Before the season started I’d wanted to launch a new version of the website but time caught up with me. I’d got as far as setting up the server in a top secret, ultra secure, data center. Currently it is sitting almost idle. :-(

However the delay in launching gives us the chance to discuss what we want from this website. I’ve started a topic on snow types which I want to use for trip reports so people can describe the snow conditions they encounter. Image and GPS uploads are on the cards. Maybe an Android interface?

The ability to upload pikkies as opposed to posting links would be welcome. I also like the idea of GPS uploads.

Talking of an Android Interface… how about Windows Phone 7 too (OK, I may be in a minority there...)

More seriously, if you want to interface to many devices then an XML view is the best approach so that people can write interfaces on different platforms and talk to the mothership using XML.

XML will be the native format and will be accessible via a RESTful type interface. That was the solution I was going to use for Android so it sounds like we are on the same wavelength here.

Ever thought about expanding to other countries?? I work, ski and live in St Anton, Austria, and still read your site on a regular basis to se whats going on over your way! Austrian site would be sweet.....

davidof - 19 January 2011 01:13 PM

XML will be the native format and will be accessible via a RESTful type interface. That was the solution I was going to use for Android so it sounds like we are on the same wavelength here.

Excellent. I can’t make any promises but I’d be interested in hacking together a WinPhone7 client based on this…

niallp - 19 January 2011 01:30 PM

Ever thought about expanding to other countries?? I work, ski and live in St Anton, Austria, and still read your site on a regular basis to se whats going on over your way! Austrian site would be sweet.....

I’m a big fan of St Anton and would love to see more coverage. I don’t think this site is *only* about France, but I suspect that the focus remains there because a lot of users (and admins) live and ski there.

Out of interest, where do you work in St Anton? I was a ski bum there many seasons ago… happy days!

Thanks for all the great work David. I’ve been rather happy with the current Pistehors, so at first I couldn’t think of anything new to suggest. But now that others have taken the lead, I’ve come up with these . . .

For me more helpful than a GPS track for trip reports or tour descriptions is just a little (embedded?) map showing the rough location of some point on the tour.
With a convenient way for the person entering the tour to interactively pick the point on the map - (even if they don’t know its lat/long or were not carrying a GPS on the tour).

My problem is that there are so many place names in the European mountains, that lots of times reading a report / description I don’t recognize the name and so I have no clue where it is (? Pyrenees ?). So I spend 5 or 10 minutes doing web searches on the name, starting up my mapping software, and at last discovering either: (a) the tour is in some different mountain range 8 hours drive from here.
(b) it’s one close by that I’ve done before, but I know it by a different name.

News:
I like the current idea of displaying recent forum threads on the R side of the News page. In fact I’d prefer smaller font to display more of them ... or perhaps
also I’d prefer to see not only new threads, but also notice of some older threads that have had recent new posts. I agree with giving priority to whole new threads, but I also like to get a quick overview of recent activity on older threads included in the main view on the News page.

Ken

I agree with KenR, a great site that I log in to almost daily for a “fix” (often several times)
An Android App would be great - self interest here.
Ability to scroll down through a significant history of the “Most Recent Topics” and Most Popular Threads” sections would be great.
A Forum section similar to above that ranks the latest forum updates to existing posts (as per KenR suggestion).
A section where members could report actual daily conditions in their area and easily and quickly upload a picture, preferably from their Samartphone.
An area where members could (if they so wished) broadcast their next day tour and invite a limited number of others along - though this could be disastrous
Oh, and how about an annual conference (with emphasis on lots of good food, wine and beer)in say Grenoble where we can all meet each other????
Many thanks for an already great site.

phil - 19 January 2011 04:28 PM

A section where members could report actual daily conditions in their area and easily and quickly upload a picture, preferably from their Smartphone.

There’s a forum focused on ski conditions I’m part of where I’ve noticed some people have started posting messages from their smartphones—by sending them to a specific Email address. (It’s on YahooGroups, so actually this has been a standard way to post for lotsa years). 

Maybe there’s some smartphone app which can accomplish the same thing without email. (I don’t have a smartphone—still living successfully w just texting + voice—too cheap to pay for a data contract, waiting for the right pricing.)

Ken

Might be way OTT but I use this site for cycle routes and it works very well.
http://www.bikely.com/
Something like it would be fantastic.

Steve Haigh - 19 January 2011 02:17 PM

niallp - 19 January 2011 01:30 PM

Ever thought about expanding to other countries?? I work, ski and live in St Anton, Austria, and still read your site on a regular basis to se whats going on over your way! Austrian site would be sweet.....

