Thoughts & Musings Blog

This page contains a running log about our group & recent web site changes. For general information, please see our FAQ. Note this website and all design decisions noted below are copyright Rob Laddish, all rights reserved.

2011, June 9+ - Performance re-write of internals

This work is still in progress and not yet complete ... more to come later!

Well, it happened again. Victims of our own success and some sloppy coding on my part, our large list of users and events surpassed the small memory limits the ISP puts on us. Sigh. Some of pages broke and stopped working. It's not the most fun thing to work on, as it takes a lot of time to improve the internals, and if done well, you won't notice anything. Good news is that a bunch of the inner workings have been improved, so we should be able to at least double our users and events without problem. Oh, and some of the pages should load much faster too! As always, please let me know if you run into problems.

2011, June 7 - UI Improvements

While tinkering around with the internals, I did make some small UI improvements.

Welcome Page

You will only see a difference after you've logged in.
We've added some more information to the event listing and a bunch of hyperlinks. This makes it easy to jump to the information you need without having to view the event page first.
Any event that you've responded to will now have a small thumb icon next to it. You can click on the thumb and edit your response.
Photo links changed from #1, #2, etc. to camera icons. Now you can hover over the link and it will tell you whose pictures they are. For added fun, we have several camera icons, and we alternate between them.
The star rating at the end of some past events changed from text to icons also. They are a hyperlink to the reviews & responses page. That will show you why others thought it was great or could have been done better next time.
Upcoming events will now show how many people have signed up yes, and that is a link to the signup/response page for the event.
Many of these hyperlinks are hidden (they look like regular icons or black text) to avoid making the page too busy. We might change this later. They all have hover text, so if you move your cursor around, you'll see them and what they do. They are not required, they just make things easier, so no problems if anyone misses them.

Events Page

Before each event name, there is a thumbs icon indicating your response (if any) to that event. Likewise, the background row for that event is lightly shaded in the same color. Like the welcome page, you can select the hyperlink to change your response or review the event.
The top part of the page is much simpler and cleaner. The search/filter table at the top of the page is now hidden by default. Select "advanced search" to make it show up. The list of commands all show up on one line, and the list of years is condensed to a single line & skips some years too.

Event Responses Page

It's great - we have a few new hike leaders. One problem that they've run into, that every leader has seen, is that sometimes someone will join a challenging hike or event who isn't aware of their capabilities and can't do it. These cases are painful for everyone, often someone stays behind with them, and it will slow down the whole event 2 or more hours. So the goal here is to indentify possible cases where this could occur so the event lead can follow up if needed.
The event responses page has a new column. For hikes, it identifies the # of hikes that person has been on and the longest milage hike. If they are new, it says "new member". If it is not a hike, it counts the number of that type of event, and if they've not been on those events (such as snowshoe, camping, canoeing, kayaking) it will say the total # of northbayhikes events they've joined. So ... hike leads can now see the few people who show up as "new member" or max miles is very small and it's a long hike. They don't have to do anything, but if they wish to, they can contact those people just to be sure they're up for a challenging event. Remember - we want our event leaders to have fun too, or they won't lead any events.
Also, the event stats part of the responses page can have 2 hyperlinks. If you select the top one, it will show all events that person has been on, sorted by time. The bottom one will show the same list, but sorted by mileage with the most challenging ones first. Both hyperlinks have hover text that explain what they do before you click on them. Since event lists now highlight with colors and thumbs what events you've been on, it's easy to see the events you have in common.
The page has been cleaned up a bit too - the columns are better lined up. Photo links show up as camera icons in place of user stats in the review section.

Bug fixes

FAQ images on many pages no longer have icky borders when viewed in Internet Explorer.

TODO - remaining work

Selecting thumb links from home or events page should return to those pages after the response is saved. (and not just go to the event)

2011, Feb 7 - Carpool Improvements

Thanks!

First I'd like to thank Paul and Cheryl Grammens. They've done a wonderful job leading most of the events in recent years, and keeping our group alive. Nick, Rich, Richard, and Paula are also doing great work. Awesome! Kerstin and I brought our 1 year old twin daughters on a recent Windsor hike Cheryl led. We hope to see more of you this year!

Carpool Improvements:

Previously our new event forms only allowed 3 options: Santa Rosa Coddingtown, Rohnert Park - Park and Ride, and custom. Recently many other good carpool places have been used. I strive to make event organization as easy as possible, so I've added new selections for:

River Road - Park and Ride
East Santa Rosa - Saint Francis Center
Cotati - Park and Ride
Petaluma - Park and Ride
Sebastopol - Coffee Catz
Sebastopol - Nick's House

Every selection now has a [map] link on the event page that uses google maps. Our carpools page that has more detail is sadly lacking in pictures for all these places. If/when you go to one of the new spots, please take a picture with your camera and send it to me so I can add it to the page. Thanks! I may extend the system later on to allow 3 carpools. Let me know if this is ever needed. Otherwise, simpler is better I think. 2 carpools + meeting at a trailhead is a lot of logistics. I'd hate to imagine another one, and peeps running late and delaying each spot.

Northbayhikes in the news!

