!

Here’s my entry for the April 2011 Monthly Photo Contest:

BoardGameGeek recently reintroduced the blog feature. I thought ‘why not?’ and started a photoblog using the Geek blog system. I’m posting board game photos there, discussing photography. It’s a simple interface, easy to add Geek photos and drop a few lines of text, and the audience is already there.

There was already some interesting comments in my Poseidon entry.

Here’s the RSS feed, or check the latest headlines from the blog sidebar, or subscribe to it on Geek.

There’s a nice Through the Ages play-by-web site at Boardgaming Online. The interface is not very smooth, but it works as long as you know how to play the game.

I’m in couple of games. One of them hasn’t progressed much — four players, different countries — but the other went seven rounds today thanks to local players who all sit by their computers all morning.

I sure would like to play the game on board at some point… It’s one of those games I really like (or think I like, based on what, three plays), but never play.

This has nothing do with games, so if you don’t have a WordPress blog, skip on. If you do have a WordPress blog, there’s something I want to tell you.

The default WordPress search sucks.  It has very simple matching and always returns results in date order, most recent first. In small blogs this might be fine, but in the long run simply doesn’t work. Fortunately there’s a solution.

I was happy with a plugin called wpSearch for a long time, but eventually found it lacking – it couldn’t keep up with the blog. So I did my own search engine, and thus was born Relevanssi. After all, I’m a trained professional with an appropriate university degree!

Relevanssi does partial matching (like Google) and sorts order by relevancy (like Google). It can also make suggestions of better search terms (like Google). It also shows the relevant part of the post (like Google), with the search terms highlighted (like Google). It also searches posts, pages, comments, categories, custom fields and all sorts of data basic WordPress search ignores.

All in all, it’s a pretty amazing little search engine plugin. What’s best, it’s free and easy to use, yet it has lots of useful options to tune the search results to your liking if you’re so inclined.

Just search for “Relevanssi” in your WordPress admin dashboard’s “Add Plugin” tool and you too can offer top-quality search results to your users. The plugin is currently very actively maintained and new features are added constantly. If you have something useful in mind, drop me an email and I can see if it’s something that could be added to Relevanssi.

Lautapeliopas now has a small Lautapeliopas in English page. I’m going to buy some advertising on Boardgame News, so that was the kick I needed to add the English info page. I was going to donate anyhow and the difference between $20 donation and $60 sponsorship is fairly small, especially as the latter is tax-deductible and provides nice benefits.

So, if you’ve been interested in Lautapeliopas, here’s your chance to find out a bit more about the site.

BoardGameGeek admins have removed the super useful Winsome Games reprint geeklist. Apparently it violates site policy in a way that several other similar reprint lists don’t. As the list was one of the most useful resources in the Geek, I’m very annoyed to see it gone.

Ok, so there’s an explanation. Makes sense, I suppose, but still — just deleting the list and all the information on it without warning was a rude move.

I added a new feature to my BGG correlation tool. If you match your correlation to all users (don’t enter a second user) and make sure Refresh cache is checked, you’ll find a user named BoardGameGeek average rating on the list. That shows your correlation to the Geek average rating, based on the Geek ratings.

Pretty neat. Mine’s 0.4, so my ratings kind of correlate with the general ratings (which pretty much matches my experience with the ratings).

I’m a Game Taster — though I wish I had a bit more time to actually taste everything interesting and have some time to really savour the stuff I find tasty.

The Finnish Board Game Society Christmas Greeting — shown here — is pretty cool. Kudos to Sampo Sikiö.

The idea is obviously cool, because I used it for the Lautapeliopas 404 page (the Lautapeliopas card text says “Name a card that isn’t in your deck. If you can find the card in your deck, take a Province. Otherwise get -404 victory points.”)

The new version of my board game web site is now open. Lautapelaaja.net is gone, welcome Lautapeliopas, more modern — some might say Web 2.0 — version. Just about everything from the old site is present on the new and I’ve also added the contents of my board game book, updated and refreshed. I’ve also recruited more people to write content and added some stuff to make participating more interesting — visitors can now rate games and comment everything, for example.