New Look, New Features for FTO

Salt Lake City, UT – Regular visitors to First Tracks!! Online have noticed that there’s been no new content published over the past 10 days or so. We’ve been skiing of course, but that isn’t it. We’ve had bigger fish to fry and we’re now ready to unveil the results to you, our loyal readers.

The database that forms the backbone of our publication had become corrupt and unusable. Couple that with the fact that our publishing platform has been all but abandoned by both its creators and users, and we knew that it was time for a change.

There was, however, no conversion script already written to modify our database from the old format to the new. This required countless hours and many sleepless nights to by hand reconstruct the database in a format recognized by the new platform with a minimal loss of content. We’re tired and brain-dead but we’re nearly done, and we’re close enough that we can now throw the switch and show our new magazine format to the world.

The good news is that the new platform is active, robust and used by tens of thousands of publishers worldwide. This means new features for you, including a mobile version of our website, improved search functionality and better categorization of articles. If you were registered for our main website before we regret that you’ll need to re-register, but forum users are unaffected by this.

We still have a few final pieces to the puzzle to finish, such as recreating more than the first paragraph of news articles over a year old, but we’re anxious to show the new FTO to the skiing world. We look forward to your feedback!

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