I’m a big fan of St Anton and would love to see more coverage. I don’t think this site is *only* about France, but I suspect that the focus remains there because a lot of users (and admins) live and ski there.

Out of interest, where do you work in St Anton? I was a ski bum there many seasons ago… happy days!

Nice! Im working in Lux Alpinae hoel bar now but worked in Scottys bar, Piccadilly bar and Museum restaurant before. Whered you work??

I love pistehors.com but it is without doubt a niche place even within the online skiing community. I mean, we talk a lot about gear, conditions and avalanches in France and Francophone Switzerland.

It would be nice to open it up to the world. I would love to be able to browse by area and get the same grade of information that I already read here about France. The problem is, there are already many other forum communities for this. It seems that each region has its own forum.

And then theres the divide between backcountry skiers and ski tourers. If your backcountry / extreme your more likely to post in TGR forums. If your pure touring, more likely to hang out here or a regional forum.

If we could redesign pistehors to offer a platform for all of these people to come together that would be amazing… but a big job!

Hi David
I have just registered.  I followed the development of the recent fatal avalanche in Tignes on Toviere.

Anyhow, as a sideline business, I supply hosting and other services for content management systems via Web application frameworks using DotNetNuke (DNN7).

I can see you are well versed in coding, and what DNN7 can offer out of the box is a fully functional Portal that can contain further portals and websites.  On top of that, the site owner chooses the business modules from those included as standard, or buys other modules from the store, or develops new modules in-house.
In other words, it’s like buying a car chassis ready built, and adding custom modules to finish it, rather than making the chassis, wheels and gears from metal blanks every time you want a new car.

The functionality is completely separate from the visual design which is provided by simply uploading a theme to the skinning engine.  There are page skins and module skins.

It provides Straight away a full CMS with authoring and approval workflow, membership facility, social groups, social networking and messaging, blogging, a Forum (Like pistehors is now), documents repository, photo sharing, project management apps.

The user architecture is by Security Group (same as a role).  So groups of different levels of user are grouped and each group performs a separate role.  e.g. Host; Site admin; Forum Admins, Forum Moderators; Page editor; Specific admins for each business function, and so on.

The core is written in c# but we developers don’t work in the core.  The opensource core team of hundreds of international experts does that.  We extend the system by developing business modules.  These are actually usercontrols developed within a template project format that automatically builds in 3 types of housekeeping functionality.

The commercial version is royalty free, and is available to download free as an opensource licence.

I can offer you a free demo installation on my server for your use. 

You could easily install it yourself on any Windows Server.  The default database is SQL Server, but other databases are possible.

As for cost, If you host it yourself, you’d bear only your internal costs.
I could host it for you on my reseller capacity for an annual fee, plus fixed price work for development or design.
However, you could have access to the website control panel, do your own design, admin, maintenance etc.

It could be funded by selling subscriptions to include an email account and an independent SMTP server so that people can send email on the move without needing to have a gmail account.

There is also built-in the ability to automatically bill for click-thru banner ads.

Please get in touch if you’d like to get a demo and really see what can be done.
There is one of my demo sites at http://www.asperto.net.  Just go on to it and register.  You’ll get standard register user status.  I’ll then provide you with a page admin username.

As for other changes - I think most social nets now have real names not nicknames, and this engenders more civilised and accountable interactions.
Many thanks
David

David
Further to the above on DNN,

A couple more features:
There is out-of-the-box support for international localization - so that the menus etc automatically appear in any language.  You would set up administrators to support each language.
There is support for content localization too - so you can support posting in multiple languages.

You could sell professional subscriptions to others who are running customer/ sports coaching services - and support them with apps for schedules, calendars, room bookings, mentoring services - and so on.

There are many choices of On-Line shopping apps.

For basic blogging and forums: there is a wysiwig editor that resembles Microsoft Word and which supports html and photo upload.

> I think most social nets now have real names not nicknames, and this engenders more civilised and accountable interactions.

It is not exactly the far west over here to be truthful. This is a fairly minority specialized backcountry forum so people don’t tend to duke it out online. Personally I’m not a big fan of the Facebook real name stuff but I’ve never ever visited facebook in my life so don’t know much about it.

I will take a look at your interesting proposal but it sounds way too advanced to be fair. I’ve been very tied up with work over the last 12-18 months so it I’ve really not been concentrating on PH as much as I could.

cheers,
David