New DCSki Launching Soon - Could be briefly glitchy

I think I’m ready to launch the next generation of DCSki, possibly tonight or tomorrow. And cutting over from a “live” production site to another is sort of like performing maintenance on an airplane while it is in flight.

Which means things could be a little bumpy during the crossover. You know, like a mogul-strewn field of snow.

I have a long checklist of items to go through to ensure a successful switchover, but while the new site is coming online there might be a few hours of odd and buggy behavior. If something looks odd, no worries – it should fix itself soon.

I’ll post a message to the Forum when the new site is officially launched (and should be back to behaving normally), inviting bug reports at that time.

This is the biggest and most extensive technical overhaul of DCSki in its 30+-year history – months of effort, tens of thousands of lines of new code, and dozens of little (and big) enhancements throughout. I can’t wait for you all to see it.

JimK wrote:

Wowser!  This will take me a while to learn to navigate to my favorite stuff!  Very fun.  Thanks for your efforts Scott.

Thanks Jim!  I just published a story documenting some of the enhancements here.  My goal was to keep the design familiar and true to DCSki's heritage, while sprinkling all kinds of useful enhancements throughout.

Wow . . . just wow!  Will take a while to experience all the new features.

Thanks for all the hard work!

Scott - congrats on the cutover to the next-gen site! Looks really clean.  As a web designer / developer / coder in a prior life, I know that those things don't always go smoothly when you have that much of a delta on the front, and perhaps much of the same feeding from the back...  Anyway, as a frequent visitor, just want to say looking good!

I didn't see it at first, but Lost Areas looks completely redone and much more intuitive. 

Going to be fun to get into the News archives.  Especially by clicking on "Surprise me."  :-)

I asked AI to explain why there’s so much discrepancy between reports of Wildcat steepness.  It said it’s because of the double fall line.  I said, “Hey, you’re quoting a post I made on DCski, and that post was wrong.”  It admitted all of that.  Moral of the story….

needawax wrote:

uh-oh.

Stephen wrote:

I was looking at the lost ski area interactive map, and it seems to me that Afton Alps and Swann Ridge are referring to the same place.

There are undoubtedly some discrepancies in the data, since so much of the Lost Areas is based on peoples' recollections and those can be hazy.  In the new summaries at the top of each Lost Areas page, it should point out when user comments have conflicting recollections for a specific ski area, if there's enough data to reveal the discrepancy.

In the short term I'd say add some comment(s) if you notice something seems off, such as thinking that two lost area entries might really be the same place.  Merging profiles could be messy, so I'd need to think of the most appropriate way to do that if we realize there are duplicates going under multiple names, but having comments that suggest the possible similarity are definitely helpful.  And the new map view definitely adds a useful new perspective!  I should caution that the locations are quite approximate -- I had to settle on a specific latitude and longitude geolocation based on rough areas of where the ski area was thought to be, and there's little chance any of them are going to be spot-on.

needawax wrote:

Also - the site feels snappier than it did before, not an easy thing to do when adding features and streamlining things...  Again, great job!

Thanks!  And you have the snappiest version because you're a DCSki Supporter and get to have all the ads disabled, which really streamlines things.  Unfortunately with the ad engine on, there's third-party latency that I can't do much about.  But I do focus on performance for all the code I write.

Afton Alps and Swann Ridge are/were indeed located close to one another, needawax. The lift descriptions seem quite different, based on what's posted here on DCSki.

Scott's point about approximating the geolocations makes sense. Hope someone will poke around on aerial photos some more, and on the ground, so that the locations of these two areas can be established more precisely.

Woody

I continue to add new features to DCSki as part of this refresh.

As of a few minutes ago, when you view a resort profile, you'll now see whether the resort is part of one of the "megapass" networks (Epic/Ikon/Indy/Mountain Collective, although currently there are no Mid-Atlantic resorts that are part of Mountain Collective.)

And on the main DCSki Resorts page, I added an additional filter so you can filter resorts by pass type.

So if you have an Epic, Ikon, and/or Indy pass, you can now quickly see which Mid-Atlantic resorts your pass might be valid at.

Note that these passes can come in different flavors with different restrictions, so always check directly with a resort to make sure your pass is valid on the day you want to visit.

I'll plan on updating the underlying database each winter season to reflect any changes in pass participation.

It is after 1 a.m., which apparently means it is once again time for me to make “just one more little improvement” to DCSki. As usual, that turned into several more little improvements.

Tonight’s victim was the DCSki Newsroom.

I’ve made a bunch of enhancements to the Newsroom that make it much easier to dig through nearly three decades of DCSki stories. You can now filter the archive by Story Type, Resort, and Columnist, and those filters can be combined.

So, for example, you can pull up all of our Firsthand Reports involving Whitetail. Or all Interview Series stories. Or stories involving Timberline written by a particular DCSki columnist. You can then look at those results chronologically, see which were most popular, or see which ones have had the most recent reader discussion.

The Popular view now has another useful option: you can rank stories based on views during the past 1 year, 3 years, or across all time. The three-year view remains the default, since otherwise some ancient DCSki story that has been accumulating page views since the invention of fire tends to dominate forever.

The Search Archive feature also works with the new filters, so you can perform keyword searches within a particular story type, resort, and/or columnist. And the Newsroom still has Saved stories for logged-in users, plus the highly sophisticated and carefully researched 🎲 Surprise me button.

I've been adding a lot of new user-facing features, as you've seen, but at least half of my work has been "behind the scenes" on the architecture underpinning DCSki, trying to make the site easier and more efficient to run.

I thought it'd be fun to share an image of a "live admin dashboard" I've implemented that provides an animated view of what's happening on the site.  (Alas, the screenshot is a still image.)  I've always been interested in visualization so it's fun to experiment with different ways of presenting DCSki activity.

Thoroughly impressed with the new improved version.   I've enjoyed reading some of the old articles from years ago.  

Good job!