Change is good

It’s been about 8 months since Lisa said, “pull the trigger” and ArkansasOutside.com was launched. She was right. The site has been going crazy thanks to very supportive friends. We have made so many new friends since the site started and you’ve all shown so much support to us we wanted to make a few updates for you.

The two most popular features of ArkansasOutside.com have been the photo pages and the events pages so those are getting some improvements.

Many of you know that we post all the photos we take at the events we cover on our Flickr page and offer up low resolution photos for you to download for free. I think this policy has been one of the reasons we have grown so quickly. We do get a lot of requests for higher resolution images and even prints of the photos. Since we take anywhere from 500 to 2000 photos at each event, the task of finding treating and sending these photos has become very time consuming. We had to find a solution.

Say hello to SmugMug, our new photo partner.

SmugMug offers us professional image management allowing you to get the photos you want. What I really liked about them is that you can still download the low resolution photos for free. There was no way I was taking that away. For higher resolution images, prints or other options SmugMug will take care of that service for us. Few things are free, except for advice and the low rez downloads but I feel service that SmugMug offers is reasonably priced and a small profit will help to keep ArkansasOutside.com going and growing.

Look for the link at the end of our articles to get to the new photo page. Over the next few weeks we will be uploading past photo galleries. We’ll keep you informed whenever we get another gallery loaded on our Facebook and Twitter pages.

You can check out the first couple of galleries we put up from last weekend’s events right here.

[smugmug url=”http://arkansasoutside.smugmug.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=gallery&Data=24404776_g5zzwj&format=rss200″ title=”Riverside%20Sprint%20Duathlon%202012″ description=”Click%20image%20to%20go%20to%20more%20photos” imagecount=”1″ start=”1″ num=”100″ thumbsize=”Th” link=”smugmug” captions=”false” sort=”true” window=”true” smugmug=”true” size=”L”]

[smugmug url=”http://arkansasoutside.smugmug.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=gallery&Data=24388613_GsFZCM&format=rss200″ title=”Riverside%20Mountain%20Bike%20Race%202012″ description=”Click%20image%20to%20go%20to%20more%20photos” imagecount=”1″ start=”1″ num=”100″ thumbsize=”Th” link=”smugmug” captions=”false” sort=”true” window=”true” smugmug=”true” size=”L”]

Now for the event pages. The calendar of events continues to grow as more and more race organizers learn about it. We have also noticed that it’s used a lot by visitors. In the interest of making it easier to remember events coming up, all of our events will now have a Google Calendar and iCal link at the top of the description. You will be able to use these links to add the events to your personal online calendar.

Some other upgrades are coming but they are mainly for administrative stuff to speed up a few things in the background. We are already working on more improvements down the road but we call those top secret for now. Thanks again to all of our friends, old and new for using and sharing our site and thanks to our advertising supporters.

We’ll see you at a race or on a trail.