Well, I just completely a major upgrade of Lottery Post, and I'm just pleased as punch that everything installed correctly and there were no major problems in bringing the site back up. According to my statistics, the site was only down for 3 minutes. Whew!
If you're typing a new reply or message, you'll notice right away that the editor is much different. I posted a very detailed explanation about the new text editor on the forums last week, and you can find it here.
In addition to the new text editor, there is a ton of new stuff that I packed in this update. Here goes:
- For all the people writing to me and posting about the absence of their favorite lottery results display on the Internet, I have added a new lottery results calendar display. Currently it can be used for Pick 3, Pick 4, and Quinto games. Click on the game name wherever you see a game popup menu, and select Lottery Results Calendar from the menu. Or, go to your state's main results page (from the Results menu at the top), and you'll see new Calendar options next to the numbers games. It should work much like you're used to. Like all results pages at Lottery Post, free members can see up to one year of past results, and premium members can see everything.
- For those looking for the All/Mostly In or Out Filters, they have been added to the Inspector 3, Inspector 4, and Positional Wheels pages. (The filter was previously only on the Deflate system.)
- There is a new very addictive online game available, called 2048. Smartphone and tablet users may have played this game before -- it's one of the most popular games around right now. So now you can play it in your web browser! Here it is.
- There is also a new Games page that holds all the online games available (just 2048 and Sudoku right now).
- There is a new Image Manager for premium members to upload and manage their images. You'll find a whole lot more functionality compared to the old version.
- The Prize Payouts pages now show the odds of winning various prize levels for many games. I'll continue adding odds for games over time -- just a lot of work to track down and calculate, but I'll keep at it until they're done. (It might take a bit of time!) Also, for prizes that have a non-monetary value (like a free ticket), the prize page will show the description of the prize (again, like "Free ticket") instead of $0. Like the odds calculations, it will take some time to track down and update all the prizes, but eventually they'll all display correctly.
- Forum pages in which you can go the previous or next page are now programmed with the latest browser technology in order to speed up the time it takes to go the the next or previous page. Browsers that support this technology include the latest Chrome browser, IE11, and I think the latest Firefox browser. The way it works is when you're looking at a forum page -- maybe you're on page 11 of a thread -- if there is a page 10 (which would be the previous page) or a page 12 (which would be the next page), the browser will "secretly" loads both of those pages in the background, so if you go back or forward one page, it will come up almost instantly. So the next time you go to the next or previous page in the forums, take note of how quickly it goes (assuming you're using IE11, Chrome, or Firefox).
- There's a ton of little things that have been updated too. You might notice little things here and there.
- Finally, as I mentioned in my other post from last week, this was an extremely important update for the technology platform that Lottery Post runs on. I am truly relieved that the update was uneventful, as it could have gone a lot more bumpy. It's a great thing for the long-term viability of the site when I can do a major technology upgrade like this.