Welcome to Louis (Lou) Dawson's backcountry skiing information & opinion website. Lou's passion for the past 50 years has been alpinism, climbing, mountaineering and skiing -- along with all manner of outdoor recreation. He has authored numerous books and articles about
ski touring and is well known as the first person to ski down all 54 of Colorado's 14,000-foot peaks, otherwise known as the
Fourteeners! Books and free ski touring news and information here.
All material on this website is copyrighted, the name WildSnow is trademarked, permission required for reproduction (electronic or otherwise) and display on other websites. PLEASE SEE OUR COPYRIGHT and TRADEMARK INFORMATION.
We include "affiliate sales" links with most of our blog posts. This means we receive a percentage of a sale if you click over from our site (at no cost to you). None of our affiliate commission links are direct relationships with specific gear companies or shopping carts, instead we remain removed by using a third party who manages all our affiliate sales and relationships. We also sell display "banner" advertising, in this case our relationships are closer to the companies who advertise, but our display advertising income is carefully separated financially and editorially from our blog content, over which we always maintain 100% editorial control -- we make this clear during every advertising deal we work out. Please also notice we do the occasional "sponsored" post, these are under similar financial arrangements as our banner advertising, only the banner or other type of reference to a company are included in the blog post, simply to show they provided financial support to WildSnow.com and provide them with advertising in return. Unlike most other "sponsored content" you find on the internet, our sponsored posts are entirely under our editorial control and created by WildSnow specific writers.See our full disclosures here.
Backcountry skiing is dangerous. You may be killed or severely injured if you do any form of ski mountaineering, skimo randonnee and randonnée skiing. The information and news on this website is intended only as general information. Due to human error and passing time, the information, text and images contained within this website may be inaccurate, false, or out-of-date. By using, reading or viewing the information provided on this website, you agree to absolve the owners of Wild Snow as well as content contributors of any liability for injuries or losses incurred while using such information. Furthermore, you agree to use any of this website's information, maps, photos, or binding mounting instructions templates at your own risk, and waive Wild Snow owners and contributors of liability for use of said items for ski touring or any other use.
Wildsnow does seem to load faster now that you mention it…power of suggestion?…or tech. wizardry?
I probably speeded it up by only 3 seconds or so, but I tried to rearange some things so that the site will do some parallel and progressive loading that’ll make it useful sooner. The two things combined should make a noticeable difference for those of you with medium/high speed connections such as DSL or cable.
FYI for everyone, I’ve done no tweaking on the mobile version you might be seeing on your smartphone. It’s already fairly optimized.
Can you make the full feed available on RSS? Maybe I’m not looking hard enough?
Yep. Seems faster.
Kjlowe, sorry no. If I do that the feed gets stolen and published all over the place. Bad enough as it is, as hundreds of sites use feed summaries simply to generate fake content they hope will rank in the search engines so they’ll make some money from click banners and such. Really bogus situation and very little is being done about it (though Google has improved and doesn’t index those sites as easily as it used to. Frustrating for those of us who actually create content. And when one of those sites ranks higher on a search results page than the blog where the content was stolen from? Wow, that really really hurts.
I know on iPhones I have had trouble seeing photos in the past. Often they are cut off on the right, but you can’t scroll over.
Kinda unrelated, but since you mentioned the mobile version…
Thanks for the hard work!
Certainly faster on my desktop and my iphone. Your customer service is amazing!!
Thanks for your hard work.
Dan
Loads lots faster for me–I’m on a slow DSL
Hey you guys, I just drove most of the day over to Salt Lake City for summer Outdoor Retailer trade show. More on that later, but for now thanks for the speed feedback and am glad you got some results! I kind of enjoy the site tweaking, so long as it doesn’t get excessive… Lou
Not sure how into code you are/want to be, but you could shave the load time even more with modern CSS techniques. One small example among many: Just use italic text and a text-shadow instead of an image for “Wild Snow”.
Thanks Scott, I’ll look into that. Can also use sprites or image maps for the ads, but those things get in the way of an updater system I have in place. But I’ll be doing a few things like that. Good idea on the blog title, really no reason it has to be an image, come to think of it. Like, I’m trying to impress the world with my text design skills? No.
Yeah, using the CSS Sprites technique for loading all your ad images with one request would be the next thing on my list. I hear you about having to conform to an updating system though. Cost/benefit.
There are some other unnecessary images too, though. For example, the background box-shadow around “Human Friendly Sitemap … Copyright … etc”. That effect should also just be code instruction instead of an image. One image is pretty minor, but if that’s a recurring technique throughout the design, then it should be targeted.
And then it looks like you’re loading two distinct streams of data from facebook. The face thing, and then the like thing. They each show a slightly different number of likes. Probably just a lag in when they update the like count or something. Whatever the case, the facebook plugins are notoriously slow and you should not have two of them.
Finally, those automated “share this” plugins are very heavy as well. I have noticed a huge performance hit from these. Again, it’s a cost/benefit equation. Would you be well served by just showing 3-4 of the most prominent, hand-coded into your template? Perhaps.
Anyways, for the amount of content and traffic you have, I think your site performs very well as-is. Just nit-picking, since you asked!
Hi Scott, thanks! Let’s take this to email. ‘best, Lou
A few more tweaks over the past couple days that trimmed a few seconds from load time. Can always do more given time, but I think the site is ready for winter.
Hey you guys, the smily faces you can select from for the comments are yet another drag on the website. They seem to not be as stylish as they used to be. Anyone miss them if send them on their merry way?
😀 Won’t miss ’em
If I do get rid of them, you can still put them in with a shortcode… Perhaps I’ll just give a list of codes folks can quickly cut/paste if they really want that face in there. For example, I just coded this one in by keyboard : then lol then another : 😆
The graphic presentation of emoticons is history. Way too much site latency overhead for how little they got used. If you need one, see the info box below the comment entry screen. You can just copy/past a bit of text or type one in from memory. The only one I remember is 😆 but that’s plenty.