Our local paper, the press democrat, has published some great outdoors/hiking articles that include us:

2010, Oct 10: walk amid the colors of the fall
2011, Jan 16: the cool hiking season

2010, Nov 1 - Bug fixes and updates

Bug fixes:

Sometimes a new user will get impatient with waiting for the account to get created, or try to go pack pages to the new account screen and create 2 accounts. We've added some help text in places to try and discourage this. We also try to force the browser to not allow the person to go back to the initial account creation screen. We don't think people really want 2 email invites for everything.

Another bug with events was preventing new invitations from being longer than a few sentences. This has been improved, please use as much text as you'd like when inviting people places.

AOL is a pain with their icons. If someone enters an AOL account on their profile, and later they leave AOL, AOL will give us a broken instant messenger icon which will make the member listing huge. (and any other place that user shows up) We can't check the icon ourselves. So ... now all IM icons are limited to a width of 15. This may not fix the problem in all browsers.

Enhancements:

Our in-browser editor for your personal description and event fields has been upgraded from an old version of FCKeditor to CKeditor. The newer version adds spell check and thesaurus abilities.

Please note - Kerstin and I have twin daughters, yay! But this also means my response time is really slow. Apologies for month long delays in some of our emails. This should improve next year.

2010, Apr 13 - Bug fixes and event limits

Today we introduced a way of limiting the number of yes signups for an event. Sometimes we can't bring many people to a site or the organizer prefers smaller groups. It gets very hectic and less fun to manage when we have over 30 people on a hike. We use the maybe responses as a waiting list, but it is up to you to come back and check for openings. It's very likely there are a few bugs to be worked out and better wording changes, please let us know if you run into a problem. For more details, please see our detailed FAQ.

Over the last couple months we ran into several bugs on the access logging & fixed them. It should be pretty stable now!

2010, Jan 06 - New web based responses are here + some access logging

I sent out a short email today to announce the new web based response system is now in place! When you respond, all others will see your response. This will help see who else is going and foster a better community. It's been a long road developing it, kudos to TJ and Paul for reviewing it and providing feedback.

This one might bore you, but I wanted to share to be transparent on our access logging. While working on performance improvements, we realized we have no way to detect "dead accounts". These are people who have since moved on and their old email box doesn't bounce our email invites. Since more users == slower system, we've added some rough last access time logging per account. We look at the last time you've been to the home page, events page, viewed an event, or (if possible) read an email invitation. All this is usually in the web server logs, but we don't have access to them on this server, so we had to roll our own. On the all users page, you'll see a field named last_view that is the latest time any one of these things have happened. We'll wait for a year, and any accounts that appear dead will get an email, if there is no response, we'll deactivate them to keep things running quickly. At some point in the future, we may add this last access time (and perhaps host) for just you on the main page so you can tell the last time you were here.

2009, Dec 27 - Performance improvements & new invite format

As we've been adding users and events, things have been slowing down. Good news - I implemented a cache system that should make all our pages load in 5 seconds or less. (worst case before was about 30 seconds sometimes - yuck!) Please let me know if you see any issues.

I changed the html email invitations to be much smaller and concise - you'll need to select the link to come to our site for full details. This may prompt you to login to our site. We recommend you never log out on your home or work systems, and only logout for public computers such as internet cafe's and libraries. This will cut the login prompts down to once a year.

We made this change for several reasons: (1) many people were going off the email invite, and when circumstances changed (such as the start time or date), they showed up on our web site & it was often missed. (2) when we implement our new web-based response system, you'll only be able to see other peoples responses if you go to the web site. We realize that viewing your email then jumping to the web site is a bit more inconvenient, but hope that the improved interaction & always current information make it more worthwhile.

I tested the new invite format with IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari (latest versions only) as well as the email client with google mail. As there are hundreds of combinations out there, I can't test them all, so there are bound to be a few bugs. As always, please let me know if you see something that looks odd. (besides my picture :)

2009, Dec 23 - New features to share partner invites & others fee/donation events

Happy Holidays from all of us at Northbay Hikes!

On Oct 13 we sent out a survey for your opinion on some site changes. We received ~50 responses & many great suggestions. This post summarizes what we heard and how we're improving the site.

Question #1: There are several other hiking/walking groups in Sonoma County. Occasionally, we do a joint outing. We have the ability to list some of their events on our web site - would you be interested in seeing these options when they're not led by us?

Summary #1: 46 voted yes, 4 voted no ==> yes it is! With some opt out options below ...

Question #2: We've asked before if people are interested in hearing from others on paid events, usually charity, and the response was a pretty solid no. There's a gray area where some places are free but ... have a suggested donation. What are your thoughts here?

Summary #2: 31 voted yes, 15 voted no ==> yes it is! With some opt out options below ... Most said they'd be interested in required donation activities as well.

When designing a program or web site, it's an art to make things seem simple while allowing lots of options. Well, my engineer talents are showing as our user preferences page and events page are chock full of options! So, what are a few more? While people voted yes to both these questions, we got several good suggestions to make these events obvious and the ability for people to opt out. Even better, we will ease into sharing these kinds of events so we can improve the process with your feedback.

