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Edmonton, Alberta
Canada
340 Posts |
Posted - 04/01/2011 : 07:32 AM
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Do to lack of interest and skyrocketing operating costs, I am sad to say that I can no longer support http://summitsearch.org. The site has been costing me $300 a month and despite the many months I have worked on it, I can no longer afford to pay to keep it online.
I have received an offer from Robin Tivy to purchase the site. Although, in his terms I must remove all the Google maps on the site and force users to submit photo and trip report waypoints manually. I also must put the photos and trip reports into a pay section of the site. The reasoning behind the removal of the Google maps is that it is distracting and cheapens the site by offering people an easy way of obtaining coordinates when they should be using their GPS or pouring over paper maps to get their coordinates. Auto linking of photos to mountains is to be disabled as well because it makes it too easy to submit photos and people are less likely to put a lot of effort in their submissions. Instead, people will have to use mountain ids to link their photos to mountains. I am hardly in a position to disagree.
Once again, I am saddened to have to resort to this however current financial realities offer me little in the way of choice.
The site will remain online for the remainder of the day. Enjoy it while you can. |
Edited by - ecoulthard on 04/01/2011 09:18 AM
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Hope, BC
Canada
7131 Posts |
Posted - 04/01/2011 : 09:06 AM
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What on earth would cost you $300/ month owning a website?
What I seen, could be hosted for about $150 a year or so? |
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Squamish, British Columbia
Canada
1030 Posts |
Posted - 04/01/2011 : 09:15 AM
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I've worked in web based companies for a few years and all I can say is SEO!, SEO!, SEO!.
Your site looks to be a great resource, but I've searched for a lot of the information on your site and it has never come up to my knowledge.
It also looks to be an older Web 1.0 site. Utilizing social media would of helped in driving traffic organically to your site.
It's a shame to see it go as I'm only finding out about it now from this post (the URL is malformed in the OP btw) What will you do with the information contained within the site? |
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Edmonton, Alberta
Canada
340 Posts |
Posted - 04/01/2011 : 09:17 AM
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| A lot of the code on SummitSearch is very computationally intensive. To run it, I have to use a lot of resources which have been costing much more than I bargained for. For example, when a new park is added to the site a lot of computations need to be performed to compute which mountains lie within the boundary of the park. When a trip report is added a lot of computations need to be done to determine which parks and ranges the trip lies within. In order for the site to remain responsive to everyone while these computations are taking place, I need to pay Dreamhost for more resources which costs money. 10$ per 100MB of RAM. |
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Edmonton, Alberta
Canada
340 Posts |
Posted - 04/01/2011 : 09:25 AM
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quote:
Originally posted by leimrod
I've worked in web based companies for a few years and all I can say is SEO!, SEO!, SEO!.
Your site looks to be a great resource, but I've searched for a lot of the information on your site and it has never come up to my knowledge.
It also looks to be an older Web 1.0 site. Utilizing social media would of helped in driving traffic organically to your site.
It's a shame to see it go as I'm only finding out about it now from this post (the URL is malformed in the OP btw) What will you do with the information contained within the site?
Lack of SEO is probably a big contributing factor in the lack of interest. I think, I would need people to link to the site more to have it show up in search results. But this is a chicken and egg problem. I have noticed Google doing a lot of crawling on the site, though.
I fixed the url in the previous post. The site is being sold to Robin who may put it back online at some point. But it will not include a lot of the automated features that distinguished the site from other encyclopedias. The information on the site is available under the same license as wikipedia, so you are free to copy and redistribute the information provided you include the same license. |
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surrey
Canada
650 Posts |
Posted - 04/01/2011 : 7:15 PM
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| Thats sad to hear you have been wokring on this for a few years now. I thought you "disliked" Robin I'm surprised you sold it to him. |
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Kootenay Bud
2695 Posts |
Posted - 04/01/2011 : 7:34 PM
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| April 1. |
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Hope, BC
Canada
7131 Posts |
Posted - 04/01/2011 : 8:59 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by sandy
April 1.
I think you nailed it. Theres no way he pays $300 for hosting his site per month LOL
Charged that much for memory usage. You could rent 3 decent servers for that price. |
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Edmonton, Alberta
Canada
340 Posts |
Posted - 04/02/2011 : 12:34 AM
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Happy April Fool Day Everyone.
Just a shameless publicity stunt. Summitsearch is here to stay, forever.
Thank god I don't have to pay $300 per month for memory usage. But $10 per 100MB of RAM isn't far off. Dreamhost charges $5 per 100MB of RAM for a private server. I have 1GB of RAM allocated for summitsearch which costs $50 per month. In addition to this, I get free support and backups for the site database. Not sure that this is the best deal, but I think it is at least decent.
A shared server would cost ~$10 per month. It would be difficult for development, since I cannot just install what I need on the server to get something working on the site. I have to settle for what they already have installed or hope they agree to install something that I need.
