Ongoing Wildsnow Tweaks — and Aconcagua?

Wow, you guys are coming up with some funny stuff for the backcountry skiing gear contest! Keep it going!

Just thought I’d fire a quick post about our back office projects. We added a “subscribe to comments” function that’ll email you about new comments on a thread. This was requested, but if it doesn’t get used much we’ll probably nix it because keeping plugins going adds to the workload. Also on the back end, we’re refining our tagging just in case it means anything (see lower left sidebar). Facebook has been fun (see right sidebar), definitely a nicely put together way for people to network. How it integrates with blogs is still being invented, but progress is ongoing. Fan us if you feel like it.

What else? I’ve been pushing our advertisers to keep updating their banners. We like the creative look of our banner variety, but it does get stale, so good to see the sponsors getting those new ones out. Speaking of which, I do ask all sponsors to set up any banner animation so it quits after a short time. Thus, you may notice that WildSnow doesn’t have the array of obnoxious endlessly flashing banners you’ll see on other sites. Likewise, we stay away from annoying “fly outs” and other stuff that gets in the way of you enjoying our backcountry skiing content.

Keeping WildSnow going takes a lot of hidden work, not to mention an expensive web host/server that can handle all our traffic — if it wasn’t for the sponsors we’d have to stop. So pay attention to those guys. Click their banners, browse ’em, shop ’em — say you saw it at WildSnow.com!

Thanks everyone!

P.S., below just flew in over the transom. Anyone care to comment?

Dear Lou,

Thanks for a great website. I and (a better-known Finnish backcountry snowboarder) Jarkko Henttonen are compiling the first ever backcountry ski/board book in Finnish. We want to include a bit of history in it, too. In that your website has been a goldmine, even though we have done a lot of cross-checking, too.
Your “timeline” has some of the most important dates outside USA. So we are wondering if you had ever come across this information: Who did the first glisse descent of Aconcagua. To us this is important because we suspect that a Finn Ilkka Koskinen in 1999 may have been among the first ones to snowboard down the Polish Glacier.

Yours sincerely

Matti Verkasalo