First off, we want to make these types of events obvious! This means showing it in several places:

The email subject line for your invitations.
The short event name on the home page.
The title of the event on the main event page.
The "key info" box at the top of each event - makes it stand out!
The name of the event in the long events listing.

We chose the following format:

PARTNER: event name [$5 donation]
Example: LAGUNA: walk from stone road to center [$5 optional donation]
In this case, the name of the other group, or partner, shows up in CAPS at the beginning.
If a $$ amount is needed, it shows up at the end, and we note if it is required or optional, and if it is a fee or a donation.
Since it shows up in the email subject line, it will make it easy for you to skip if you wish.

If this isn't enough for you, we've added the ability to opt out. To do this, login and go to your settings.

Under Contact Information, Set "Filter Email" to all.
Under General Preferences, you can set "Allow Partner Events" to no.
Under General Preferences, you can set "Allow Fee Events" to no.
If you do this, you won't get email invites for those events, but you will see them on our home page and event listing page.

Right now, we only have 1 partner loaded into the system. Some partners prefer we don't share their invites, and some people get email from both places and don't want that either. So ... we'll start slowly, and if there is a bug or if you can suggest a better way, please let us know.

We hope this meets most of your suggestions, and always welcome your feedback!

Happy holidays & see you on the trails in 2010,

Rob

2009, Dec 20 - New web style events on hold for a bit longer

On Oct 13 we announced a plan to make our event pages more interactive. Well ... it's taking a bit longer than I wanted. Paul, TJ, and I met and I demonstrated the new functionality. [Agile/Scrum processes for project management is great!] I got a lot of good feedback and suggestions.

Most of the functionality looked great, but there was 1 feature missing that both TJ and Paul thought had to come now rather than later. This is the ability for an admin or event organizer to create/delete/edit a response. It's important, as we still get emails and the occasional phone call to join a hike, and they need to add it in. So while I hoped to release this in phases, we decided to hold back the first phase until this one was in place.

In the meantime, some other changes have come through:

User settings now requires you to enter the closest city - this lets us better plan carpools and events in the future!
User settings has a new option for "Allow Alternate Carpool" to yes or no. This will be a default value when signing up for new events that allows other members in your area to contact you so you can organize your own carpool. We're still thinking through how to present this information, but it should help groups of people that live far from Paul, TJ, and I. (such as those in Sebastopol)
The events listing page had a face lift - it now looks much cleaner, and we clearly note upcoming vs. past hikes. By default, we'll show photo links, # people, and average ratings for an event when the new event style is released.
A new FAQ icon is added next to some user and event settings. These are help for more complex things when the ? help icon can't show enough info.
We added this new blog page to share updates with you. Occasionally, we'll still send emails, but we'll try to keep them simple and put most of the detail here.

I hope to get the new interactive event pages finished early 2010. After a month of several up to 2am development nights, I burned out and needed to take a break. Our twins will arrive in Feb or March, so I hope to get back into the swing of things soon. Once our daughters arrive I'll have much more important things to do. Besides, you won't want to see spit up all over our pretty web site. :)

2009, Oct 13 - Note on upcoming changes & a survey for partner organizations

This was sent out by email to all our members:

We're pleased to announce some upcoming changes to our web site. They will help bring us closer together as a community. I also have a couple of general questions I'd like your thoughts on for some future changes:

1) There are several other hiking/walking groups in Sonoma County. Occasionally, we do a joint outing. We have the ability to list some of their events on our web site - would you be interested in seeing these options when they're not led by us?

2) We've asked before if people are interested in hearing from others on paid events, usually charity, and the response was a pretty solid no. There's a gray area where some places are free but ... have a suggested donation. What are your thoughts here?

Tangible examples often help - I'll send out a notice for a Laguna Walks event, that has a suggested donation, but is free for us if you want. It will use the new features below, to allow anyone who wants to go to self organize any carpools you want.

Please respond to this email with your thoughts within the next 5 days or so, and I'll tally the results. Thanks!

Now on to the new web site changes:

A) When you respond to an event, your response will be posted to the event page on our web site for all to see. This will help others see who is going, and help to self-organize non-standard carpools. It should be a big help to event organizers - as that role can take 2-3 hours per event responding to emails and listing the names on paper.

B) Posting your response to the web site will not send any emails to the organizer or anyone else. The option to have this happen is there, and will be implemented at a later time.

C) After an event is over, please come back to the event page and rate your experience. You will be able to rate it from 1-5 stars, enter a comment, and post a link to any pictures you have for the event. All reviews will show up at the top of the event page. Later on we may add an option to the event listing page to sort all events by the highest ratings, and link to peoples pictures from our static pictures site.

As always, there will be bugs. Please email me directly if you run into a problem. By default, all events will use the old email style of responses unless the organizer specifically asks for the new web style. This way previously planned events will continue using the old style, and if we run into a bunch of bugs, we'll fix them before starting another event with the new style. If all heck breaks loose, you will always be able to respond to your email invitation and it will go directly to the organizer.

See you on the trail,

Rob Laddish (rob@laddish.net)

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