I would never sell the site to Robin. I don't dislike Robin. Rather, I dislike the way he has behaved toward me in the past year. I certainly would never agree to the terms I mentioned in the first email.
This is my first time trying out an April fools joke so I hope there's no hard feelings.
Enjoy the rest of the spring skiing everyone. |
Edited by - ecoulthard on 04/02/2011 12:35 AM |
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463 Posts |
Posted - 04/02/2011 : 12:58 AM
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You're not selling?!
But I was SO looking forward to fiddling around with formatting those waypoints and having my trip reports re-linked by admin with the wrong mountain.
And, and.. looking at a map of mountain names concocted from behind a computer screen.
Oh well.
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Calgary, Alberta
Andorra
3830 Posts |
Posted - 04/02/2011 : 07:59 AM
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| The 'selling to Robin' was what gave it away to me. No way. |
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Jasper, ab
Canada
1041 Posts |
Posted - 04/02/2011 : 09:03 AM
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| So I'm coming back to town after spending a great day off near the icefields, my only day off in 25 days I might add, when ,due to the new cell towers on the parkway, my phone rings near Athabasca Falls. So I pull over and after the call I check my emails and then CT only to read Summitsearch has shut down. It's not easy reading a long message on the iPhone, plus I was yearning for beer, so I only read the first paragraph and shut the phone off. With all the snow on the ground it looks more like February, not April 1st, so it never hit me. I was pissed because I have put in quite a bit of time on Summitsearch and even ordered a new iPad2 with 3G so I could do more stuff while at work, where I have plenty of time to work on Summitsearch. Then I get to my favourite pub only to find out the Jasper will not have any trailcrews this summer except for front country trails, you know, the trails for the tourists who don't want to stray too far from civilization. This wasn't a good ending to a nice day. It's a good thing that I was tired and quite inebriated when I got home, because I wanted to delete everything I had done on Summitsearch before it shut down. Anyway, I guess I should read entire messages. I didn't think this was very funny. |
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Edmonton, Alberta
Canada
340 Posts |
Posted - 04/02/2011 : 09:54 AM
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quote:
Originally posted by lobo
So I'm coming back to town after spending a great day off near the icefields, my only day off in 25 days I might add, when ,due to the new cell towers on the parkway, my phone rings near Athabasca Falls. So I pull over and after the call I check my emails and then CT only to read Summitsearch has shut down. It's not easy reading a long message on the iPhone, plus I was yearning for beer, so I only read the first paragraph and shut the phone off. With all the snow on the ground it looks more like February, not April 1st, so it never hit me. I was pissed because I have put in quite a bit of time on Summitsearch and even ordered a new iPad2 with 3G so I could do more stuff while at work, where I have plenty of time to work on Summitsearch. Then I get to my favourite pub only to find out the Jasper will not have any trailcrews this summer except for front country trails, you know, the trails for the tourists who don't want to stray too far from civilization. This wasn't a good ending to a nice day. It's a good thing that I was tired and quite inebriated when I got home, because I wanted to delete everything I had done on Summitsearch before it shut down. Anyway, I guess I should read entire messages. I didn't think this was very funny.
My sincerest apologies Dieter. I should have given you a heads up. The goal was to get more publicity rather than a cheap laugh. I'm not that great at comedy so I don't try to be funny. I would be happy to help out with trail maintenance this summer. It is about time that we met as well, seeing as we have both worked a lot on summitsearch. How about we meet at your favorite pub sometime and drinks are on me? |
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676 Posts |
Posted - 04/02/2011 : 10:49 AM
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| Shoulda sold it to Outdoor Adventures in Whistler! But that would've made the April 1 connection too easy, I guess... |
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Vancouver
1827 Posts |
Posted - 04/02/2011 : 7:09 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by ecoulthard
Happy April Fool Day Everyone.
Just a shameless publicity stunt.
I don't dislike Robin. Rather, I dislike the way he has behaved toward me in the past year.
Since you feel ok using Robin as the fall guy in your publicity prank, perhaps you could state clearly and fully what, if anything, you have copied off the bivouac web site, how you did it, and what you used it for. |
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Vancouver
349 Posts |
Posted - 04/02/2011 : 8:36 PM
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| Nice one! |
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Edmonton, Alberta
Canada
340 Posts |
Posted - 04/02/2011 : 9:04 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by sgRant
Since you feel ok using Robin as the fall guy in your publicity prank, perhaps you could state clearly and fully what, if anything, you have copied off the bivouac web site, how you did it, and what you used it for.
Thanks for the opportunity to clear my name. There is a lot of misinformation being spread around by Robin. This is one of the examples of Robins behavior that I dislike. I feel okay with using someone as a fall guy who has behaved in the manner that Robin has. If he apologized to me then I would apologize to him and we could move on. Unfortunately, the word apology doesn't appear in his vocabulary.
