Brecon Fans Races

I've upgraded the site to the latest version of mojoPortal CMS, and switched the comments systems to use Disqus, which is nowadays pretty ubiquitous and behaves better than the previous Facebook comments thing.

I'm hoping to find time to update the look and feel of the site soon, but that's always surprisingly time-consuming! Watch this space.

 

Of course the Brecon Fans website should run under https encryption, because people can log in and pre-enter! But encryption for home/hobby websites has always been a problem as it has required significant payments and/or complicated configuration. I should say.. it's not as if we have ever been putting people at risk, as payment for our race entries is taken by PayPal, which has its own security, but it did mean usernames and passwords for this site were travelling over the wire... read more

I noticed a few days ago that registering with a Google account was no longer working on this site. We use the Janrain social sign-in toolkit, and a little investigation showed this was all to do with the change from Google to Google+ accounts (some boring yada here). I think it works now, and we also enabled sign-in with Disqus and OpenID too (not that anyone knows their OpenID, but it's kinda geeky). read more

To cut a very long story very short, I have fixed the searchable results page which has been broken for months! Apologies for the interruption. I use to keep the results in a separate Access database file that I could upload to the web server easily after the race, but the mechanism for reading this broke when my web hosts migrated onto 64-bit Windows Server 2012. On that operating system it is only possible to have either 32-bit or 64-bit Access database drivers, and it wasn't working out... read more

Last year a couple of people told me they had not been able to login and enter on-line because the web page was off-centre and the login controls were not accessible. Recently I managed to replicate this in Internet Explorer, and tonight I think I fixed it. If you were affected, please test and let me know if you have any problems.

I've added a little countdown timer to the home page, showing this: The Pen y Fan Race starts in // I got the JavaScript from http://www.hashemian.com/tools/-countdown.htm and added the script into the Brecon Fans home page using the mojoPortal editor (TinyMCE) - all nice and easy. I've also tidied up some of the styling so that all text can be re-sized in the browser (for our veteran runners ). This meant changing all text styles from using fixed sizes to using proportional sizes... read more

We’ve set the dates for 2013… 13th – 14th July. The start time for Pen y Fan will be an hour later, at 12 noon, to give travellers more time to arrive.

And I’ve tweaked the web site to make the text bigger. All suggestions welcome for further changes.

Online entry is now open for 2013!

Demonstrating my mastery of displacement activity, I've created a Facebook page for the Brecon Fans Race Weekend http://www.facebook.com/BreconFansRaceWeekend

and embedded a panel for it into the home page of this site. I expect a turnout of at least 5000 after this sophisticated marketing campaign.

Please all "like" it a lot, then go for a run in the hills...

Just back from a work trip to Chester, and finding the house full of boxes of Breconshire Brewery ale. I think I'd better check it's all OK, perhaps one bottle from each box. Also I bought the wine for prizes on the way home, 24 bottles of nice, and Naomi picked up the prizes from Cotswold Outdoors in Brecon. And as well as the main prizes, every runner at each race will get a 15% off voucher valid in any Cotswold store, which is most welcome and very generous I reckon. On Wednesday... read more

Insurance all sorted thanks to John Sweeting and WFRA goodness. Plenty of entries have arrived by post - more than in previous years. Hard to tell what that means for turnout on the day. I've tweaked the photos page on the web site to make the thumbnail galleries display fully, and moved the slide show onto another page - this is a lovely feature but all the different years' galleries are a bit hard to find, and I've not found a way of making one slideshow for each year - this would need a... read more