If you’re reading this, you noticed that we have a new website. It’s been a process that began about six months ago. We hope you find it easy to navigate and filled with useful and interesting content. One of the challenging issues web designers face today is the wide variety of devices used to view websites. This site has been designed to be viewed on a variety of browsers so don’t be surprised if it looks different on your phone, tablet, and desktop browser.
The team involved in making this a reality is from all over the US. I am humbled to have such incredibly talented and dedicated people working with me to bring this new website from a concept that began when I interviewed for the RD position last January to a reality today.
- Ian Doremus, from Eugene, OR is the principal designer of this site. I’ve built several websites with Ian over the years and he’s got a knack for incorporating photography into his designs. He has spent countless hours working with me on this new site. Ian will soon be the new WSER webmaster.
- Richard Goodwin, from Colfax, CA has been the WSER webmaster for 13 years. He wrote the original webcast which was cutting edge at the time. Richard is stepping down as webmaster and looking forward to being just a “regular race-day” volunteer in the future. Richard has helped with the new website, while concurrently maintaining the old site. His contributions to WSER have been recognized with a Friends of the Trail and a Little Cougar Award.
- Ted Knudsen, from San Rafael, CA is the new WSER Chief Technology Officer. Ted does all the behind-the-scenes work to keep our domains, servers, and everything tech-related running smoothly. He is the guy who developed the world-class webcast platform ultralive.net and has played a critical role in this year’s lottery. Ted is a WS Friends of the Trail recipient.
- Tim Smith, from San Antonio, TX, is a professional web designer who specializes in wordpress and has been our technical consultant.
Retiring race director Greg Soderlund, the WSER board, and Research Advisor Marty Hoffman also contributed to the new site. In the very near future you’ll see contributions from Ten-Day buckle holder and owner of realendurance.com Gary Wang. Photographer Luis Escobar contributed many photos.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the cadre of friends who reviewed the site. Thanks to each of you.
Now for a little of the technical details if you are interested:
- The site is hosted on Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud. A small instance runs the apache webserver, while a micro instance runs the mysql database.
- We are using WordPress as the CMS with a variety of plugins and some custom code.
- The theme is a custom responsive theme. It uses media queries to ask the browser what its capabilities are and then renders the appropriate layout of the content.
We will continue to develop and add content. If you have ideas or suggestions on what we can do better please let us know.
