ShipSpotting.com Forum

Shipspotters all over the world => Site related news, functions and modules => Topic started by: Henrik Soderberg on July 28, 2010, 10:10:34 AM

Title: New site manager
Post by: Henrik Soderberg on July 28, 2010, 10:10:34 AM
Hi everyone,

As you have seen in posts by Derek, there have been resources added to Shipspotting.com. I've only been talking to the webmasters so far, and it's really about time I introduce myself in public.

I'm Henrik Soderberg from Lulea in northern Sweden. Some of you might know me as "henks" from Airliners.net. I ran the site together with Johan Lundgren for many years, with me responsible for most things on the site. Airliners.net is also the site Tomas Pinas had in mind when creating Shipspotting.com back in 2004.

ShipSpotting.com caught my interest years ago. I have spoken with Tomas Pinas in the past, and he told me his vision of the site's future. I can say I know just about as much about ships as I know about planes (which isn't that much). ;) The images I like most here are large tankers, odd vessels and wrecks. I am very happy to see that AirNav's vision of this site's future is almost identical to Tomas Pinas ideas - and it's what I believe in as well.

My role here is "Site manager". This is a new role on the site, and as you understand from the title it includes a very wide area of responsibility. Nothing will change with the current webmasters and admins. They will continue doing their great work as usual.
 
The first mission for me here is to sort out the new site that will replace the current one. The Xoops CMS (that's the software running the current ShipSpotting.com site) wasn't exactly designed to handle the world's largest shipspotting image database. Getting out of this CMS system is a very difficult task due to multiple severe bottlenecks in every logical layer there is on the site. The huge amount of data and images also requires a lot of optimizations already with a small amount of visitors. Top priority here is to keep the images and data consistent. I'll not go into details, as these discussions will appear in separate forum threads in time.

Since I know you're all eager to see the new site online I will try to read/reply in the forum only once or twice a day for now.

I'm really excited to be here in the beginning of this new, expansive era for ShipSpotting.com.

Please contact me if you have anything you'd like to share.

Regards,
Henrik Soderberg
Title: Re: New site manager
Post by: Stan Muller on July 28, 2010, 07:43:14 PM
Hi Hendrik,

Welcome to our site!
A site populated by a bunch of hardheaded shipspotters, sailors, photographers and other ship related viewers and posters.
You'll find a lot of excitement in this forum, as you probably have heard of seen already.
I hope your influence will be of help to make this site a more smooth meeting point for the above mentioned.
We are proud of "our" work and in spite of some emotional response every now and then, this is a great site.

looking forward to the first results of Thomas' initial ideas.

best regards and good luck!
Stan
Title: Re: New site manager
Post by: H.J. de Winde on September 12, 2010, 05:54:28 PM
Henrik,

Maybe you can start doing somthing about the Search fields! By now for example, when I search for VOS RELIEVER, I found hundreds of ships even called JO SUSPICION because there is found VOS in a word in her details! I found VOS RELIEVER yes, after 86 pages I visited it! In my opinion this has nothing to do with a surch engine! Be sure, this is regular! :-(
Title: Re: New site manager
Post by: Henrik Soderberg on September 12, 2010, 06:44:33 PM
Hi,

The search and advanced search will be modified quite a lot once the new site is online. Exact matches and more options will show up. The current search both on this site as well as on the beta has many limitations.

Once the last synchronization has finished (as we move to the new site) we can start changing the site structure to better fit the needs for this.

Regards,
Henrik
Title: Re: New site manager
Post by: Kelvin Davies on September 12, 2010, 07:18:23 PM
Actually, the search facility works very well.
If the name has more than one word, select "Advanced Search".
Type the name Vos Reliever in the box and below that, choose "Exact Match".
On the first page are 4 or 5 photos of Eagle (new name for this vessel) and a couple of photos of Vos Reliever.
Simple!
Kelvin