All of the content on summitsearch comes from Natural Resources Canada, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, Googles elevation service, topo maps or from member contributions. I have received permission to use all the data on summitsearch. If you go to a mountain page you will find a list of references for the data.
This is more than I can say for bivouac. I wonder which guidebook was copied verbatim for this page? http://bivouac.com/MtnPg.asp?MtnId=29300. In case Robin changes the content of the page, which he often does when he is called out on something here is a snapshot.
To be fair this data wasn't entered by Robin personally.
On this page Robin himself has verbatim copied coordinates from peakfinder.com without attribution. I feel that people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. http://bivouac.com/MtnPg.asp?MtnId=32556, http://www.peakfinder.com/peakfinder.ASP?PeakName=sawtooth. Again to be sure that Robin doesn't change the content here it is in photo form. 
When I was initially developing summitsearch I needed a test set of mountains to help iron out bugs. I didn't yet know about the government data sets so I used mountains from bivouac which are publicly available. I downloaded them from public pages and now that I no longer need them they are useless to me. If Robin wants them back I would be happy to send them to him. While Robin is at it, I suppose he should ask Google to delete all the copies of his pages that they publish, such as this copy http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QudpbGEyCkUJ:bivouac.com/MtnPg.asp%3FMtnId%3D1 Mount Columbia&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca&source=www.google.ca. Maybe, he should ask this site http://www.archive.org/web/web.php to delete all the bivouac pages they publish as well. I will NEVER allow any data from bivouac to be published on summitsearch, even if bivouac goes belly up and Robin begs me to.
I challenge anyone to find anything immoral about downloading public webpages. Note that by downloading I mean clicking on a link and looking at the page. The simple act of doing that copies the page to your computer where it is stored even after you leave the page. I would also like to point out that I have been a paying contributor to bivouac for many years and have contributed many photos and trip reports. The way for Robin to handle this situation is not to try and launch a political attack against me but rather to try and work with me.
The word apology does appear in my vocabulary and I use it often (because I seem to screw up all the time). I would like to apologize to everyone for this April fools joke. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but had I known how it would turn out, I wouldn't have done it. I will refrain from Aprils fools jokes in the future since I am not good at them. |
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High River, (just south of Calgary eh!), Alberta
Canada
1718 Posts |
Posted - 04/03/2011 : 6:42 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by lobo
So I'm coming back to town after spending a great day off near the icefields, my only day off in 25 days I might add, when ,due to the new cell towers on the parkway, my phone rings near Athabasca Falls. So I pull over and after the call I check my emails and then CT only to read Summitsearch has shut down. It's not easy reading a long message on the iPhone, plus I was yearning for beer, so I only read the first paragraph and shut the phone off. With all the snow on the ground it looks more like February, not April 1st, so it never hit me. I was pissed because I have put in quite a bit of time on Summitsearch and even ordered a new iPad2 with 3G so I could do more stuff while at work, where I have plenty of time to work on Summitsearch. Then I get to my favourite pub only to find out the Jasper will not have any trailcrews this summer except for front country trails, you know, the trails for the tourists who don't want to stray too far from civilization. This wasn't a good ending to a nice day. It's a good thing that I was tired and quite inebriated when I got home, because I wanted to delete everything I had done on Summitsearch before it shut down. Anyway, I guess I should read entire messages. I didn't think this was very funny.
lobo, was that part true? |
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884 Posts |
Posted - 04/03/2011 : 7:17 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by Sodbuster
quote:
Originally posted by lobo
So I'm coming back to town after spending a great day off near the icefields, my only day off in 25 days I might add, when ,due to the new cell towers on the parkway, my phone rings near Athabasca Falls. So I pull over and after the call I check my emails and then CT only to read Summitsearch has shut down. It's not easy reading a long message on the iPhone, plus I was yearning for beer, so I only read the first paragraph and shut the phone off. With all the snow on the ground it looks more like February, not April 1st, so it never hit me. I was pissed because I have put in quite a bit of time on Summitsearch and even ordered a new iPad2 with 3G so I could do more stuff while at work, where I have plenty of time to work on Summitsearch. Then I get to my favourite pub only to find out the Jasper will not have any trailcrews this summer except for front country trails, you know, the trails for the tourists who don't want to stray too far from civilization. This wasn't a good ending to a nice day. It's a good thing that I was tired and quite inebriated when I got home, because I wanted to delete everything I had done on Summitsearch before it shut down. Anyway, I guess I should read entire messages. I didn't think this was very funny.
lobo, was that part true?
