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.

[Kyle]

You guys are awesome!
I like seeing some of the funny quotes in the portal though.

[Katie Reynolds]

Originally Posted by Brandon Martus

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.

The thread is here; thanks to everyone who has responded so far! Still looking for some dates (specifically for PARC, Bash, BattleCry, Ramp Riot and River Rage!!) Please post in the above thread if you have any dates for past or future off-season events.

You guys are great; thanks!

[Cory]

Brandon, I will love you forever and never ask another thing of you if you make the picture galleries searchable. Well...maybe not never but for awhile at least

[Bharat Nain]

Good stuff Brandon. And yes, Jess Jank and Katie Reynolds are some people who put in an incredible amount of work, and yet are rarely appreciated. Good work - keep it up.

[Conor Ryan]

your doing some great stuff, let us know if you need us to help. With no major robot work or major competitions to go to i think we all have some extra time.
Keep up the spectacular work.

[Brandon Martus]

I'm excited. Probably too much, but eh, I'm a big geek.

vBulletin is releasing 3.5 this summer (we're on 3.0.7 now). They skipped right from 3.0 to 3.5 because of some of the major changes and enhancements* made to the software. Most of the changes are for the moderation, administration, and core software -- but the core software changes will allow me to write some really cool interfaces for the new image gallery, white papers, and other new features I am planning.

So, they're planning a public beta in June, and we'll probably upgrade to that so I can get the new features going with the new software before next season.

* I just noticed they used one of my posts from 2002 in one of the screenshots. My username is mister on their forums. That's weird.

[Joe Johnson]

Originally Posted by Brandon Martus

I'm excited. Probably too much, but eh, I'm a big geek.

vBulletin is releasing 3.5 this summer (we're on 3.0.7 now). They skipped right from 3.0 to 3.5 because of some of the major changes and enhancements* made to the software. Most of the changes are for the moderation, administration, and core software -- but the core software changes will allow me to write some really cool interfaces for the new image gallery, white papers, and other new features I am planning.

So, they're planning a public beta in June, and we'll probably upgrade to that so I can get the new features going with the new software before next season.

* I just noticed they used one of my posts from 2002 in one of the screenshots. My username is mister on their forums. That's weird.

Sound Great Brandon. By the way, slashdot recently reminded me of one of the coolest features on the web the WayBackMachine. Which is

The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

The name is a reference to one of my favorite cartoons of my youth: Peabody's Improbable History



Anyway, I used www.waybackmachine.org to find the names of some of the folks who helped make ChiefDelphi.com what it is today (one was Brain Deplae who used to use the screen name "attitoad" often back then -- nice guy but he took a buyout from Delphi and I've lost touch with him -- he wrote the first perl scripts that ran the message boards on our site).

As awesome as our current site is (thanks Brandon) it is hard to remember our primative roots.

The net was new and untested when we started all this. Check it out.

For what it is worth.

Joe J.


P.S.
If you have time, I suggest you check out the old versions of our first domain name before we became ChiefDelphi.com. Just enter "www.pchs-delphi.com" into the waybackmachine search.

It is equally interesting to see old "www.usfirst.org" verisions. JJ

[Brandon Martus]

Originally Posted by Joe Johnson

If you have time, I suggest you check out the old versions of our first domain name before we became ChiefDelphi.com. Just enter "www.pchs-delphi.com" into the waybackmachine search.

It is true ... you do learn something new every day. 'pchs-delphi.com' is news to me.