Jeroen

I programmed a new feature that allows registered users to mark their participation in events.

To see what this is all about, go to the calendar, and click on an event that you plan to visit. You will then see a dropdown list called MyEvents, where you can select your involvement in the event, e.g. 'I will visit' or 'I will compete'.

All events that you add to MyEvents this way will show up on your profile page, under a new Tab called 'Events'. And so you can let the world know at which events you will be / have been.

I will probably add more features to this in the future. One thing that I really want is the possibility to add Playak events to Outlook or Google Calendar etc. Or if you have other wishes, please let me know and I'll see what I can do.

Enjoy,
Jeroen

Found this move - they call it the Magic Trick - in the Riot blog:

Now, this is all nice, even if the paddle throwing part of the trick smells a bit oldschool, but I think it can be taken to a next level, which I will call the Circus Trick here:

Instead of throwing the paddle forward, throw it way up in the air, and catch it again when you are done with your loop.

Now I can't tell you if it's technically possible at all (hack, I cannot even loop ), but it would sure look impressive and it's definitely worth a try….

Looking forward to the first video of a successful Circus Trick ….

Update January 27 2007:

Hurray, the video of that trick exists:

{mov}Fubu%20Flip%20-%20slum%20dot%20se{/mov}

Thanks to Mikael and slum.se !

A cool headcam video of the rhine falls descent, made for the film festival in Germany, February 2007:

Thanks to bondle.de

I have been working on a new service that puts registered Playak users on a Google map.

The idea is that my server tries to find out where each user is located and then puts that information in the database. At one point, users will be allowed to change that info (my server's guesses are not always correct), but that's for further study.

One big problem is that we have about 10000 registered users, and if I put all of those on a map, your browser's javascript will go crazy by the huge amounts of data, i.e. you'll wait forever before you see something… I'm not sure yet how to solve that problem. If anybody has any ideas, please let me know. For now, I just solved the problem by only showing the last 200 active users on the map.

The links to the profiles etc should still be developed further, but I would just like to get some feedback first before I put more time in this…

You can see it in live action here.

Enjoy,
Jeroen

Since I keep a huge list of paddling
related sites for Playak News Watch anyway, I thought I might as well
use that to create a 'Paddle Search Engine', which basically means
'Google in a paddling context'.

As an example, if you use this search engine to search for 'Agent' or 'Punk Rocker', you wont be bored by news about the CIA, the Ramones etc.

Feel free to try it out here:

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=012365686223057051577%3Ar-xj5yyxtmq

Feedback welcome as always. If people like it, I may integrate it in Playak some day.

Enjoy,
Jeroen

From Exchile:

I have been working on a new rating system that integrates better with all Playak content.

You can already see it in action in the articles, spots, kayahoo links, videos and right here in the blogs.

One
good thing about the new system is that the page you are visiting
doesn't have to reload because of your rating. That means for instance
that you can rate a video while watching it.

Also, the system
makes it easier to add ratings for anything we can think of. For
instance, you can now give three separate ratings for each spot. You
can give a low rating if you think the description is not very well
written, but still give a high rating if you think the spot as such is
great for experts, and again a low rating if you think it is not at all
suited for beginners.

I will slowly start adding this new rating system to all other Playak services as well.

Enjoy,
Jeroen

PS feedback welcome as always…

Bohemian Rhapsody, performed by the industry's 25 most annoying voices:

Quite off-topic, but fun!

enjoy,
jeroen