Austin who administers the British Associate of Radio Controller Soarers gratiously gave me permission to spread the word on their slope soaring forums about Weather Permitting. I got some helpful feedback, a few bug reports, increased the mailing list subscriber numbers by double and gained 10+ registered users to the site! A great success I think.
One of the bugs reported was actually a duplicate of one that Sean Cull submitted during the early stages, I should have investigated it more thoroughly, because it was easily replicated the second time, and fixed in seconds.
The need for accurate data
One particularly noteworthy piece of feedback was the issue of information accuracy. It's something I stupidly hadn't considered, and is of critical importance, because a site that can't be trusted to have accurate information is unuseable. Yet the problem remains that the individual slope soaring sites must be maintained by the users, and therefore I have to rely on people caring enough to update. I've decided for now to add in some "report" buttons that will allow users to submit any inaccurate or missing information to the slope "owner", which will then be automatically passed on to me if no action is taken within a particular timeframe. This is something I'm going to be constantly reassessing to make sure all information is as accurate and helpful as possible.
Mmmmm Google Maps
People understandably struggled with finding Latitude and Longitude data, something I should have foreseen, but unsurprisingly didn't. I had always planned to replace the input fields for those with an embedded google map, which will allow the user to search via text, and the pinpoint the slope soaring position. Much easier all round, and I wish I'd saved people confusion by doing it before my post on the BARCS forums.
and finally...
This is where I would put a nice christmas wish, and naively announce my intent to get in an hour's slope soaring on Christmas Day, but I want to get some more features pushed out before Christmas Day, so I'm going to hold off as an incentive to push forward.