I think the point is... If you don't have the time to put up quality stuff, then don't.

Although, I could be wrong.

Jake

If creation of pages was overly easy we might see more lower quality content than what's typically posted, while as it currently is we might be missing out on good contributions as folks don't want to deal with the burdens you pointed out. Dead end argument I suppose.
Images aside, you can always create HTML in any way you want and just paste the source over. There are plenty free WYSIWYG editors out there. If you then decide to use a third party image hoster (e.g. flickr and the likes) you can embed images from there through your editor and the images will still show when pasting the source here.

phlipdascrip wrote:If creation of pages was overly easy we might see more lower quality content than what's typically posted, while as it currently is we might be missing out on good contributions as folks don't want to deal with the burdens you pointed out. Dead end argument I suppose.
Images aside, you can always create HTML in any way you want and just paste the source over. There are plenty free WYSIWYG editors out there. If you then decide to use a third party image hoster (e.g. flickr and the likes) you can embed images from there through your editor and the images will still show when pasting the source here.

Rather than letting all these other sites (Flickr, etc.) pass us by I think we should try to keep up with them feature-wise. Because yes, you certainly can just link to images stored over there (I've done this quite often) but SP users then miss out on having those photos in the SP database where they can be linked to as first class objects. I think SP loses a lot of power when it becomes a kind of husk or shell that just points to content hosted elsewhere.

I'd love it if people who want to contribute high quality but are falling away because of the tedious and increasingly out of date mechanisms here would stay and press for more modern access. For example a sanctioned bulk uploader, supporting wiki syntax such that you don't have to divide your page into sections via separate text boxes (just one text box for the page content), RSS feeds for areas/mountains/etc., etc.

I could go on but dang it's late! Also none of that will happen

I have enjoyed SP for years watching it's growth from having on maybe 200 mountains posted to almost 10,000 and it's members increase from 5,000 to over 46,000. I applaud all the members of this site as an engine for us to all communicate, and most importantley those prime members who run the site for all climbers around the world. And yes, as I was writing my first TR, I had to learn the path/method but I was no means bothered by it as this site is not a standard web site, as it is just for us climbers.

And maybe it should not be so cush easy as you would like, but as in climbing, which anybody has pushed themselves can attest, may be a little hard, but that's climbing.

This site was never meant to be as easy as your personal Facebook page. It's much more important than that.

Montana Matt Guys, we've had some comments that the TR form is hard to use. Should we code up something more user friendly?

Ryle Dude. There's a high pressure system sitting over the Southwest right now. Should be good for a couple of weeks.

Josh Roadtrip!

Montana Matt But what about Summitpost???? Should I stay and write some code?

Ryle F that. You want to cater to those whiners or climb? Besides, we need a belay slave and someone to carry the beer.

Josh What's a "belay"?

Montana Matt I'll get the beer...

You make it sound like it's an overly complicated thing. I agree that uploading many images is somewhat tedious work, but it's by no means complicated.

(disclaimer: 1st, I'm totally happy with the way DMT does TRs, but if anyone wants to be official...)

TRs should be (and generally are) a lot less complicated than mountain/rock pages. A TR-writer can be much more casual about directions (there really don't need to be any), maps, mileages, and route-finding.

If you use the bulk-uploader, and pre-edit the images to put in captions and titles in the IPTC data fields, the BU will do a lot of the work for you; there will be a list of the images, numbers and titles, which you can just paste into your text.

Free programs like Irfanview (windows) allow you to embed the info directly in the jpeg, which can be quite useful if you later want to figure out why the heck you took that photo. These editors show the photo while you are adding the info, so you don't have to guess blindly.

In IrfanView, select image|information|IPTC button
...and edit the caption on the caption tab, and then select the origin tab and put the title in the "Object name" field. When the BU returns the list of figures with the numbers, it will put the title in the same line, in code that can simply be pasted into the appropriate place in the TR. The caption is the below-photo more-extensive text that we normally see when we click on photo objects. You can start each Title with "A." or "B." or "C." ... if you are worried that you won't be able to remember the order. Do this procedure for every photo you want to use in the TR, before you use BU.

Get the newest version of BU if you want to use this feature. Again, it's totally optional.

As far as I can tell, nobody polices to make sure you don't upload pictures of flowers and so forth. If they are relevant to the TR, have at it.