Renee Sauce

Leo self portrait
We were never good with history but we think this guy was pretty big in the Renee Sau Renaissance.
Another Leo self portrait
Same guy but in "period" costume..

So, it's been cold lately. Very cold. Terribly cold by Atlanta standards. Not so much in magnitude but in sheer duration. Atlanta usually gets the few odd days each winter of reminder why we live here and not Buffalo, NY. But, this year, we've had so many of those days, we are starting to think we are actually living, well, not Buffalo but someplace a lot colder than here. There have been some windsurfable days lately but the desire to jump in 44 degree water wanes now that spring can't be more than a few weeks away.

32 degree session
- source
Umm... maybe we'll go work on the website instead.

So, we put the time to go use. We've re-arranged the furniture, put up a new coat of paint and dusted the shelves here. We've upgraded, updated, migrated and consolidated. We'll spare you the details (unless someone really wants to know) as those things tend to put most people to sleep and would only reveal the general level of incompetence around here.. We guess you could call it a rebirth of sorts although the less kind might just say we put the old website out of it's misery. It's something that we've been putting off in ways for a long time but some recent core software updates made it more urgently necessary.

The result of all this is a much more unified website with a single log in. The wiki is still somewhat separate but, since after four years, zero edits have been done by anyone else, that wasn't very high on our to-do list. As importantly, the future upgrade path is much more secure.

New! Improved! Recommended by 4 of every 5 dentists!

Here are just some of the changes we've made:

  • One login, that's all. Since everything commonly used has been centralized under one system, only one log in is required. None of the logged in/not logged in nonsense some of you suffered through. As well, you can use an account on the website or register through another social media account. If nothing else, this should keep Peelskid from having his bi-weekly heart attack when his cookies expired.
    One call that's all
    "One call that's" all guy.
    One call that's all
    Wait, maybe this is him.
  • Modernized picture gallery. We've imported every.single.gallery.image (about 2200) into a new gallery which makes viewing simpler and offers slideshow and other options. No more layout busting pics that are too big. We still like big pics but they won't be the pain they used to be. User uploads should be easier and just around the corner as soon as we write up the very, very brief tutorial. If you haven't visited the gallery lately, please do. The advent of digital photography means we have accumulated some crazy good albums of local windsurfers and kiters.
  • Modernized forum. We really liked the old forum but we had nightmares about the day when we wouldn't be able to access it seamlessly through the main site. So, we imported all 13000 posts. We created an interface comfortably similar to the old one but with a few new features. We no longer have nightmares about losing all those posts in the dustbin and Peelskid should be able to log in and post dirt-bike videos. (Which, btw, we love because he's a windsurfer and anything a windsurfer does is cool, by definition. That's how we roll around here.)
  • Cleaner, more modern interface which behaves better on mobile devices. We won't go so far as to say we're mobile optimized but you should be able to navigate the site much easier while at the lake or anywhere else you don't have your computer handy. We've done a few other things to make images and content easier to view, as well (especially images).
  • Mild twitter integration. New topics, stories (but not comments) and posts from our Facebook page appear as tweets on our twitterpage: twitter.com/windsurfatlanta. The feed is updated hourly. If you can't stop by here all the time, at least twitter will give you some idea of what's new. The twitter page will get some cosmetic changes shortly, too.

There still is a long to-do list of planned features, tweaks and archives so check in periodically. As the weather warms up, things will get more active both here and on the water.

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FoilDodo's picture
FoilDodo
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Joined: 03/19/2008 - 23:50
Posts: 2738
Re: Renee Sauce

Looks GREAT Renee!
After all those days of 35º rain falling in to the lake, I was pretty stoked to hear the Lanier water temp only got to 42º... oh boy let's go!

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