We’ve been live for just over one month now, and I am incredibly happy with the progress so far. This project has been faster, easier and more fun than I expected. Everything has been made to fit to the same general layout except for the wiki guidebook, which is unfortunately too complicated for me. I have although met someone through the UNSW Outdoors Club who is a software engineer and he seems keep to help out, so maybe he can straighten that all out for me and have the entire site looking unified finally.
Besides the Wiki Guide though, I re-installed a new forum and made that conform to the general layout, so the forum looks good now (just need some of you people to start registering and posting!). The Photo galleries look awesome, I’m very happy with how that turned out. I will continue to add all of the best photos from all of the trips I go on - that of course works in with this blog, the trip reports section, where I will continue to write up our trip reports, add videos from our trips, and add videos from other outdoor activities which I thought were worth watching.
I am interested in having other people submitting their own trip reports, photos, and/or video logs from trips. So don’t be afraid of email me (aegist at TDMSKP.com.au) if you are interested in doing that. Until we have a number of regular contributors though, it will continue to just be me posting in here. I will keep to a general format of trip report, trip video, video of interest, and maybe a website update like this if appropriate.
With nearly all of the website looking the same, and the general photo gallery and trip reports section just moving along smoothly, all of my attention is on the guidebook now. Unfortunately, wiki guides are almost useless until you have a lot of people editing them, and you don’t get a lot of people editing them until they are worth visiting… So that means I am spending all of my time now just adding content to the guidebook. I will try to update the guide, with photos, for every trip we go on; I am also copying generic information from wikipedia about some of the normal facts of outdoors sports (even this is time consuming though). Nonetheless, this is where my time is going, and it is starting to come along. I think less than 6 months, and we will start seeing critical mass in that department.
Wrap Up
So, to bring this post to an end let me list all of the things I would *love* you eternally for doing:
- Participate in the forums
Register, and make some posts. Subscribe to the threads you post to. Come back regularly, and you will become one of the founding members of what I am determined to make the largest outdoors community in Australia
- Edit Articles in the Guide
It isn’t that difficult, and they don’t even have to be good. Just make new articles, write anything you can think of, and save it. The more content in it, the better, even if it is bad. Bad content at least allows other people to come through and tidy it up.
- Subscribe to this Blog!
The top of the right hand side menu is a link - Click it, enter your email address. Or scroll to the very bottom of the page and just enter your email address. Feedburner handles the subscriptions, so I don’t even get your email addresses, they are all handled by a Google company - so you can be completely confident that your email addresses are safe!
You don’t even have to do all 3, any one of them would be cool!
Shane
