It’s been a while since we’ve had a newsletter for users of Skipr.net. A bunch of things have happened since we “spoke” last. For most of you, this will be the first newsletter, as we’ve more than doubled the number of boats on Skipr.net since the last one!

In this Newsletter:

Skipr Plus
New Features
Boat Photo competition
Notable Tracks
Island Cruising

[...]

This weekend we launched a re-design of the skipr.net website.  We’ve overhauled its user interface and laid the foundations for a range of new features to help cruising sailors and everyone else  interested in the tracking the movement of recreational vessels. This post describes a few of the new features. [...]

The observant among visitors to this site will have seen the email subscription option in the right hand column.

Every day the system sends an email which lists newly posted items on a number of relevant Australian cruising sites. It makes for a very convenient way of keeping up with local cruising news.

If you know of other sites which should be included, leave a comment with the site details.

Here are the sites currently “monitored”:

• Alfreds Cruising
• Sail-World.com Cruising Australia News
• Skipr’s Notebook (this weblog)
• My Sailing - articles from Cruising Helsman etc.[added March 09]

as well as the following weblogs of Cruising boats and their owners

• Crystal Blues
• Diomedea
• Te Moana

For those “in the know”, this is a “mashup” of Feedburner‘s email subscription service, the Planet aggregator and the sites listed above which all provide”feeds”.

I just “opened the front door” to Skipr.net. There is still some more testing to do, but I thought I’d make the site public while we’re doing some more testing. Beta testers will get their log-ins on Monday.
There is still much to do. My current priorities are:

• Implementing the new design across the site.
• Giving boats the ability to define a cruise or cruise leg.
• Improving error trapping and reporting.

Anyway, here we go….!

I need to produce some documentation for Skipr.net and have a way for users to be able to provide feedback. So here I go with another Blog!