Welcome Back MASSkiting!

Folks,

I apologize for the long outage throughout the night and want to tell you what and why that occurred.

First I want to thank the folks on the web team who have dedicated hours, literally 100's of hours combined to get Mk to a place where we can make significant improvements. I built the site on past technologies and when we initially migrated to this platform I had some major challenges. Getting these modules and functions current was always such a big technically complicated task that it was near impossible given my full time job.

The issue:

Mk runs on some pretty dynamic and robust functionality and these pieces are not always easy to assemble, update, and improve. Not being a hardcore coder some of these challenges took some outside assistance and until recently we found it possible to get it all done. I am not talking about features you see but rather to create new features the foundation needed to be overhauled. If this was a simple brochure static site it would have been a breeze.

Issues were:

• Upgrading while not loosing data.
• Upgrading to allow more mature hosting Setting up a work flow of development, staging, and production severs
• Getting caching and load balancing to manage our traffic
• Traffic that is authenticated meaning the site knows who you are and what you have yet to see is very demanding on a what was a single server.
• To get it all moving we had many code errors and challenges
• We needed to learn and master a number of other applications to systems admin this process

The end result is that finally Mk is ready to move forward with the correct foundation to finally push change that you can enjoy. An example was the ability to rapidly launch a new site http://tughillsnowkiting.com/ which hats of to Jermy who single handedly took training courses, days off work, to build that site to grow an event we all support!

Second was Wolfea who also took training for sys admin and web development so that he could assist this new 3 person team. Wolfea spent the last 3 weeks preparing the environments learning the command line executions. Without help like this the next steps would be impossible.

Last night we moved off of one server onto a multi-tier environment sponsored at my work which is essentially 6 servers load balanced between 2 data centers with Memchache and Varnish. This took a HIGHLY QUALIFIED hand to do this despite the issues that through bandaids I myself created making it a dodgey move that took 16 hours (code issues between soe heavy modules that needed adjustment with new multi-tier hosting).Our traffic does not require this but the advanced workflow and development tools will allow us to make significant functional advances to the site. Last night I was in my office until 1am. After a year preparing Mk is finally in a place to do the fun stuff. The most exciting part is to have both Jermy and Wolfea assisting!

Future:

• Travel Reviews
• Improved profiles
• Kite reviews
• Theme
• Board Reviews
• Hatteras Event site
• Major verison upgrade

These are some items that we have road mapped. It was impossible to do this before as the work would have been lost and the upgrades not possible without the new overhaul and environments.

Best,

Johnny D

If you can help let me know ;-p Thank you again to Jermy and Wolfea for stepping up and training so seriously!