I'm finding that the early hours of the morning are great for making improvements to DCSki.. (It's just hard to wake up in the morning and go to work!)

I've made another round of significant improvements to the site, although many are "behind the scenes." There's really a lot of technology behind DCSki now.

DCSki Weather is now much improved. The current weather conditions section of the main DCSki page (top right corner) is now primarily text-based. This should (hopefully) eliminate prior problems of having the forecast image cached by the web browser, thus resulting in outdated conditions. For reasons that I haven't entirely figured out (other than the National Weather Service servers being down), the current conditions will occasionally be unavailable. Often clicking re-load in your browser fixes this problem. The Weather Forecast page is also improved, using the standard DCSki page style. All conditions and forecasts are based on the Baltimore metro area. Bear in mind that it's usually warmer in Baltimore in the winter than at the area ski resorts, and rain in Baltimore can be snow at the higher elevations.

A couple random links from the DCSki Link Database are now displayed on the front page (bottom right.)

I've also been testing out various pages with various browsers on various platforms. I've found some pages had marginal errors on Internet Explorer on Windows; I've tried to fix these. (Everything has looked spiffy on my Mac all along, honest! If you see any pages that look odd - even if they only look a little odd - please bring it to my attention.

I still have a number of improvements I plan to make to the site in the coming weeks, including overhauling the site-wide search engine, adding a lodging properties search and advertising feature, updating resort profiles to include information about children's programs, and more.

Once I wrap up with these architectural changes, I will switch gears and focus on publishing news articles on a regular basis previewing what to expect on the slopes this winter, etc. In about a month we'll be getting pretty close to the start of the ski season. I know I can't wait to hit the slopes.

Suggestions for site improvements are always welcome. Of the dozens of new features I have added over the past few months, many were a direct result of reader suggestions. Keep them coming!

As always, I'm grateful to all of you for visiting DCSki and making the site successful. Please spread the word and let others know about DCSki this winter.

Thanks!

- Scott