New Look, New Features for FTO

Admin

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Regular visitors to First Tracks!! Online have noticed that there’s been no new news or feature content published over the past 10 days or so. We’ve been skiing of course, but that isn’t it. We’ve had bigger fish to fry and we’re now ready to unveil the results to you, our loyal readers.

The database that forms the backbone of our publication had become corrupt and unusable. Couple that with the fact that our publishing platform has been all but abandoned by both its creators and users, and we knew that it was time for a change.

There was, however, no conversion script already written to modify our database from the old format to the new. This required countless hours and many sleepless nights to by hand reconstruct the database in a format recognized by the new platform with a minimal loss of content. We’re tired and brain-dead but we’re nearly done, and we’re close enough that we can now throw the switch and show our new magazine format to the world.

The good news is that the new platform is active, robust and used by tens of thousands of publishers worldwide. This means new features for you, including a mobile version of our website, improved search functionality and better categorization of articles. If you were registered for our main website before we regret that you’ll need to re-register, but forum users are unaffected by this.

We still have a few final pieces to the puzzle to finish, such as recreating more than the first paragraph of news articles over a year old, but we’re anxious to show the new FTO to the skiing world. We look forward to your feedback!
 
Admin":2fvfi52w said:
....The database that forms the backbone of our publication had become corrupt and unusable.

Hey! Just a short Perl script away from Nirvana. What could be simpler? Right...

Cheers
Jeff
 
The look of the home page and news has definitely improved. The feature articles remain the stepchild of FTO in terms of appearance and presentation. Many of the pictures don't display now, the tables still look like crap and there is random html code now scattered throughout the text of articles.
 
Tony Crocker":14dajqvq said:
Many of the pictures don't display now, the tables still look like crap and there is random html code now scattered throughout the text of articles.

Read. The. Announcement. I'm still cleaning all of that crap up. With nearly 11,000 articles that's going to take a while, especially after four 18-hour days spent just getting it to this point. I haven't even showered since Thursday. :-# And if you knew how much extraneous $hit is included in the code for those tables you submit to me you'd be amazed that I even get them to display at all.
 
I also checked the archives. As the Forum has not changed in appearance the archives are also the same, as I expected.

Why are tables such an ordeal? Software such as Wordpress have no problem with them. I am trying to be constructive here. Perhaps people such as Patrick and Harvey44 would not have cut back their FTO participation in favor of their own blogs so much if FTO's platform had more flexibility.
 
Tony Crocker":1yokc9xr said:
Why are tables such an ordeal? Software such as Wordpress has no problem with them.

Because you create them in Microsoft and as a result they have an absurd number of proprietary tags that are not interpreted by HTML.
 
Interesting stuff. I think I like it. Though I still vote with Tony on at least the visibility of the feature articles.

Mobile is much streamlined... thank you. I'll have to try to post using it to see if tap-a-talk is still under consideration (by me anyway).
 
EMSC":dp39s1oj said:
Mobile is much streamlined... thank you. I'll have to try to post using it to see if tap-a-talk is still under consideration (by me anyway).

Just to clarify...the new mobile site is for everything except the forums. The forums run on a separate platform. For the forums, Tapatalk is still the best mobile option.
 
Admin":3017weqz said:
With nearly 11,000 articles that's going to take a while, especially after four 18-hour days spent just getting it to this point.
You should have hired a programmer. After all, what's your hourly billable rate?

Admin":3017weqz said:
I haven't even showered since Thursday.
Um....gross.
 
Admin":2vyq4u95 said:
It's even better now for touchscreen smart phones

FYI, actually the last couple of days my phone just loads up the full desktop version of FTO and no longer the mobile site... (Android 2.2 with stock browser)
 
EMSC":241zj5vr said:
Admin":241zj5vr said:
It's even better now for touchscreen smart phones

FYI, actually the last couple of days my phone just loads up the full desktop version of FTO and no longer the mobile site... (Android 2.2 with stock browser)

I actually use Dolphin HD instead of the stock browser so I just loaded FTO via the stock Android browser for the first time. It correctly loaded the smart phone version. I'm therefore guessing that you have a preference for the desktop version stored in cookies. From the desktop version simply click the "view mobile site" link at the bottom of any non-forum page.

Sent from my SPH-D700 using Tapatalk
 
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