The Free, Online, Concise Guide to No Limit Texas Holdem Poker

Announcing the publication of The Free, Online, Concise Guide to No Limit Texas Holdem Poker.

The Free, Online, Concise Guide to No Limit Texas Holdem Poker is an e-book and is available for online reading in HTML or JavaScript, or you can download it for Kindle, Epub, PDF, RTF, LFR, or Palm Doc formats at SmashWords. Alternatively, you can read it as a series of web pages, starting here. The advantage to the web page version is that it includes a 40 minute embedded video of me actually playing poker while pointing out examples of what starting hands to play.

The Free, Online, Concise Guide to No Limit Texas Holdem Poker covers:

• Playing styles; their advantages and vulnerabilities, how to play against each style and some recommended starting hands to play, and then
• the mathematics of poker including outs, odds, percentages, pot odds, and implied odds. At the end I include
• additional suggested readings once you are comfortable with the basic material. As an appendix I’ve included sections covering
• rules, game play, poker hand rankings and terminology and definitions, for those of you who are brand new to the game.

Ruminations

I used to put this kind of post in the main blog but the main blog seems to be gravitating toward very instructional or informative topics and away from the uncertain or exploratory type of posts.

I’ve been idly wondering lately why how I’m running at poker affects my everyday confidence and perspective and attitude. When I’m running well I feel more confident and happier, and the opposite when I’m not running well.

Today on the final leg into work via transit I realized that poker is the only challenging/developmental thing that’s going on in my life these days. Work is not challenging and not really going anywhere new, my personal life is pretty stable, my other interests and hobbies I’ve been involved with for so long that there’s little change or development going on there so that just leaves poker.

Seen in that context it makes sense that so much spare cycle time (as they used to refer to underutilized network servers) gets allocated to poker, and why how poker things are going tends to affect me so much. It’s not necessarily that the other things are not important but just that they are stable and don’t provide a lot of entertainment as things to think about.

It’d be different were I in my 20’s and still finding my way in the world, but that’s not the case anymore.

That’s not the best situation, either for things in general or even for my poker playing specifically because it could put undue pressure on poker to be successful. On the other hand, maybe that kind of pressure is good for my poker to move things forward, though at the same time it may strain the rest of my days when things aren’t running well. So, I talk myself in a circle, but hopefully with a little added perspective on things.

Tricks to adding category feeds to static HTML pages

I wanted to create a static HTML page that would display both the latest blog feed as well as the latest blog feeds from within specific categories.

The reason for wanting this is that some of the categories might be more appealing to some potential readers than others, and even though my blog seems narrowly focused, I write a heck of a lot so even more narrowly focussed categories might be more appealing.

Unfortunately I can’t cut and paste and display the results here; WordPress.com has restrictions on scripting within posts and to use this you need to be able to accept javascript from Feedburner. But here’s a view of how the summarized blog feed looks on the static HTML page:

Main blog RSS feed

And, here’s how a couple of the category feeds look:

RSS blog category feed

(click image for full size if it’s not readable)

Note that there is some duplication, simply because some of the most recent entries are also in some of these categories, and also because some of the posts are in more than one category.

For archival purposes I’m saving an operating version of this HTML file here:

http://www.anon-poker-blog.com/rss-index.html

~

To get this all to work, I used this page, “Feedburner: How To Republish Blogger Feed as HTML” to help me to set up a Feedburner feed of my desired categories. But here’s where I got stuck, and I still don’t know why.

Feedburner would not accept the url for my categories. I would paste in the url, and Feedburner would return with multiple possibilities for the feed. One possibility that Feedburner would find would be the root of my blog, in other words a feed for the entire blog. The other possibility suggested by Feedburner would be a url that was only the most recent post in that category, not the entire category itself.

I experimented with different possible urls for the category feeds, and accidentally found something that worked:

http://www.anon-poker-blog.com/index/ ….

… category/poker-basics-for-beginners/feed/?cat=2/

(without the …., sorry; it’s too long to fit in this theme)

or, in more generic terms, (I run two blogs in one domain so each has it’s own directory; most blogs don’t need the “/index/” but that’s where the main blog exists separate from the other blog)

http://www.SITE.com/category/CATEGORYNAME/feed/?cat=2/

where the CAPITALIZED parts are unique to the site and category.

Why I needed both the “/feed/” and the “/?cat=2/” at the end I still don’t know. This is not even my second category, so I don’t know that the number even makes a difference, but for whatever reason this seemed to fool Feedburner into accepting the category feeds?

If anyone knows why this issue might have come up, please let me know.

Also, if there is a way of using PHP to generate the category feed in a static HTML page without using Feedburner at all, please let me know as well. I’m sure there is a way, but I haven’t been able to find one yet that is cheap (ie. free)

You can find more general information about setting up category feeds with WordPress here, Category Feeds With WordPress and Feedburner, but again this couldn’t help me solving the category feed problem and only helps with adding a pre-determined widget for category feeds. The other site mentioned at the top helps you to clip the script for the feed and then use it where ever you want with a static HTML page.