New Site - more information

[Richard]

The new site's coming along nicely - still looking at the same early-2004 launch. Features of the new site: •Park database, including all roller coasters, and most other rides/attractions in Australia. •Frequently updated articles and content, including latest news from Australian parks, reviews, interviews, editorials/feature articles etc. •Park guides and strategies. •Photo galleries, both general park/ride/coaster shots, as well as construction updates. •High-quality videos of many rides and attractions (more details yet to be announced). •Forums - similar to the Total Thrills forums, though great improvements in terms of how it looks and ease-of-use. •Full-fledged staff. Details will be announced, and applications will be accepted shortly for a variety of different positions. As always, we're all out to have a good time, but professionalism will be of highest importance. Stay tuned on this one! Now, here's where you, the members come in. Are there any feature you'd be interested in, something/s that you think would benefit the site and the readers and general community? If so, then please don't hesitate to let me know. Post in this thread, email me or send me a PM. I'm open to pretty much anything that you think will help. I went somewhat blindly into Total Thrills. As there was no Australian community, I didn't know what to expect, or what people would want. Now that I've got the benefit of an established community and ever-useful hindsight, I can tune this new site to exactly what you, the users, will want. Thanks for helping to create a better future for all Australian thrill seekers! Richard

[Shaun]

Is there going to be anything on the show ride type side? eg. a data base of all the traveling rides? Shaun

[Richard]

I've thought about that, but at the end of the day, it's not something I'm interested in catering for. I'm not really a carnival fan, so in my mind, it wouldn't be a good use of my resources to cover something I'm not that keen on. Aside from that, it'd also be very difficult to implement given the current database structure - it'd essentially require a whole new system to what I've got now - which works perfectly for fixed rides and parks.

[Shaun]

I don't know how your sites set up but wouldn't you just create a new section called 'portable ride' and just have a page on each diffrn't ride? But like you said if your not intrested it's not worth doing a half assed job and wrecking the rest of your site. Just on the portable rides, the topic is very intresting at the moment now that wittingslow has gone broke. Shaun

[Richard]

It's all database driven - everything is stored in a database - all ride information, park details and even news articles is linked and cross-linked with everything, making it not only reasonably complex, but very neat and easy to manage at the same time, and making the pages all consistent in layout and dynamic (i.e. you change one thing and it changes them all). To give you an example, there are a series of parks, in the "parks table", with all the information on the given park, as well as a parkid column. Now, in a separate "coasters table", I store the coaster information and stats in there, as well as a parkid colum. So that now links the coaster to the park. News articles also have the parkid column as well, so each article knows what park it is about, and each park knows where to find any articles that are about it. At the end of the day there's no simple way of factoring in rides that periodically move (and I probably would include it if it were easy enough to do). It would be possible with another database setup, but that's certainly nothing that's on the list for the initial opening of the site. I could say (very doubtfully) that further down the track if there's sufficient interest, as well as adequate assistance (I know next to nothing about the travelling rides of Australia), it might be more feasable, but certainly not in the forseeable future.

[rappa]

It all sounds very well structed and interesting Richard, can't wait for it to come online. Look forward to hopefully being able to contribute to the site in any way I can. Just slightly off topic and I won't mention anymore about it but does anyone (particularly Shaun) know of a similar forum discussing the portable segment of the industry?

[Shaun]

I'm also looking forward to seeing your site Ricahard, the preview looked great. The most improtant thing to me apart from a good forum is lots of good photo's showing all the intresting parts of the ride, eg. not just overviews of the ride but shots of the cars, lift hill, station, main mechanics etc. whcih I'm sure you will have Richard after seeing some of your gallerys already. Djrappa- there's not much in the way of forums about show rides unless you can speak german but there is a good Australian site on our local travelling rides called www.ride-extravaganza.com, that a very Knowledgeable fella called David runs. Shaun

[Richard]

Though the emphasis has shifted from focusing nearly entirely on photographs as with this site to more of a general coaster site, the photographs will indeed by kept as interesting as possible. I'm looking at buying yet another new digital camera in the near future (it's time for me to go back to SLR after four years with compact digitals) and some decent lenses to try and boost the general quality and consistency of the photos. I want to start completely from scratch with all of that, so that you're not all seeing the same stuff as on this site and what you do see is truly high quality. The site won't focus on one particular thing like some sites do (for instance Westcoaster is really only about construction updates). What I've got coming will be equally strong in news/articles, photo galleries, construction updates, park/ride database, so as to please as many people as possible. One thing I would like to add is that the park/ride database is going to be fantastic and comprehensive. For instance, the coaster database is about half complete in terms of entering data, and there's currently more operating coasters in it than there are at RCDB for Australia.