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New Bouldering Site - Bouldr |
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6-Feb-2007 1:24:42 AM
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Hi everybody,
Hope that I'm not being a nuisance by posting this here - if I am, then I apologise.
I was hoping that I could get a little feedback on a new site that a mate of mine and I have put together: Bouldr - we have just made a big release, and I'd love to know what everyone on here thinks about it.
Any constructive criticism or suggestions welcome!
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6-Feb-2007 8:22:58 AM
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I get,
Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
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6-Feb-2007 9:09:50 AM
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me too.
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6-Feb-2007 10:27:53 AM
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works for me.
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6-Feb-2007 10:28:51 AM
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Looks pretty cool. Might add a few local problems.
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6-Feb-2007 10:35:28 AM
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Wheres the actual content (ie bouldering guides?) I either can't find it or it doesn't exist.
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6-Feb-2007 11:25:31 AM
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Still not working for me :(
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6-Feb-2007 11:27:00 AM
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Finally did work for me rodw...
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6-Feb-2007 1:09:45 PM
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Works for me as I zoomed in on me sitting at my desk not working!!
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7-Feb-2007 3:23:41 AM
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Apologies for that, people!
Looks like the server died on us for a little while. Should be up now.
Not the greatest first impression, I'll admit, but take a look around, and tell me what you think.
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7-Feb-2007 3:24:58 AM
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Thanks gordoste,
We have a whole bunch of improvements in the pipe, so any constructive criticism would be great!
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9-Feb-2007 4:32:11 PM
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Works for me. Like the concept. As content is added should be a valuable resource.
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9-Feb-2007 4:49:51 PM
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My suggestiosn for making a site 'popular' is to invest some serious time into populating the database
and creating your own content before 'unleashing' it on the world. MikeB did that well with the launch of
Chockstone. He had created so much of what you see here in the articles, guides and galleries BEFORE
he went online. Unfortunatly 99% of people are just lurkers so don't expect anyone to rush in and
populate your database for you - especially when there are similar systems in place at rockclimbing.com,
aca.org.au, thecrag.com and tasclimb.com (to name a few!). It doesn't matter how many fancy features
are there - if there isn't a reason to return you probably won't get much traffic. Its all about CONTENT!
Sorry to be a bit of a pessimist - i've just seen a lot of sites come and go due to a lack of real information
or enterainment.
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9-Feb-2007 5:34:59 PM
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must be a UK? based site.. .
there are 243 problems listed in the UK.. not that many for a site that has been online for 1year.
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10-Feb-2007 3:53:15 AM
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Yeah - I appreciate the point that Bouldr has been around for a while - thing is, we have only just started to tell people about it - up until the end of January, we had just been working on getting the interface right, and developing a set of features that, though minimal, give us a good starting point.
We have 318 problems listed on the site at the moment - on the 31st of January this year, we had only 80 - that's a fair amount of growth in a short time, and I understand what you say when you talk about 90% of users being lurkers, but the 10% that do contribute do so very well! I posted a message on a UK Bouldering website, so that is why most of the climbs are clustered around the UK - people on that forum then suggested I post on a couple of other forums to get climbers from around the world interested. I picked Chockstone because after a little reading, I could see that on the whole, climbers here are very level-headed, and I need as much feedback as possible to get Bouldr right.
We have kept Bouldr very focused - Chockstone has a lot of information not dedicated to routes, which is great (not a criticism by any means) - but we're only focusing on building a worldwide database of climbing routes and bouldering problems. We have a whole bunch of nifty ideas and plans to allow Bouldr to become a fantastic resource, and to be useful wherever you may be, but to get there, we need to make people aware we exist.
Thanks for the feedback, too - I'm going to have a talk to my mate, and see if we can provide more incentives to add climbs and get involved.
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12-Feb-2007 10:27:26 AM
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Hi Bouldr Matt,
You might be intersted to see the already heavily populated
http://www.climb.org.au/
Alot of people have invested some serious effort into creating guides for this site. I really think IDEALLY
with so many route databases out there, that people need to create some sort of 'standard' route databse
firlds which can be cross linked to other online databases. I for one don't have the energy to re-enter
routes into yet another database.
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12-Feb-2007 12:48:25 PM
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Neil has a really important point.
But I don't think a standard format will fix the problem. It's easy to transfer data fields and build importers. It's much harder to reconcile two conflicting sources of information.
What is needed is a single point of truth for route/problem records. That's what the route register at www.climb.org.au is for.
BTW I wholeheartedly applaud your efforts Matt.
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12-Feb-2007 9:53:09 PM
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er, yeah a whole bunch of public API's would be useful for mashing all these 'single points of truth' together in different ways.. Not least of which would be to make mobile.thecrag.com...
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13-Feb-2007 9:30:25 AM
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Okay, let's think this through. How do you think it would work?
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