Next?

[Brandon Martus]

Hey. It was great to get to meet all of you (and see those that I already knew) this past week. I was overwhelmed with the number of people who came up and introduced themselves. Thank you for that.

So now what? As my dad (Mike Martus) said at the Web Hug, we are working on plans for how to improve (content, speed, reliability, rules, etc) in the near future. The new features / improvements on my plate that I will be working on first can be found on my todo list, but I will most likely be starting with these, probably in this order:

Picture Gallery. We are going to add a bunch of features that will make it easier to find pictures, describe them, add comments (visible on the page, as well as the new thread), etc, etc.

White Papers. We will be adding search, better categories, editing, revision support, multiple attachments, etc.

Spotlight System. We will be categorizing the spotlights so that they show up in appropriate places. The serious/inspirational/FIRST-related ones will show on the portal, General, Competition, etc. The funny/forum-specific/etc ones will show up in Chit-Chat, and other places.

Event Attendance. jessjank. and Katie Reynolds have a thread in the Off-Season forum about this, but I wanted to announce it here so that you can help them out if you haven't seen the thread. They are mining a bunch of data related to past events. (Name, Date, etc). Once they have it, I will enter it into the Attendance system, and you can then check off if you were at a particular event. The system will also have future events, which fulfills the main purpose of the system .. but I thought it would be fun to keep track of where you've been (and who else was there). The actual use of this system is probably not going to be ready until late Summer, but it's never too early to start getting data of past (and future) events.

More about all of these as they happen.