NEW Parks Pages are Coming! - Wild Texas Forums: Parks, Travel & Recreation

Shannon · 09-27-2004, 02:19 PM

Hey gang! I've been a little quiet in the forums lately due to working behind-the-scenes on a major update to our Texas Parks pages.

I've only scratched the surface (I have over 490 parks to update and that number's likely to grow), but here is a sneak preview of the type of information and resources WildTexas.com will soon provide you on every Texas park and recreation area:

EXAMPLE PARK: Abilene State Park
This is a park we previously just linked to TPWD's official park info page. Now, we have a page on WildTexas.com just for this park (and, soon, every single park in Texas!)

These new park pages will include information and photographs (as available), including new resources we previously were not able to provide due to time constraints, such as:

Current Water Level for all Texas lakes/reservoirs
U.S. Regional Maps of the Park Area from the U.S. Census Bureau
Topographic Maps of the Park Area from TopoZone
USGS Aerial Photographs of the Park Area from TerraServer (and, eventually, from our very own aerial photography archive -- an extension of our Moore Photography & Design (OutdoorPhoto.com)
More accurate GPS coordinates for GPS users
... And much more, as time permits!

Review our brand new Abilene State Park page for an example of what's to come for all Texas parks listed on WildTexas.com!

And if you have photos you'd like to share of any parks, please consider sharing them in the "Your Photos" gallery. In the future, we'll be incorporating a feature on each park page to randomly display selected user-submitted photos of that park.

Any suggestions or things I'm missing? This is your site, remember (we just pay the bills!)

10-01-2004, 08:22 PM

That's great Shannon! Keep up the good work. Can't wait to see more.

Thanks

Shannon · 10-06-2004, 03:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hiwayman

That's great Shannon! Keep up the good work. Can't wait to see more.

Thanks

Thanks for the appreciation -- it helps the morale!

One of the most important updates I am working on, in addition to adding all that new content, is a much more robust distance-based search capability for finding parks. Eg. Find parks within X miles of city Y. Right now, as we all know, I've had to hard-code the Parks Search to show all parks within 200 miles of a handful of major Texas cities. This is certainly not as convenient as I'd like our search to be for Wild Texas members, and it's also cumbersome from my (developer) standpoint.

I hope to have this functionality online soon, but first need to obtain and input the latitude and longitude coordinates for ALL parks in our database. So, patience is needed but things are going to get a whole lot better!

Quote:

PS: Please pardon our dust as we undergo these changes. Occasionally, pages may render in a "wonky" (odd) manner or not at all. Rest assured I'm behind the scenes -- causing the problems AND working to quickly resolve them with minimal impact to our members.

Thanks, gang!

Cube · 10-07-2004, 01:34 AM

Howdy Shannon,

Long time no talk.. great job you are doing here!
I like the new Abilene page.
I like the new look of the place (at least new to my visit)

I'm working a night shift and it's hard to live a normal life, but the weather has the family thinking about camping. This is a great resource.

Take care all,
Cube