sangiro

Post me the URLs to the manufacturers' web sites and I'll get it up there... Safe swoops Sangiro

I'll sleep when I'm dead... Safe swoops Sangiro

Heya all, Following on the Gear Review enhancements I made last week I've added the ability to add a gear item to your "favorites" list. Works the same as bookmarks with a few cool options. You can send a gear item to a friends favorites. You can set your list to be either public or private. You can view a full list of everyone with public lists. You can rate any users public list. You can set preferences for how you want your favorites displayed. You can obviously remove a favorite at any time or remove them all at once. This should make it easy to track specific items that you want to visit regularly to check for new reviews. Also a cool way to share the gear you jump or the gear you wish you jumped with others. Each gear item has a "Favorite" link added so you can easily add the item. You can access all the Favorite functionality from the Gear Database main page. Check the navigation bar on the right. Access the Users List from here and check out my favorites here! As with the reviews this will follow shortly for the Dropzone Database to enable you to bookmark your favorite DZs. Let me know what you think - hope this is useful. Safe swoops Sangiro

With all due respect, that's a bit presumptuous. Just to prove the point, look at the winners of the photography competition: Aleksandr Voronov form Moscow, Russia Jeff Agard from Oxford, Massachusetts, USA Josh Hill from Houston, Texas, USA Raffaele Chierichetti from Cittiglio, Italy Francis Bodan Jackson from Christchurch, New Zealand Thomas Olson from Houston, Texas, USA Jirka Sima from Velke Pritocno, Czech Republic Remco de Borst from Rijswijk, Netherland Jussi Mattila of Anjalankoski, Finland This is not America, this is Dropzone.com. Safe swoops Sangiro

The judges has done their thing and the 2002 Amateur Photographers Competition winners has been announced..... Congratulations to them and thank you to everyone who participated. There were some really cool shots - we'll do it again next year.

The judges has done their thing and the 2002 Amateur Photographers Competition winners have been announced..... Congratulations to them and thank you to everyone who participated. There were some really cool shots - we'll do it again next year.

There I was browsing through some titles in the local bookstore when I stumbled upon "the good website guide 2002" by Simon Edwards. Flipped to the sport section and my life will never be the same again! Bwahahhaa... (see attachment) Safe swoops Sangiro

***HH performs a traditional African castration ritual - fondly referred to as "the door-slamming method" - on Chromeboy*** Safe swoops Sangiro

As things sometimes go..... I screwed up and had to roll back the database. There are a few reviews that may have been lost in the process. My sincere apologies for the inconvenience. Please go back and enter them again. Should not happen again....

Note the exact time and place when you said that.... Safe swoops Sangiro

Just an FYI here: I suggested this to Barry quite a while ago and he wasn't interested. I may contact him again. At the same time, as I said earlier I'd only be interested in doing this if I can do something with value add. To that extend it doesn't really make sense just to wrap his data. Safe swoops Sangiro

Don't flatter yourself.... Safe swoops Sangiro

Worth mentioning..... PISA now has a web site: http://www.pisa.co.za/ Safe swoops Sangiro

Craig - the intention is not to do anyone a disservice. I do believe there are several ways you may be able to improve on what Barry is offering. You mentioned some, and also identified some early on which led you to place his content in a database for analysis. He seems to have now caught up with your improvement. I think there may be more. What I'm hoping to get out of this conversation is a sense of what other expectations people have around a service like that. Like Barry I don't have a lot of time so I'll only do something if it actually adds value. I will not do it with the intent to do him a disservice, and at the same time I don't think Barry's pages is a holy cow. Some interesting ideas so far but I'm far from convincing myself that I want to launch into this. Safe swoops Sangiro

Heya all, I've been putting a bit of work into the Gear Database to upgrade the review system. I'll continue to work on it in the days to come but here's where we're at with some of the enhancements: 1) Modify your old reviews. If you've already written a review on an item and want to add some details or you change your mind about your review later, you can now go back and make changes. Simply click on the "Write a Review" link again for the item that you've reviewed and it will allow you to edit your review. I'll add an "Edit Review" link shortly to make it easier to navigate. If you've written any reviews you may want to go back anyway to complete you review and add some of the new information that I've now provided for. (see below) 2) Review Subject. Some reviews don't have subject lines. Go add a subject to your review to make it easer for people decide which ones to read. 3) Recommend it? There's now a drop down where you can recommend the item. Select either "Yes" or "No" and the script will place a thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon next to your review. I'll build some statistics around the percentage of people recommending an item vs. not recommending it later. 4) Pros and Cons Added. I've added two new fields for pros and cons. Enter the a few main thoughts in here. With the subject this will provide a nice quick overview of the item. (i.e. Pros: Cost, Low toggle pressure, easy to pack) 5) Review summary. Each item now has a summary graph of how people rated it. A few more quirks here but I'll iron those out. 6) Helpful or Not? You can now give feedback on whether a review was helpful or not. There are two buttons at the bottom of each review. This will help people select which reviews to read first. 7) View all a User's Reviews. Click on the reviewers name or on the (user reviews) link and you'll get a list of all reviews written by that user. You'll also see a graph of how the person rated all the items he reviewed. This is helpful if there's a specific individual who's reviews you value and you'd like to see them all. This will also in the future become the page from where you can Manage all your reviews. 8) Fixed the Star Ratings. The star ratings are now out of 5 only and I've fixed the bug that gave a distorted view of the ratings. 9) "New" reviews marked. new reviews will now appear at the top of the list and be marked with a yellow "New" icon 10) Review formatting. Some people write really useful long reviews. These used to appear as a single paragraph in the old system. The script will now format your text with line breaks to look just like your original input. 11) Review validation All reviews will now be validated before they are posted to the web. This means, whether you post a new review or modify and old one and editor (in this case it's me only!) will read your review before it's posted. I'll obviously let negative reviews through but this should cut down on malicious reviews and unsubstantiated bashing of manufacturers. 12) Old reviews are included. I've migrated all the "old reviews" into the system as well. These were written before I switched to a user registration model on Dropzone.com. This means they don't have valid usernames associated with them and are missing some information like a rating etc. The information in these are good so I included them. I've tried to adjust the system so the ratings and numbers don't get skewed by these unrated items (I'm basically ignoring them when calculating averages) If you spot a review that you wrote on the old site that you'd like to have associated with your Dropzone.com username, send me an email with your username and the ReviewID (top right corner of every review) and I'll make the association so you can start managing and updating your review. OK - that's a mouth full. There are still a few small bugs and broken tags - I'll fix those. The Dropzone database and reviews will be next to receive these modifications. I've got a few more cool features in the working. Hope this helps!

