SummitPost.org

So as I've been climbing more and keeping myself busier with other priorities, I sadly have been contributing very little to SummitPost the last few years.

However, one of the basic things I've been doing that has kept up with my climbing is putting up comprehensive photo albums on Picasa, with a rough "TR abstract", informative captions on all of the photos, geolocations of the photos, and often at a later time, annotated photos of the route or other things. Basically, by the time I have those, it is pretty much a photo TR, which I have occasionally transferred to a TR format on SuperTopo, although that still only is done for maybe 1/10 of the outings since even that takes a lot of time.

While I still would do the occasional TR and route submissions etc. on SP, so that I can share more info more casually as I go is there becoming a standard/acceptable way on SP to "share" albums? Like what I do with these albums in Facebook and Google+?

I'm thinking maybe just throwing up a forum post in the relevant region announcing the album, and maybe adding the link to the relevant route or mountain page (if any) in the comments section - unless there is a better place to put it? I know SP generally doesn't accept forum posts to external trip reports, but this seems a little different and the albums get enough attention from my friends on Google+ & Facebook (climbers & non-climbers alike), that it seems a shame that it is not being kept more in the SP stream. And every now and then when I have time to make a more complete 'product' from some of these, I certainly would do so!

An example would be something like a simple forum post like this:
--------------------------
2012-05-27to28 - Charlotte Dome S Face (III, 5.8, 12P)
As a last minute Memorial weekend "Plan B" climb, Scott Berry and I seized an opportunity to climb together and experience a route that we both had at the top of our lists: The South Face of Charlotte Dome (III, 5.8, 12P). This "50 Classic Climb" turned out to be a stellar outing, with pitch after pitch of immaculate rock and interesting climbing features and ever increasing exposure. Scott & I managed to extend & link pitches such that we brought it down to 9 LONG pitches. We waited until after the Saturday snowstorm had passed before heading up Saturday night and sleeping a few hours at the Charlotte Creek-Bubbs Creek jct. It turns out my friends Chris Terry & Dominique & their friends also had plans to climb the route, and we ran into them at the base and climbed it as 3 teams of 2. Some 'issues' near the end of the climb resulted in a rather unique bivy experience before we were able to finish descending the next day.

PellucidWombat wrote:I know SP generally doesn't accept forum posts to external trip reports

As far as I know, SP has no problem with forum posts to external trip reports as long as it does not seem to be for commercial gain. Of course, we'd rather see trip reports here, but I know of no issue with what you are proposing.

On the other hand, when people submit "trip reports" on the content side that are merely links to an external site, that's not well received and such "submissions" are often deleted.

The only real downside I see to what you are suggesting is that if you are detailing route conditions rather than just your adventures, your posts may not have much long-term value to users since they won't be in the content database and won't come up under search results (unless someone does a forum search, which is much less likely and only goes back a year).

Yeah, I wouldn't see it as a substitute for submitting content, but better than submitting nothing! Or as a rough placeholder until/unless I made something more substantial.

The temporary nature of the forum post is why I was thinking of doing that for an initial publicized sharing, and then somehow attach it to a relevant area of SP. e.g. the comments of a route page? Although it seems to me that people rarely look at the comments when researching route pages :-/

How about 1) a forum post, 2) attach a brief note and a link to the full story (even if just the forum post) on the summit log? I do read summit or route logs if I'm doing research in the content database. (and true, I usually ignore the comments section).

The upside to uploading content elsewhere is high. With Flickr, you get an RSS feed, instant sharing of the data in many places on the web, apps for iPad, mobile phones, all kinds of stuff. Software has emerged for storing your captions in the photo itself, and these captions are sucked in and displayed by the picture, which can also be geotagged and sucked into various map displays. You also get to upload full-resolution without feeling guilty (no matter what Matt says, people will always believe large uploads are responsible for slowdowns at SP). Services like Animoto have importers to make cool slideshows from your content hosted at places like Picasa, Flickr, etc. With your own blog you get control of your content, again, RSS feeds that allow syndication anywhere you need it, and the ability to add whatever technical or database features you want.

I look at folks like you and some other folks further north with amazing content, and wish that SP had modern web tools that made it easier to live here. In my experience, SP is the first "web 2.0" site that I used a lot. But now it's still fundamentally a "site" and not an "application" which is a growing problem (IMHO, I know many disagree!).

Michael,

Good idea with the summit log links. Perhaps that will help me keep up to date with my signings as well

One of the major things that discourages me from uploading pictures to SP these days is that sites like Picasa can act as a one-stop depository of images. Especially for annotated photos, if I ever want to add something or find that I made an error and need to change it, doing so on my computer is automatically updated to the online photo and thereby updated everywhere that references it. No need to hunt around and delete older versions and upload newer versions!