Our Website

Largely random and miscellaneous notes on our website, it's features and use. To date it's a bit of a scrapbook or collection of yellow stickies - over time it may become a little more ordered ...

Website Issues

Display of Table Data

We use Google Sheets / Excel Workbooks to hold and maintain tabular data (on a Google Drive). WiX provides an App to display such information on the website, and we use this to display Fixtures and Results, Teams, League Tables, Sign-up Sheets and more. The information should be displayed as illustrated below (for the Super 14 Fixtures and Results):

Occasionally, the table will display empty / blank as shown below:

This may occur if the table has recently been updated, so try again in a couple of minutes to see the data displayed correctly.

If it doesn't come good within a short space of time it is reasonable to suspect that something has gone wrong! Please report such issues to me at GCBC Webmaster - preferably letting me know which page and table is at fault so that I can resolve the problem quickly.

Smartphone Use

The website is designed to work well on a desktop monitor - this enables the display of fixture lists, results and league tables. That said, it should be usable on a smartphone ...

Smartphone use requires an element of redesign to lay out the information in a useable form on the restricted space of the smaller screen:

I don't always remember to do this ... 🫢 ... so if you note an 'ugly' rendition do let me know.
On some pages it just isn't possible to fit everything onto a smaller screen without excessive scrolling.

But all pages should work on a smartphone.

You can get smartphone access via this QR code:

Calendar Display

WiX, in their infinite wisdom, have announced that they are discontinuing their Google Event Calendar app from 3rd December 2025 - which is a bit of a nuisance since that is what we use to display Calendar events on our website.

The alternative recommended by WiX doesn't work for us - it would allow us to display just one out of the dozen calendars that we use for the various competitions and classes of event - so I've had to get a little bit 'creative' and use some embedded HTML to access Google services directly!

Things will look a little different but everything should work pretty much as before - including the Lynn Smith Calendar Access Feature. Known issues:

The Calendar button on the Members page takes you to the new format calendar. Existing embedded links to calendar still link to the old calendar format which will [probably] stop working some time in December.

If you encounter further issues, please let me know at GCBC Webmaster .

The Lynn Smith Calendar Access Feature

So called because Lynn enquired as to whether it would be possible to access the Club fixtures calendar from the email / calendaring App on her 'phone.

The calendars we use are owned by GCBC Webmaster and are accessible to the public - provided that you have the 'key' ...

It's not one calendar, but ten - a separate calendar is used for each class of event so that we could have them shown in different colours. Aesthetically, that may well have been a neat idea but it makes the sharing a bit more complicated. It does mean, however, that you can select just the one[s] that you want.

To add a calendar to Outlook, you go to the Calendar page, a right-click on My Calendars, Other Calendars or Shared Calendars (depending on where you want them to appear) and go to Add Calendar > From Internet ... and enter the location (.ics file) of the calendar that you want. Repeat for each calendar to be added, and then sort it out so that it displays as you want it to ...

The calendars are:

GCBC General- for general events such as meetings and green keeping.
County Games - for events organised at a county (or national) level at which Guilsfield members compete as individuals (as members of an affiliated club).
Friendlies - for matches that we arrange and play against local clubs on a ‘friendly’ basis.
In-House Events - the schedule of our in-house competitions and informal roll ups.
Ladies League Games - for county league games played by teams of Guilsfield ladies.
Men’s League Games - for county league games played by teams of Guilsfield men.
Mixed League Games - for league games played by teams of Guilsfield members.
Other Events - a calendar to hold other events that fall outside the other classifications.
Severn Valley Indoor - for games arranged by the SVIBC.
Veterans League Games - for county league games played by teams of Guilsfield veterans.

Simply Copy the [Hyper]link[s] above and paste into the Add Calendar > From Internet ... location field[s].

Notes:

You want to copy the link address and paste that into the appropriate field - if you 'click' on the link you will be able to download a file 'basic.ics' instead which may be what the calendaring app needs but it's less helpful to you!
The instructions above describe the process for Outlook but the links should work for any calendaring app that is capable of displaying a calendar from the Internet.
Provided that you subscribe to the calendar, you will automatically get to see any additions or revisions.
This is an unsupported feature in the sense that while I can issue correct and corrected links I have no way of verifying correct operation within your particular calendaring app.
The set of calendars and links reasonably reflect the sets of events that I was aware of last year - this set may well change over time.

If you encounter problems, please let me know and I'll help if I can. This feature seems to be working reasonably well for a number of members so there is a small pool of expertise to draw upon.

Google Calendar on a Smartphone

The equivalent process will also work with Google Calendar on a smartphone. However, the smartphone Calendar App lack the functionality to subscribe to shared calendars. Instead you need to make the subscriptions via Google Calendar on a [desktop] browser and can then select which of the subscribed calendars is to be displayed within the smartphone Calendar App.

An Experimental Sign-up Sheet and Poll

One of our members inquired whether it would be possible to sign-up for events on the website - getting to the clubhouse isn't always so easy, particularly at the beginning of the season. The obvious way to do this would be to present the sign-up sheet as a 'form' and enable logged-in users to sign up - but we don't support / require individual user accounts on the website.

But we do already make use of Google Drive and Google documents to present information onto the website - more about that another time perhaps - and we could present a sign-up sheet as a Google Sheet and enable members to append information (e.g. name and contact details) as a supplement to signing up in the clubhouse. The caveat is that members using the 'facility' will need to be comfortable making very basic use Google Sheets and careful enough not to mess-up the sheet in the process.

So, herewith an experimental sign-up sheet and poll to discover whether this might be a practical and useful feature:

Sign-up and enter the poll here - the sign-up sheet and poll will open in Google Sheets in a new window.
Enter your data, wait but a moment while Google saves your changes and close the data entry window to complete your update.
Refresh this page to see your updates - the updated sheet together with your submission should appear below ...

If all this works for you, your 'vote' will be recorded on the experimental sign-up sheet.

If you have issues or questions please let me know at GCBC Webmaster and I'll endeavour to assist.

Guilsfield Community Bowling Club