Site update

Every year, I try to make at least one improvement behind the scenes to the Cooler Crew site. Over this past year, we've added in as many of the small-town treasure hunts as we could get our hands on into the site. This has involved a lot of googling and other tracking down of articles from smaller newspapers, contact with the folks who run the various hunts, etc. As of right now, we have 633 distinct pieces of content on the site, dating back to some of the original writings of Greg Sax back in 1999, and including all of the hunts we know of that took place in 2013. I hope to keep that particular tradition up. I'm also in the process of trying to make the url names of each of the individual pages more consistent, something along the lines of content_type/source/year/name. 

On the back end of things, I'm tweaking the code that powers the treasure hunt section of the site. One of the more prominent things you'll notice is the addition of a Google Map to the hunt information section of the treasure hunt pages where we have GPS coordinates for the location of that particular treasure hunt. On that same note, I'm working to change the way the summary maps work on the site. As of right now, the summary map pages, e.g., the Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt map are relatively static. Yes, they update based on hunts being added, but the underlying database structure isn't very conducive to maintenance, and all of the boundary data for cities, and hunt location data are sent to you, regardless of whether they're visible in the map you're looking at or not. I'm working to change that.

Finally, I'm actually working on a replacement for our forum. I think its kind of obvious that with Facebook, there are a lot of people who can't justify the $10 per year to maintain their membership at Able Minds. The last post in the Cooler Crew boards at the time I write this took place on September 25, nearly three months ago. A while ago, I started a conversation with many of you on Facebook just as a brainstorming place. I got a lot of good ideas from that. While I can guarantee that there won't be a forum hosted on coolercrew.com for the 2014 hunt, I'd really like to have something in place for the 2015 hunt. Don't be surprised if you see invites from me to test out a development site sometime over the summer. As for the history at Able Minds, well, you know we've got our boards from 1998-2005 archived here. I'm working to get the Ableminds content archived here too (as well as to keep it updated as people post). 

Oh and don't forget, with an account, you can create content here too. At the moment that's the only reason you need an account. As a result, accounts can now only be administratively created. When the forum comes online, you'll need an account for that as well. Until then, if you don't have an account, and would like one, follow the contact us link below and we'll set you up. We've done a major purge of "inactive" accounts, so if you had one before, or even thought you had one before, you might not now. Once the forum is back online, account creation will be re-enabled.