SliderGuide Blog

For those of you with Mac OS X Leopard you can now get your SG fix from your dashboard. (For those of you without a Mac – get one!)

To get SliderGuide in your Dashboard you need to follow these 3 easy steps:

1. Open SliderGuide in Safari and click the Dashboard Clipping button

Open up SliderGuide and go to which ever page you want to show in your Dashboard. For this example I’m going to use the FIBT Top 10 List. Once you have the page open, click the Dashboard Clipping button (highlighted above).

NOTE – Don’t worry if you don’t normally use Safari, you only need it to make your dashboard widget and then you can go back to whatever you use after.

2. Select the section of the page to show

Be sure to drag the box to be a little bigger than the size of the box so that you have some room for the frame on the Dashboard Widget. Once you are done click the “Add” button at the top right of the window.

3. View SliderGuide in your Dashboard

Not really a step, but enjoy SliderGuide in your Dashboard. You can repeat these steps multiple times and have FIBT Ranks, Upcoming Races and Recent Features all in your Dashboard.

We have a ton of ideas we want to explore on SliderGuide. While we are mostly an entertainment site, we also think there is a lot of potential in designing and developing tools for athletes. One of the tools we are currently developing is an iPhone application. Although we don't want to give too much information away at this time, we can say that it will put to use many of the features that make the iPhone such a powerful device (think GPS, accelerometer, and Wi-Fi). As we get closer to real code, we'll start posting notes and screenshots. We don't want to throw around a release date for the first version yet, but work is currently underway. Come back in the next few days to see some of our preliminary sketches.

We’ve been itching to create a line of SliderGuide t-shirts for a long time. Now we have the first batch on the way! Our first printing is a SliderGuide logo tee with the S on the front, plain and simple. The shirt is printed on American Apparel cotton tees, which tend to run a little small. Make sure you get a size larger than you might typically wear.

We have also decided to do a giveaway to kick things off, but there’s a catch! We are going to hold a contest to determine who gets a free shirt. We’ll announce it in few days when the details get ironed out.

If all goes well with the first round of shirts, we’ll have more printings and a variety of shirts available in the future. If you have any ideas for t-shirts you’d like to have printed, contact me at kyle (at) sliderguide.com.

While I’m not as nearly as entertaining as the Kyle, I am the one responsible for many of the features and updates that are made to SliderGuide – and these updates can happen at any time I’m not taking 14^th place in America’s Cup races. And I’ve had a lot of time on my hands considering the last America’s Cup race was in April.

That being said this new SliderGuide is a complete rewrite from the old version. I started from scratch so we could utilize newer technologies and hopefully give you some pretty cool features in the future. So that is why no one’s old login works anymore (You probably forgot your login anyway, so what’s the big deal?)

So what’s new in SliderGuide?

• Shiny New Look – Kyle’s worked hard to come up with the best looking site possible. There are still a few kinks we are working on, but you can’t deny SliderGuide looks good!
• FIBT points – Check your position on the FIBT Points List
  men | women
• New Event Management – Events are a bit different than before. Basically this is how it works, if you have one after party then it’s one event. So events like America’s and Europa Cups will have multiple men’s and women’s races.
• Better Photo Upload – Uploading photos on the last site sucked. We now a have new java applet that will let you upload as many photos as you want at the same time. All you have to do drag your pictures in an upload! Right now you can upload photos to any event. So go back through our history of events and upload your old photos!
• The Wiki – If you’re not familiar with a Wiki it is kinda like an online encyclopedia that you can add too. Currently the wiki articles are a bit sparse but you can help us out by adding more!
• The Marketplace – A bit like a craigslist, but for sliders. Rather than putting up fliers in the start house, just post it here and everyone around the world can see it!

And there is lots more where that came from. Here’s just a taste of what we have coming up through the pipeline

• Facebook App – You’ll be able to share your results and race schedule with all of your friends on facebook.
• Photo Albums – Much like uploading photos to the events, except you’ll be able to have your own photos albums of anything you’d like (keep it PG-13 please)
• User Submitted Content – Think you’re funnier than us? Or do you have a sliding event you’d like to promote? Well soon you’ll be able to do just that. (Odds are you aren’t funnier than us though)

That’s what we have for now, but stay tuned. It should be an interesting season!

P.S – Odds are something is broke, so you have been warned!

We just released the main SliderGuide site, and now we have a blog, too. What gives?

In addition to the great articles and features we have on SG, we wanted a place to talk freely and share some ideas with our readers. There is so much news and content that comes out of a season of sliding, that not all of it fits into a typical SG article. That’s where the blog comes in.

Although we haven’t permanently settled on any specifics yet, you can expect to see announcements and general site info appearing here. it’s also my hope that we’ll get to cover some of the design and technical details that go into running a site of this size. There are a lot of interesting things to be found behind the scenes, and we want to highlight a few of those considerations for you.

We hope you enjoy the blog as much as the other SG features, but for now, we have more work to do!