How Best to Connect for Downwinders??

Regret to have missed the race from Sand Key this past Sunday. Although I must say it presented quite a site to see 30+ kiters go by as I rigged up for a session off St. Pete beach.

Would love to join in on down winders over the Winter months. I'm from Chicago and fly Peter Lynn kites and promise not to get in anyone's way. Am wondering if the Old Guard on the forum could give me some tips on how to hook up with the group when they are doing a down winder. I live in St. Petersburg with a flexible which allows me to go when the wind blows....

Best regards,
Tim

[Unimog Bob]

People sometimes post on here.
In addition, last year or so we set up a TextMark service to help people communicate to others when it was windy. It got some cooperation, but not as much as anticipated.

I just setup a similar texting service for DWs.

Here is the link http://lite.textmarks.com/DOWNWINDER
Basic instructions are on the site.
A discussion of the basics for the TEXTMARKS system is here (this one applies to WINDY... not DOWNWINDER, but the basics are the same) :

http://www.fksa.org/showthread.php?t=8676&page=4

Not sure why, but communication on a large scale doesn't happen around here. My guess is that there are enough riders that people have settled into cliques.
Text to that link and I will get back to you, if not more people.

The TEXTMARK texts amongst people can be output to a webpage as well, as shown here on right under ("Recent Wind").
http://www.scottfears.com/

Seems like a no brainer tool for updates of races etc. One person texts something, everyone gets it in 5 seconds. The output can be accessed both by text updates for subscribed members or by visiting a web site via s smartphone showing the linked gadget and updates (no subscription necessary). Even as useful as it seems, I haven't seen one example of this technology allowing coordination of information taken advantage of, which I think is a missed opportunity. Maybe it will be used this year (?)
At bare minimum, I will hook up a gadget on that demo page and you will be linked to people via me and several others who do DWs.

[ARCSrule]

good luck with that! I fly PL's too--chargers. the inflated guys don't like foils. jjust 2 weeks ago i broke a spar in the surf and of course could not relaunnch. same time a group was starting a downwinder and a guy had to swim in from 1/4 mile out because of a bladder failure. an hour later, another bladder failure up the beach and tangled mess of spaghetti lines. But the only issue that day was the foil that could not relaunch! sorry for the rant but you and I are most likely the only arcs in fla i'll be in key west between xmas and new years. hope there's wind. email a company down there about the flats trip they offer. i guess since i'm flying a foil, they won't even answer my email

[Unimog Bob]

Wow. One day a friend posts about a wind forecast and gets asked about it's futility, now I respond with an offering to a guy to join us in DWs and supposedly I am not sincere. You are right ARCSRULE, my real agenda was to get a foil guy out there and screw him over.

I couldn't care less if a guy is flying a bed sheet. I started on foils myself. Not sure why anyone would post such a negative response after I obviously took some time to try to hook a guy up. None of the guys I ride with give a shit what a guy is riding.

[Kiteboarding Tampa Bay]

I think Text Marks is the way to go, plus the embed feature is sweet for those at the office and wondering if they should duck out.

Its 20 bucks a month to work with T-Mobile, though. (I have T-Mo)
I would gladly use the service if we can take up a collection from the other T- Mobile users.

[Unimog Bob]

Hmm. I thought T-mobile did that.

As you might have seen in the news, starting on October 1st T-Mobile will institute an additional charge for each text message sent by businesses such as TextMarks. We are working with other companies in the text messaging industry to try to convince T-Mobile to revert this charge, but we don't know if we will succeed. This additional fee is greater than the revenues that can be generated by placing ads in the text messages, so, unfortunately, we will be forced to stop delivering free ad-supported messages to T-Mobile subscribers unless this situation is resolved. We will continue to deliver ad-supported text messages to subscribers of Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and other wireless carriers.

This will only impact our free, ad-supported accounts. Paid accounts will continue to deliver to T-mobile customers, with no additional charges passed on to our customers.

If you have a free account but would like to continue to deliver messages to your T-Mobile subscribers, you may upgrade to a paid account, available at www.TextMarks.com. In an attempt to make the paid service affordable to everyone we are offering our customers who are affected by this a discount of 50% off our regular prices*. To take advantage of this discount please use the code TRANSITION.

Delivery of free ad-supported text messages to T-Mobile subscribers are scheduled to stop as of October 6th, 2010. We apologize for this situation but it is entirely outside our control. We will keep you posted on any developments or changes.

Regards,
Chris Neumann & the TextMarks Team
tmsupport@textmarks.com

Easy enough. Just call me or someone else, they text to it. You don't need a subscription to check the webpage (via smartphone), just bookmark the webpage and check the output.
http://lite.textmarks.com/DOWNWINDER

[Kiteboarding Tampa Bay]

Gotcha. Just signed up for DOWNWINDER

Would it be possible to use the widget code on another site?

[Unimog Bob]

You can just "have it" or register a new extension. Since we have to type the extension every time if wanting to text via TEXTMARK, DWr or similar might prove more efficient.

To have output show on a joomla site, you don't need a widget. I just passed the RSS feed thru mod_slick_rss in joomla and customized the CSS of the mod to make it look pretty.

http://lite.textmarks.com/rss2/DOWNWINDER

right now slick is letting me down though. It won't ignore title and only post the description. It's reading, parsing and displaying everything. Gonna have to use Yahoo Pipes to filter the RSS feed prior to entering slick_RSS I guess.

[greg meintjes]

Hi , this is for Arcsrule, regarding no response about Key West, just saw that you did not get a response regarding Key West over Xmas, hope you got my response, It was sent from my Iphone the same day. It may not have been what you wanted to hear, and I have nothing against foils, I learnt on foils, but our predominant winds are out the N or NE in December and this means that our launches are done from boats in about waist deep water, Launching under these conditions is not impossible with foils, however the setup is a bitch. Hopefully we get some East winds so you can ride Smathers. I do not care what anyone rides , a kiter is "a kiter" if he is being pulled by a kite. Have fun.

Greg
http://keywestkiteboarding.com/index.html

[CrazyJay]

Scott you homo. I wouldn't dw with u if u were riding foils, lei's, and sure as hell not a bedsheet. Good to see u still causing waves. Just fkn w ya.
Prob gonna do a nice dw'r on Sunday and end at my house for cookout and re-warming in the hot tub. Arc rider and everyone else invited. Hit me up.
Jayson