This blog has been rather quiet of late as we have been working hard completing the “All Wales Trip Plan” service design and writing the code.
Our primary objective has been to get a service up and running for the Anglesey coast. Anglesey is a popular destination for sea kayakers and is as challenging in many ways as it is beautiful. Our service will present trip plan suggestions matched to a sea kayaker’s skills but selected with a close eye on the forecast winds and tides.
Effective trip planning can be a fairly time consuming (perhaps daunting) task that is sometimes rushed or even not done at all. The SKW project has taken on the challenge of automating the process of creating custom trip plan templates and then serving up detailed trip plans for a specific time and date. The trip selection process itself is complex and has to crunch a lot of values to come up with a suitable list.
So how are we doing? We plan to invite a group of experienced paddlers to act as alpha testers around the end of this month. We will be looking to them to assess our trip suggestions and trip plans and give us some expert feedback. They know the waters around Anglesey very well and have a good feel for the capabilities of kayakers at a variety of skill levels. If that does not result in too much additional development work then we should be able to open our doors to all comers shortly thereafter.
The service will then be in a public beta. We have a massive list of features to add to the site and we will be rolling those out on a continuous basis – helped on (we hope) by suggestions and constructive criticism from paddlers trying out our service and the suggested trips.
Why are we calling the public service a beta? Well partly because there are lots of extra facilities we have yet to build but also because we have the rest of the Welsh coast to include. Once we are satisfied that we have the facilities that the majority of our users need in place and we have started to “roll out” to the rest of the coast then we will probably be confident enough to declare Sea Kayak Wales properly “live”.
Right from the start we will be encouraging Sea Kayak Wales members to record their own trip plans so they can be included in their personal trip suggestions lists. Such private trips will remain private to individual members unless they choose to share them with the community. Members will be able to build their private paddling routes taking advantage of the Sea Kayak Wales database of launch points and key coastal waypoints.
The Sea Kayak Wales web site service is free – so sign up now, if you have not already done so, and be one of the first to access our trip planning service as soon as it is available.
To sign up, just click the login link towards the top right of the page at SeaKayakWales. If you have a Google or other OpenID account then just click on the appropriate icon but if you need to set up an account just for SKW then follow the link on the page.
Our primary objective has been to get a service up and running for the Anglesey coast. Anglesey is a popular destination for sea kayakers and is as challenging in many ways as it is beautiful. Our service will present trip plan suggestions matched to a sea kayaker’s skills but selected with a close eye on the forecast winds and tides.
Effective trip planning can be a fairly time consuming (perhaps daunting) task that is sometimes rushed or even not done at all. The SKW project has taken on the challenge of automating the process of creating custom trip plan templates and then serving up detailed trip plans for a specific time and date. The trip selection process itself is complex and has to crunch a lot of values to come up with a suitable list.
So how are we doing? We plan to invite a group of experienced paddlers to act as alpha testers around the end of this month. We will be looking to them to assess our trip suggestions and trip plans and give us some expert feedback. They know the waters around Anglesey very well and have a good feel for the capabilities of kayakers at a variety of skill levels. If that does not result in too much additional development work then we should be able to open our doors to all comers shortly thereafter.
The service will then be in a public beta. We have a massive list of features to add to the site and we will be rolling those out on a continuous basis – helped on (we hope) by suggestions and constructive criticism from paddlers trying out our service and the suggested trips.
Why are we calling the public service a beta? Well partly because there are lots of extra facilities we have yet to build but also because we have the rest of the Welsh coast to include. Once we are satisfied that we have the facilities that the majority of our users need in place and we have started to “roll out” to the rest of the coast then we will probably be confident enough to declare Sea Kayak Wales properly “live”.
Right from the start we will be encouraging Sea Kayak Wales members to record their own trip plans so they can be included in their personal trip suggestions lists. Such private trips will remain private to individual members unless they choose to share them with the community. Members will be able to build their private paddling routes taking advantage of the Sea Kayak Wales database of launch points and key coastal waypoints.
The Sea Kayak Wales web site service is free – so sign up now, if you have not already done so, and be one of the first to access our trip planning service as soon as it is available.
To sign up, just click the login link towards the top right of the page at SeaKayakWales. If you have a Google or other OpenID account then just click on the appropriate icon but if you need to set up an account just for SKW then follow the link on the page.
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