Blog Tech and a Weekend in the Backcountry

Dawn patrol early this week.

A few things about this blog before we head out for the weekend at a hut:

Permalinks
If you like a specific post and want to share it or link to it, remember to use what’s called the “Permalink.” You get this by first clicking on the post title, which changes the way your browser is looking at the blog. After that, just copy/paste the URL from you browser address bar. For example, the Robin Ferguson eulogy permalink would look like this: //wildsnow.com/612/farewell-robin-ferguson/

A permalink simply refers a person’s web browser to the actual blog post, by number.

Another way to get the permalink is to right click on the post title.

Traffic
How many people read WildSnow.com? Our numbers this winter are stunning. January: Average of 3,675 unique visitors a day, total hits for month of 1,679,739. Based on this we’ve picked up a few new advertisers. Thanks goes to Backcountry Access for their recent top bar sponsorship! And thanks SlideWright for the sponsorship link! Advertisers are noting that since we don’t rotate ads, they’re getting a massive number of impressions for their money compared to sites that rotate one banner position among a selection of advertisers. We’ve made a big effort to design WildSnow.com so we can accommodate our supportive advertisers in the most effective way possible, and we thank them for noticing that.

Your Comments
We’re up to more than 2,000 comments! We appreciate your comments so much. You’ve found typos, made excellent points when things turn polemic, and overall made WildSnow.com a much richer place.

Due to comment spam (meaning people trying to hijack our comments to place advertising) we still moderate all comments. Once you’ve had one comment approved, you’ll bypass moderation and see your comment immediately. But this is based on your email address and IP number — if those change your comment will still be placed in line for moderation. We almost always have someone doing comment moderation during waking hours for this time zone, but once in a while we have to leave things running on their own. In that case, you may not see your comment for period of time if it requires moderation. This happens frequently during weekends and holidays.

We also have fairly strict filtering on our comments. Please avoid profanity, as comments with more than the most benign profanity are automatically deleted without even being seen. Also avoid placing more than one link within the body of your comment, as our spam filter is sensitive to how many links there are in a message body. As for style, while we welcome your opinions please avoid personal attacks and that sort of thing.

We’ve had a few people leave potentially libelous and/or fraudulent comments, most of which have been deleted without ever going public. In one case, a potentially libelous comment was left with a false email address. Using the IP number for that comment, through internet forensics we obtained that person’s real identity and are in the process of dealing with that situation. This has been an interesting process (a la Sherlock Holmes) but I’d rather have been testing bindings or writing blog posts! So please, keep your comments on the up-and-up.

Future
Looks bright. Someone once asked me “how do you find something to write about nearly every day?” I said something about how backcountry skiing encompasses so many areas of life one can easily find blog fodder — provided they have a modicum of curiosity and time, as well as being involved in a community such as that of ski alpinism. Thanks to all you blog readers we have the advertisers, so we have the time. As for curiosity, that’s never been a problem (perhaps to a fault, but it keeps me going).

Getting out for the weekend. See you guys next week.