While six of the buggy orgs were in their garage all winter building new buggies, we did some building of our own and attempted the first complete overhaul of our website since it was launched in 2008.
In addition to a visual re-design and upgraded forum, gallery, and news software, some of the exciting new features include:
Videos!
This project has been at the top of our wish list since the beginning and it’s finally here. We’re launching our video library with 263 videos that span all of cmuTV’s coverage from 2003-2009 as well as some older historic gems and some compilations and clips from this semester at rolls. Our agreement with cmuTV is to give the DVDs one year of exclusivity before we put the content online. DVD sales help fund the production itself, and we don’t want to undercut that. In what we hope will become a new tradition, the 2010 videos will be unveiled online this week before the races.
Content Feed
Didn’t you hate when you came up with a clever comment on a picture in the gallery, but nobody ever saw it? Now everything that happens on the site is sorted out and displayed chronologically so you won’t miss a thing. Ok, so we ripped off the facebook concept a bit, but I think that site is really going to take off, so I figured we’d ride on the coat tails.
Reference Wiki
This one is going to take a while to reach its full potential, but I think it’s going to be cool. Buggy is so full of quirky and specific terminology and ideas that it takes new teams, new fans, and anyone else that crosses our path a long time to figure out what’s so cool about it. We have tried to offer a “What is Buggy” section on the site, but it’s too large a job for us to tackle well. Luckily, the wiki format lets everyone add and refine the knowledge base as they’re able. If you’ve never edited a wiki before, don’t be shy. Just click edit anywhere you see it and start typing.
History
Wondering how your favorite team has been progressing over the last 1o years? Don’t wonder any longer, just take a look at the “trends” tab on any organization page and check our our new graphs. We hope these graphs are just the beginning, let us know what buggy data you think could benefit from some visualization.
Take a look around, check out the new digs, and let us know what you think in this thread in the forum. All accounts from the old site should still work, but you’ll need to re-confirm your e-mail address. Send an e-mail to admin@cmubuggy.org if that process gives you any trouble. Thanks to shafeeq and colugodriver for uploading pictures from rolls this morning. The new gallery should be a lot easier to use, so hopefully we’ll have everyone contributing pictures this raceday!
How do you know it’s late March in Pittsburgh? 1) It was 20 degrees or less at rolls 2) 8 of the 11 orgs put up their fastest time of the semester this weekend (and the other three were the 1 buggy orgs). The cold was killing walkie-talkie batteries, fogging windshields, and fogging my brain, but impressively the buggies were flying.
All of a sudden spring break is behind us and we’re in the 4 week sprint to raceday. We stodgy alumni thought the kids were taking a bit of a gamble not scheduling rolls for either weekend of spring break, but it seems to have worked out pretty well for them. The first weekend of the break would have been entirely rained out anyway, and the skies were clear this weekend so it’s all good. Saturday was one of those super slow days with no clear culprit, but everyone shook off the rust by Sunday and put nearly twice as many buggies down the hill in the same amount of time. We’re up to 11 rolling organizations, and 5 new buggies in the class of 2011 (plus Apache from the late fall); raceday must be near.
Push practice was scheduled to start this week, but just as teams were charging up their flashlight batteries and telling their new drivers that it’s “actually kind of fun,” Sweepstakes had to put a hold on things.
Melting snow and rain kept teams off the course on Saturday, but Sunday was exciting enough to make up for it. Pika joined the new buggy 2011 club (with a standard tryke no less!) and Spirit entertained the chute crowd with a hat trick of spins and a rarely seen mechanical failure. Enough intro, let’s get to the details.
Rolls weren’t to be this weekend, but the BAA had a good homecoming weekend anyhow.
The cold finally showed up for Halloween weekend with rolls temperatures around 37, and with daylight savings time still in effect we’re down to about 60 minutes on the course. Sunday was cancelled in advance to make way for parties, so we’re still batting an impressive 9 for 10 so far this semester against inclement weather. Only 6 orgs made it out, so an hour was enough to get through the roll order 3 times. If I’m not mistaken, this was the first day of the year with no incidents at all, that’t not very ghoulish.