• Santa track for Christmas Eve
  We now have a site from the Census Bureau that will translate zipcodes into Latitude/Longitude coordnates. We need those to map Santa's destination against a US Map.
• Weather/temperature pulls in the middle of the letter
  Trickier than expected to find a site that will just give temp and not a hundred embedded ads. This may not make the cut for this year.
• Forgot password functionality (reset and send email?)
  Working on this one, should be easy. That's what scares me...
• Elf response system! Currently the elves have no way of writing back to people who send in comments, suggestions, trouble reports. Can you say "Oversight"? Ooops. We're working on that..

Recent activities:

• Fixed a bug where pet references where included in letters for children who had no pets. SImilar problem for children who hadn't move this year.
• Login failures are now logged for better debugging (Thanks Parker's Mom!)
• Preferences can now be saved (register page does double-duty)
• Intro text in development (and yes, it is a variant text template)
        (Sorry, we couldn't help ourselves --Elves.)
• "Where's Santa" pop-up now available only after logging in
• "Where's Santa" pop-up now automatically closes after 15 seconds
• Navigation bar alters Login/Logout and Register/Preferences based on login status
• Dark backgrounds have been removed from rotation
• Instructions vary on registration/preferences screen based on login status
• Jinkle logo now links back to Jinkle top page
• New letters in development (2nd letter added, shows up 5% of the time)

  ---

• Dateline added to letters with NPT (North Pole Time) timestamp added

  As a result of being at the North Pole, Santa and Co. exist simultaneously in all timezones, including those which span the international date line thus, in truth, Time has no meaning to the North Pole residents. Since they are always all timezones, they span the entire day and since they span the dateline, that goes for yesterday and tomorrow. Yep, Santa and Co are therefore eternal.

  Therefore, NPT has some unique properties:

  1. There is no AM or PM listed in the timestamp
     (Day and night are on monthly, non-meridian cycles)
  2. The hours will vary and rarely match the timezone of the reader
     Anything below the Artic Circle falls into one of 24 timezones for at least an hour. At the poles, though, it is fairly random. In fact, one might say it is random no more than the difference between GMT and the reader (or server, whichever is greater)....if one were guessing. (And if so, date=time()+rand(0,[BestGMToffset]*signflip) might be a very good guess indeed)
  3. Coincidentally, the minutes will almost always match up across Timezones
  4. Elves have been known to move the clock forwards or backwards, depending on how soon the next milk and cookies break might be...
  5. Rudolph cannot tell time, because the watch keeps slipping off his hoof