I was in Virginia Beach all last week, spending time with ill father. He’s doing okay, though hospitalized and quite elderly so we don’t know how long he’ll be out of the woods. Even though his body is frail his mind is sharp, and I know that’s a blessing. Got some good stories out of the guy that rounded out his life picture. Knowing details of your parent’s journey can be both fun and painful, but either way you get a lot of insight into your own path, so such was appreciated. Thanks dad!
Virginia Beach is a crazy place. The city is populous as cities in the east tend to be, and fronts on the ocean with a strip of hotels that’s one of the more famous “beach strips” around. Indeed, streets in the Monopoly game are named after the roads here, with Atlantic being the closest to the ocean, then stepping back to Pacific Avenue etcetera.
The Virginia Beach ocean front, that's my brothers Craig and Tom.
Having not much experience of such places, I found the stack of high rise motels fronting the shore to be both amusing and truly sad. What if they’d held them back a block or two and made a strip park or something? Nope, instead you’ve got a band of sand, a concrete “boardwalk” then a wall of buildings. Sort of like how mega ski resorts eat up backcountry — only we’ve got a lot more backcountry in North America than we do beach.
Back to WildSnow
Thanks goes out to our guest bloggers and commenters for the rich content you created while I was on the road. The avalanche stories are great, and we’ve got more coming including a good one from Alaska. We’ll start those again this week, along with ramping up our gear reviews and even sprinkling in a few backcountry trip reports.
Samsung i760 smartphone. Not perfect (no GPS and bogus camera) but the price was right and it has a keypad and a slideout keyboard, essential features if you're using an LCD device in bright light.
Latest push, and hopefully the last big one so I’m free for winter fun, is creating a mobile (PDA, smartphone) version of WildSnow. What got me going with this is I upgraded my phone to a Samsung i760 smartphone with Windows Mobile. WildSnow.com didn’t look so hot on the Windows mobile browser, so off I went on yet another website upgrade. I didn’t do as complete a job with this as say the New York Times does with their mobile version. But I did strip out a bunch of stuff that slows down site loading on a slower connection and tended to clutter things up when your PDA browser wasn’t able to sort things out to a narrower format.
The WildSnow mobile version only shows when you use a mobile device, check it out if you’ve got a PDA or smartphone. Apple’s browser software did pretty well with the site as it was, but just about anything else was having trouble with it. Things should be much better now. In the future, most obvious ongoing change for the mobile version will be giving our advertisers a panel of mini-banners you’ll see at the top of your PDA screen, but for now we’ll stick with text links. More, we’ll tweak everything so the text is less crowded.
In other WildSnow improvement news, with the help of our WildSnow geek squad (Dave, Tom, etc.):
-We’ve got a new system of placing our images with a nice border and caption.
– We’re now designing first and foremost for the Firefox browser. As a web professional, I reluctantly made IE my browser of choice for years, simply because so many other people used it and I wanted an ongoing sense of how my projects looked in that browser. Now, with Firefox being so popular and also much better than IE in so many ways, I figured it was time to move. So be it. Just know that if you want the best performance and look for WildSnow.com, consider using Firefox as your browser, though we’ll test in IE and try to keep all the major components working.
– I’ve made a ton of behind the scene speed and reliability improvements. You might not notice much difference from this, as I’ve added in a few things that negated some of the speed improvements. But you should see an increase in reliability while you’re browsing the site and making comments.
– We’ll keep going with our guest blogs, though the site will continue to feature my opinion blogs, gear reviews and trip reports for most days. Our schedule for new content will continue to be something new every week day, with occasional new posts on Saturdays.
WildSnow.com publisher emeritus and founder Lou (Louis Dawson) has a 50+ years career in climbing, backcountry skiing and ski mountaineering. He was the first person in history to ski down all 54 Colorado 14,000-foot peaks, has authored numerous books about about backcountry skiing, and has skied from the summit of Denali in Alaska, North America’s highest mountain.
