Category: Uncategorized

We speak your language

A few months ago, we posted about the new fonts we’d added to the site, and hinted that we had “plans to translate the site and editor itself into many languages.” We’re happy to announce that phase 1 of those plans has now launched on the site.

Under the hood, every time your web browser asks a web site to load a specific page, it also tells that web site which languages it supports. “I read Korean,” it may say, “can you show me this page in that language?”; or, “Please give me a version of the web site that’s tailored to Spanish as spoken in Argentina, or any Spanish whatsoever.” Up until a few weeks ago, that specific part of the request (called the Accepts-Language header) was ignored by Match The Memory. “Koh-ree-uhn? Sorry, never heard of it — you get English.” “Here ya go, a nice English web page for you!”

We have now published a little tweak that allows the site to correctly respond to those requests for the 5 most-requested languages on Match The Memory:

  • English
  • Spanish
  • Portuguese
  • Dutch
  • Korean

Everything from the home page, to the game play page, to the editor where you can create and refine your own personalized matching games has been professionally translated into these languages. The addition of the four new languages gets us to almost 90% support for requests to our site, so it should open up opportunities for game creators and players across the world.

  • English
  • Spanish
  • Portuguese
  • Dutch
  • Korean
The home page in the 5 languages that have been currently translated.

What’s next?

We’re planning to roll out translations for the following languages in the next few months:

  • Croatian
  • Polish
  • Italian
  • Hebrew
  • Russian
  • Chinese

(Update 2021-11-13: These languages have been added to the site!)

These represent the six next most-frequently requested languages on Match The Memory, and once they’re in place, more than 95% of our visitors will get the site sent to them in the language that they actually asked for.

After that, we’re going to branch out beyond the current user base of Match The Memory, and add support based on the most popular languages spoken worldwide. (Sorry, we don’t have plans to support fictional languages like Klingon.) That will involve creating translations for:

  • Hindi
  • Arabic
  • Malay
  • Bengali
  • French

If you’d like to speed up this translation effort so that we get to your chosen language more quickly, get in touch with us via our contact form. Let us know which language you’d be able to help with, and we’ll work together to drop its support into the site.

Alternately, if you’d like your preferred language to jump the line, as it were, you can donate the cost of the professional translation (approximately USD $30 per language) and let us know which one you’re interested in.

Happy 10th Birthday, Match The Memory!

The first version of Match The Memory launched exactly 10 years ago today. Since then, you’ve made thousands and thousands of memory games (25,000+!), which have been played more than 12 million times. Today, we’re celebrating not just the site itself, but the creators who made the best games on the site.

Continue reading Happy 10th Birthday, Match The Memory!

How Match The Memory is better than a physical memory game

I have a lot of experience playing matching games, since I create quite a few myself, and I curate all of the public games built by others on the site. So when my 3-year-old son got an old-school physical matching game for Christmas this year, I immediately started contrasting the experience with playing a similar game online with Match The Memory.

Continue reading How Match The Memory is better than a physical memory game

To Block or Not To Block

A year and a half ago, we made a strategic decision to add Google Ads to our site pages. In general, it has been a good move for us, helping to offset the cost of running our servers.

But we understand that not everyone likes having ads show up on their games. Some people run ad-blocker software in their browsers that prevent our ads from showing up; we’re fine with this. We do it ourselves.

Recently, we got a request from a game creator to remove advertisements on their games. We decided to turn it into a win-win opportunity, and created a new product that allows a user to disable those ads while still providing some revenue to keep the lights on at Match The Memory.

You can see this new product on any game’s Buy page. After you purchase it, Google Ads will be removed for all visitors who come to play that game.

Most Popular Games – Week of 2 Dec. 2017

I’m surprised that there aren’t any holiday games in here yet. I’m sure we’ll see more of these as the month goes on.

All Games

Rank Title/Image Creator
1 Phases of the Moon Matching Game
 Tori Keim
2 Irregular Verb Memory Match
 Unknown User
3 Nonfiction Text Features
 Suzanne Hurley
4 Mr. Polum’s Landform Game
 Chris Polum
5 PARTS OF THE HOUSE
 Felipe C.

New Games

We’re covering a lot of the basics here: language, math, geology, civics. If you used all of these new games this week, you’d probably wind up with a pretty solid education. 🙂

Rank Title/Image Creator
1 Culture
 Unknown User
2 Module 7 Review
 Unknown User
3 Weathering
 Unknown User
4 DiSalvi’s Vocab Review Game
 Christopher Disalvi
5 Chapter 4 Vocabulary Matching with Pictures
 Kyle Heaslip

It’s hip to be square

In general, pictures are best shown either horizontally or vertically. Pictures of people are usually shot in the “portrait” orientation, while most other photos are generally taken in “landscape” orientation. That’s why we built Match The Memory to default a game’s cards to the Landscape layout, with the option of switching them to Portrait. This lets you have your images as big as possible on your cards. (Pro tip: if more of your cards are vertical than horizontal, we suggest that you change that game to Portrait.)

However, sometimes you have a picture that doesn’t really fit either Landscape or Portrait. Whether it’s a drawing of an atom or your latest Instagram selfie, sometimes you need a square. That’s why we just added a new Square layout option to Match The Memory.

In addition to possibly fitting your images better, Square cards are bigger — the same height as Portrait cards and the same width as Landscape cards.

Try out the new Square orientation on a new or existing custom memory game. Let us know about specific games that you think are better having square cards rather than horizontal or vertical ones.