If cutbacks to trail maintenance are the case, I might have to get to Athabasca Pass sooner rather than later... |
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Jasper, ab
Canada
1041 Posts |
Posted - 04/03/2011 : 8:28 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by Sodbuster
quote:
Originally posted by lobo
So I'm coming back to town after spending a great day off near the icefields, my only day off in 25 days I might add, when ,due to the new cell towers on the parkway, my phone rings near Athabasca Falls. So I pull over and after the call I check my emails and then CT only to read Summitsearch has shut down. It's not easy reading a long message on the iPhone, plus I was yearning for beer, so I only read the first paragraph and shut the phone off. With all the snow on the ground it looks more like February, not April 1st, so it never hit me. I was pissed because I have put in quite a bit of time on Summitsearch and even ordered a new iPad2 with 3G so I could do more stuff while at work, where I have plenty of time to work on Summitsearch. Then I get to my favourite pub only to find out the Jasper will not have any trailcrews this summer except for front country trails, you know, the trails for the tourists who don't want to stray too far from civilization. This wasn't a good ending to a nice day. It's a good thing that I was tired and quite inebriated when I got home, because I wanted to delete everything I had done on Summitsearch before it shut down. Anyway, I guess I should read entire messages. I didn't think this was very funny.
lobo, was that part true?
Well, the whole post is true. Yes, I was talking to the boss in charge of the trail crews in Jasper and they are not hiring backcountry fly in trail crews this year because of Harper's cutbacks. They are hiring six front country guys for trails like Miette Hotsprings, trail 7, trails around Pyramid Lake, Valley of the Five, the Overlander trail, etc.
I don't believe it will last though. There was too much damage from the late season storms last year and there are quite a few bridges out. I personally clear lots of trails in the Jasper area myself, but I don't repair bridges or do other trail maintenance. I have been clearing the Tonquin Valley for years now, but the bridge over the Astoria for the ACC trail is washed out and I can't fix that. The rockslide on the Tonquin trail is massive and there is no way the horse outfitters will get by without help. Maybe they'll have special crews for those things, I'm not sure. As far as Athabasca Pass is concerned, I will clear about 25 kms of it this spring, but I can't do the entire thing myself. It was cleared last year and they are having their 200 year anniversary, so I'm pretty sure that parks will do the rest. I will also clear Fryatt and Alexandra River and a few others. I believe this is the first step in keeping people out of the backcountry. Parks Canada is set on keeping people close to the highways. They are putting in cell towers, skywalks and are even talking about zip lines and allowing hang gliding. If it is true and they don't do any backcountry clearing, in three years you'll not be able to do a trail in Jasper. I know better than most, because i clear trails around here, how many trees come down in a winter. Years and years of fire suppression has made for a very old forest with zillions of standing dead trees. But I don't believe that it will get that bad. I think that they will come to their senses. |
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884 Posts |
Posted - 04/03/2011 : 8:52 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by lobo
Well, the whole post is true. Yes, I was talking to the boss in charge of the trail crews in Jasper and they are not hiring backcountry fly in trail crews this year because of Harper's cutbacks. They are hiring six front country guys for trails like Miette Hotsprings, trail 7, trails around Pyramid Lake, Valley of the Five, the Overlander trail, etc.
I don't believe it will last though. There was too much damage from the late season storms last year and there are quite a few bridges out. I personally clear lots of trails in the Jasper area myself, but I don't repair bridges or do other trail maintenance. I have been clearing the Tonquin Valley for years now, but the bridge over the Astoria for the ACC trail is washed out and I can't fix that. The rockslide on the Tonquin trail is massive and there is no way the horse outfitters will get by without help. Maybe they'll have special crews for those things, I'm not sure. As far as Athabasca Pass is concerned, I will clear about 25 kms of it this spring, but I can't do the entire thing myself. It was cleared last year and they are having their 200 year anniversary, so I'm pretty sure that parks will do the rest. I will also clear Fryatt and Alexandra River and a few others. I believe this is the first step in keeping people out of the backcountry. Parks Canada is set on keeping people close to the highways. They are putting in cell towers, skywalks and are even talking about zip lines and allowing hang gliding. If it is true and they don't do any backcountry clearing, in three years you'll not be able to do a trail in Jasper. I know better than most, because i clear trails around here, how many trees come down in a winter. Years and years of fire suppression has made for a very old forest with zillions of standing dead trees. But I don't believe that it will get that bad. I think that they will come to their senses.
I think the backcountry community is large and vocal enough to prevent it from getting to that point. At least I hope so. Geez, if you could retroactively bill the going rate for all your donated time clearing trail, you could probably retire! But know that your 'forestry philanthropy' is highly appreciated regardless. If I lived in the area I'd offer another set of hands; the thought of you waging an annual battle with the Tonquin, Fryatt, Alexandra, and Athabasca (and other) trails is seriously impressive. BTW, we are probably spending a weekend at your hotel next month (my wife has a conference in town), so I'll give you a shout. |
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SummitSearch is shutting down
