Three New Features

7/2/2006

Three significant new features were added to the website yesterday… state/county stats maps, recent log entry forms for stats and milestones, and alert messages.

State/County Stats Maps

For users who have entered the states and Wisconsin counties they cached in, maps showing where they have been are now auto-generated and shown on the “States/Counties/Countries” tab of their user profile.

Thanks to Team B Squared (Brian) for creating the base maps that are “filled” by the web server and displayed.

Note that this is really just phase 1 of the map project. In the future more features will be added, including:

– Several customization options, including fill colors and image size.

– Addition of text to the map images, including a legend and a title indicating whose map this is (more important when including the map on another site).

– Instructions on how to add these images to your geocaching.com profile, with HTML code to be cut and pasted… though I’m sure some folks will figure out how to do this without any help.

– Ability to select and display a “home county” or “home state”.

– A world map?

Recent Log Stats And Milestone Entry Forms

To make adding state/country/country and milestone information easier, you can now reference logs you have recently made on geocaching.com (assuming they have been picked up by our Recent Logs harvester).

Go to Milestones->Add Milestone or State/County Stats->Add Stats. In both cases, you’ll see a link to a Recent Logs Entry Form… click on that link. On the form that appears, you then just select one of your recent logs, enter a bare minimum amount of information, and you’re done. Information like the date of the cache find, name of the cache, link to the log entry, etc. are all picked up automatically and added to the database.

Now you have no excuse not to keep your stats and milestones up to date! 🙂

Alert Messages

Alert messages will now be displayed in red text in the upper right hand corner (to the right of the WGA logo) of every page on the WGA web site.

Currently alerts only appear in two situations… when you have new private messages, and when your WGA membership has expired or is about to expire. In the future there may be additional alerts, such as reminders to folks to vote in BOD elections, etc.

If you find these alert messages annoying, they can be switched off. Go to Your Account, click the Preferences tab, and set “Show Alerts” to No to prevent them from being displayed.

A related note: If you log into the WGA site infrequently but may possibly get private messages from other users, I highly recommend turning on email notification… this will ensure you find out someone is trying to contact you in a timely fashion. Email notification for private messages can be enabled under Your Account->Preferences.