About PongWorld.com

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2008 Updates
Look for exciting updates this year, especially in the areas of Equipment reviews, Elite profiles, and the Community.

2007 Updates
Many updates in the areas of the Player Community.

2006 Updates
Several behind-the-scenes improvements.

2005 Updates
Expanded the User Community
Improved the Find A Player features
Additions made to Focus on Country feature

2004 Updates
2004 Olympics Report
Focus on France
Added drills to the Tips section
Updated Elite Player Profiles
Added search options to the Community Message Board

2003 Updates
Looking ahead: 2004 Olympics
Add Your Link
Updated Table Tennis History
Other racket sports: tennis, racquetball, badminton
New home page design
Added information to Web Design section.
Added GIS Tools section.

2002 Updates
Table Tennis Rules
Country in Focus
Updated Find-A-Player with geographical search tools in the United States.
Updated Classifieds
Updated Tips
Tournament: 2002 Fort Collins, Colorado results and report with photos
Added results and upcoming events to home page.

2001 Updates
Table Tennis Community with Message Board, Find-A-Player network, Classifieds.
Radically redesigned the home page layout. New logo.
Newsletter
Tournament: 2001 US Open Report and Photos
Tournament: 2001 Fort Collins, Colorado results and report with photos

2000 Updates
Tips
Equipment Reviews database
Elite player profiles and photos
Feedback form
2000 Olympics
Ladder

August 28, 2000
This website started out as a few static pages "hosted" (used here very loosely) by AOL. I used the FrontPage HTML editor very briefly, since it didn't take long to realize that FrontPage is second-to-all. So after upgrading to TextPad and MS InterDev, I was finally on the right path.

Soon I decided to have PongWorld professionally hosted by VeoWeb, a great webhost. This allowed me to develop dynamic pages using PHP, a superb server-side scripting language similar to Microsoft's ASP. With PHP, the HTML is generated "on-the-fly". PHP also integrates with a number of Relational DBMS's very well. PongWorld uses the mySQL database, the RDBMS provided by VeoWeb.

To create the PongWorld database, I first modeled the table objects and relationships with PowerDesigner. This enabled me to not only create a sleek database design that works well, but also to generate the database DDL SQL with a mere click of a button. Then all I had to do was to execute this SQL script to create all of the database objects.

Since I am not a big fan of frames, I have used PHP and Server Side Includes to encapsulate similar functionality and reuse it throughout the site. This simplifies maintenance and overall development work.

My philosophy in designing this website has been to keep things simple and page-sizes small. This way, downloading the pages is fast and visitors hopefully won't be annoyed by blinking, moving, popping or other annoying objects. For more on this subject, consult Jakob Nielsen's website.

Let us know how we are doing. Send us an email with suggestions, complaints, or praise.

Your PongWorld Webmaster