Maps

The ski resort xslt page now incorporate a link to Michelin maps page. Using the tagging mechanism ##Location## and ##ParentLocation## are used to create the query required to display a map centred on the resort.

More work could be performed to use other map providers for non European locations such as US, NZ and Japan as these are not provided by Michelin.

As the tag replacement is performed post translation the location and parent location is not known until after the translation and therefore the translation cannot take into account these values. This means that the translation would not be able to dynamically create the hyperlink, using different providers based upon the country.

This means that a client side script would need to be implemented to hyperlink to the appropriate map provider.

AquaMAD

I've now bought the AquaMAD domain.
The placeholder can be found at www.AquaMAD.co.uk.

I should now integrate the news parser to atleast provide up to the minute news on water sports.

In Japan

Now I've arrived in Japan I've been working hard on SnowMAD. The following activities have been completed:

1. Tidied up CSS a bit.
2. Entered more resorts details.
3. Applied for more advertising partnerships.
4. Integrated rotating adverts from Tradedoubler instead of static ones on the dynamic pages.
5. Integrated a second GoogleAds text data entry. This appears only on gear pages with specific data within it.
   This is achieved by the gear transform xslt looking for gear details in the xml page. If it finds some it transforms it into the googleads script. This is simple because it is not based upon the content of the page.
6. Integrated an ebay panel on gear pages.
   As above xslt transforms the gear data in the xml into the ebay script tag. However, the ebay URL needs to be amended to point to the correct category, country and search for the item name.
   Some of this info is not in the XML and only available in the ASPX engine. The XSLT therfer pumps out a TAG that can be parsed by the ASP.NET post transform.
   The above case parses ##EbayLocation## into the ebay country code of the visitor.
7. Applied to ebay to gain commission from Ebay affiliation. No answer from commission junction!
8. Developed and Integrated an external parser to gain extra data on items. Works using AJAX (javascript in the client accessing server side processes)
   The client javascript (pumped in by the xslt transform as above) calls the parser aspx page specifying the resource that is required. The parser ASPX is heavily cached so as to reduce the access to the remote data source and also reduce the overhead of the parser.
   This technology may be shifted from client to be ASP.NET server based so that the external content gets indexed too.
9. Added a news parser.
   I have developed a newsparser. It is a component that reads RSS and displays it. I've then called it from a new dynamic home page so that includes up to date news (collected by google).

The more I do the more needs to be done..

I've now got a nasty problem too. The logs are showing that the search engine bots are getting 500 errors when accessing the site.. That's right the bots no one else. Once I've worked out how to fix it or even test it I'll post..

Advertising

Over the past few weeks I've worked on the advertising aspect of the site. I have joined Adsense and also trade doublers.
Both of them seem farely straight forward but I really need to get some traffic to the site to be able to actually generate any income.

Still to do

Things still on the list...

1. Review engine
2. Actually writing some of the content.. There's a lot of blank pages on there at the moment
3. Find.. To allow users to find gear, resorts etc based on their criteria.. This needs an XML generating aspx page that effectively builds a huge XML representation of the site (including the data files) so that search criteria can be presented to the users dynamically based by what info is in the data files and then data files can be located based upon the values picked by the user..
4. The idea is to have the XML aspx page heavily cached so that it's like a regularly updated index... We'll have to see how it works out..
5. Advertising

Thoughts from others would be most gratefully received

Christmas Dev

Over the festive period I've put in a few hours. Here's what's been added:

1. Added gear content structure.
2. Removed nasty error: display on the production system. (I'd forgotten to deploy the dll for snowMAD)
3. Added a page called sitemap.aspx. This page dumps out all the nodes in the site structure dynamically. With certain parameters it's also used to feed the google sitemaps programme with the correctly formatted site map xml. Can be found at www.SnowMAD.co.uk/sitemap.aspx.
4. Added a bravenet free forum. can be found at http://pub6.bravenet.com/forum/468183105/
5. Added a link to do a price check on froogle on the gear xslt. (Needs more work. Currently provides two checks 1. from the name tag and 2 from the parent foldername which is displayed within a span on the page. [javascript on the button looks up the span innerHTML and passes that as the product name parameter to froogle] Found www.Kelkoo.co.uk had no skis so went with froogle.
6. Kept trying to get listed on google.. Arrgh. The logs are showing that googlebot's visiting but I'm not getting listed. The sitemaps page states "Data is not currently available. Please check back later for statistics about your site. " This is going to start being a problem. I've got listings on MSN and Yahoo at least:
   http://search.msn.co.uk/results.aspx?q=site%3Awww.snowmad.co.uk&FORM=MSNH&srch_type=0&cp=65001

Experimenting with search

Of course one hugely important aspect will be the search optimisation. I'm also experimenting with Google searches and sitemaps to see whether I can get the site to come up in some searches.

You might be able to see the difference between the photo portal and snowmad is that snowmad has crawler friendly hyperlinks generated by the application whereas photo portal relied on asp.net link buttons.

I'll probably experiment with sitemaps to include an existing site for Total Register Machines Ltd (family connection!)

Another weekend's work

And another few hours spent experimenting. The latest is at: http://www.snowmad.co.uk/snowmad.htm This includes a whole bunch of resorts aligned to countries. The way these relationships work is a simple folder structure on the web server.

Flipperweb starts his web sites

This blog is the story of the birth of flipperweb sites.
For some time there has been the flipperweb photo portal at http://flipper.gotdns.com. This was the start and is also the foundation for my current work. http://www.snowmad.co.uk/snowmad.htm

SnowMAD will be the place to get info on anything to do with skiing and snowboarding.
As you can see it's not pretty, there's no real content and it's slow. It's hosted on an old laptop at home right now. The work has gone into converting the photo portal engine into a cms for snowmad. Also converting it to a css based site with xml and xsl transformations. Go look at Arabba in Italy on the site to see where it's going.

There are plans to allow members to upload reviews of gear and resorts also for members to post piste maps or resort maps too. They'll be forums and I'm looking into the idea of linking onto a holiday selling website too.

I plan to follow it up with a scuba related site too.