March 25, 1996 To the Cyberspace Snow and Avalanche Center updates list: There has been substantial work done and progress made over the past couple weeks. Interest in avalanches appears to be tapering off, but many of our changes and improvements will help us get off to a strong start next season. SPONSORSHIP The first exciting news is that we have our first sponsor - Marmot Mtn Ltd! Their logo now appears at the top of our home page and our Current Conditions (or Bulletins) page. Please take a moment to follow the link to their web site. If they have an email link on their page you might even thank them for sponsoring us. The one concern we have is that people will now think we have big bucks and don't need the support of users. This is far from true. The sponsorship of Marmot really helps us get off the ground, but will not cover all our expenses. We still need your help! BULLETINS The biggest changes over the past few weeks have been in the handling of bulletins. This is a time-intensive undertaking to begin with, since the content changes every day. The handling of bulletins from most Avalanche Centers has gotten a bit easier, but for a few that do not cooperate directly with us a great deal of time and trouble-shooting is still required. Bulletins now appear in html form and reside on CSAC resources. We no longer rely on the University of Utah gopher server. This change has come about over time, and reflects an increase in the quality of available resources rather than any problems with the U of U. The use of their gopher server for the past two seasons is greatly appreciated, as are the efforts of "Jonzy" at the U of U computer center in getting us onto that system. We would not have gotten started without them. Most bulletins are now sent to us via email as they are issued. This means that they are immediately posted to the web site and immediately mailed to distribution lists, so most can be received almost instantaneously by subscribing to the appropriate list. The Canadian list has over 300 subscribers. Newer lists include NW and SW Montana and Switzerland (in all three languages). By next season we plan to insert html links into the posted version of incoming bulletins upon arrival. The Utah Avalanche Forecast Center and the Northwest Avalanche Center will not submit their bulletins directly, and we have to pull these off the net. This seems to be working ok for the most part, but it involves delays (typically well under an hour for Utah and under two and decreasing for the NW) and presents challenges for setting up list distribution. The Utah bulletin is now available by email list service (subscribe to csac-utah, which can be done via a link on the web page). Once we figure out how to keep the Utah list reliable we will consider setting up the list for the Northwest. