Finished? – No!
Well, the plan was to have the site finished by now.
However, with other work commitments and a number of technical problems work has slowed.
Problems and solutions:
Bloat – Some of the web pages for skiing/boarding areas in particular countries have become ‘bloated’ and are in the region of 100 kb. These pages are clearly slow to load and also ‘expensive’ in terms of server resources. An example of such a page is the introduction page for the US. At present there are around 700+ ski/boarding areas listed for the US in the system, and this takes time to load. The solution has been to divide the resorts in to states (this data was already in the database) and make the user go ‘country -> US -> State -> Ski / Boarding resorts’.
Web-services – At present the site uses some web-services to automatically add and update information. Incorporating these has been a bit of a problem, namely: a) getting the information to display as required and b) ’storing’ the information within the database so as to avoid multiple requests to the service for the same information.
