What's New On These Pages: April 1995

Next month: May 1995

• Saturday 29th April
  No problem with the updates - 20.10 on Saturday evening was the first one, with the exact jackpot pool being updated at 21.45.

• Thursday 27th April
  The Program, an ITV (Granada region only) TV programme on Thursdays at 10.40pm, very briefly flashed a screen shot of my lottery pages - the first time they've appeared on UK TV ! Sadly, I can't get ITV Granada where I live :-(

• Tuesday 25th April
  Bought a second ticket because it's a rollover week.

• Monday 24th April
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #23.

• Saturday 22nd April
  Spectacular success at last for the auto-updating ! Not only did the code work perfectly for the first time in weeks, but it auto-updated at 20.10 on Saturday evening (e-mail requested at 20.00 came back at 20.09), which now surely makes it the first place you'll find the results on the WWW !

• Tuesday 18th April
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #22. Adjusted code to fix weekend parsing problem. Brought first Saturday mailing forward a minute to 20.00.

• Saturday 15th April
  20.01 e-mail request arrived at 20.23, so I'm going to try a 20.00 request next Saturday. ITV teletext page 123 changed their format yet again (no "-" in the jackpot line), so my code didn't parse it correctly.

• Wednesday 12th April
  Moved first Saturday evening teletext mail request forward a minute to 20.01 as an experiment.

• Monday 10th April
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #21. Disputed the total prize pool figure that Camelot were giving out - it was exactly £30,000 too high !

• Thursday 6th April
  The introduction of mosaic 2.6b1 meant that, for the first time ever, netscape and mosaic both support the mailto: URL, so I've now included it on all auto-generated lottery pages.

• Tuesday 4th April
  Improved the code that parses the URL passed when a form is submitted so that duplicate or unordered selected numbers are correctly dealt with. This fixes problems with people who are deliberately constructing the form URL themselves and also with browsers that bizarrely don't submit form elements in order.

• Monday 3rd April
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #20. Added code to ignore an extra space in the weekend teletext jackpot figure (see below).

• Saturday 1st April
  I'm sure ITV teletext are deliberately trying to "tickle" my weekend updating code to display the wrong jackpot pool figures ! This time, they left a space in the jackpot pool figure in the final sub-page during Saturday evening, whilst not having a space in the other sub-pages - surely that was aimed at my program ? :-) This meant the figure came out as "22" instead of "£22,271,424" on the home page. I wonder what trick they'll come up with next week ? Perhaps it was an April Fool for my lottery pages..

Previous month: March 1995

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