Heya all, I've been putting a bit of work into the Gear Database to upgrade the review system. I'll continue to work on it in the days to come but here's where we're at with some of the enhancements: 1) Modify your old reviews. If you've already written a review on an item and want to add some details or you change your mind about your review later, you can now go back and make changes. Simply click on the "Write a Review" link again for the item that you've reviewed and it will allow you to edit your review. I'll add an "Edit Review" link shortly to make it easier to navigate. If you've written any reviews you may want to go back anyway to complete you review and add some of the new information that I've now provided for. (see below) 2) Review Subject. Some reviews don't have subject lines. Go add a subject to your review to make it easer for people decide which ones to read. 3) Recommend it? There's now a drop down where you can recommend the item. Select either "Yes" or "No" and the script will place a thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon next to your review. I'll build some statistics around the percentage of people recommending an item vs. not recommending it later. 4) Pros and Cons Added. I've added two new fields for pros and cons. Enter the a few main thoughts in here. With the subject this will provide a nice quick overview of the item. (i.e. Pros: Cost, Low toggle pressure, easy to pack) 5) Review summary. Each item now has a summary graph of how people rated it. A few more quirks here but I'll iron those out. 6) Helpful or Not? You can now give feedback on whether a review was helpful or not. There are two buttons at the bottom of each review. This will help people select which reviews to read first. 7) View all a User's Reviews. Click on the reviewers name or on the (user reviews) link and you'll get a list of all reviews written by that user. You'll also see a graph of how the person rated all the items he reviewed. This is helpful if there's a specific individual who's reviews you value and you'd like to see them all. This will also in the future become the page from where you can Manage all your reviews. 8) Fixed the Star Ratings. The star ratings are now out of 5 only and I've fixed the bug that gave a distorted view of the ratings. 9) "New" reviews marked. new reviews will now appear at the top of the list and be marked with a yellow "New" icon 10) Review formatting. Some people write really useful long reviews. These used to appear as a single paragraph in the old system. The script will now format your text with line breaks to look just like your original input. 11) REVIEW VALIDATION All reviews will now be validated before they are posted to the web. This means, whether you post a new review or modify and old one and editor (in this case it's me only!) will read your review before it's posted. I'll obviously let negative reviews through but this should cut down on malicious reviews and unsubstantiated bashing of manufacturers. 12) Old reviews are included. I've migrated all the "old reviews" into the system as well. These were written before I switched to a user registration model on Dropzone.com. This means they don't have valid usernames associated with them and are missing some information like a rating etc. The information in these are good so I included them. I've tried to adjust the system so the ratings and numbers don't get skewed by these unrated items (I'm basically ignoring them when calculating averages) If you spot a review that you wrote on the old site that you'd like to have associated with your Dropzone.com username, send me an email with your username and the ReviewID (top right corner of every review) and I'll make the association so you can start managing and updating your review. I've posted a example review here. If your review doesn't show all this information then you should go back and make changes and add info. OK - that's a mouth full. There are still a few small bugs and broken tags - I'll fix those. The Dropzone database and reviews will be next to receive these modifications. I've got a few more cool features in the working. Hope this helps!

I've added some more files to the document archive. Click on the Latest Additions header to see the latest 25 files...

I've considered setting up a fatality database on Dropzone.com for this very reason - that the skydive.net fatalities page are sometimes slow to update. I've heard all the warnings about lawyers and such.... but beyond that what do you guys think? Good idea or waste of time? Safe swoops Sangiro

Actually, I suspect it may be the other way round... Safe swoops Sangiro

Thank you sir! Would definitely be a milestone to hit 10 grand.

Wild child! Safe swoops Sangiro

Here's one by Martijn van Dam Safe swoops Sangiro

Aaaah... always good to see an old friend again.

Heya, I've added a few statistics and graphs to the About section (in the footer of all pages) of the site. The graphs are 35KB graphics and take a while to load. Also, the script simply generates the graphs from the database, which means it includes corrupt data as well... so you may see some stray records... like the forum post in 1970... before Al Gore invented the Internet! Clay, was that one of yours?!

Congratulations! Never doubted you'd do it.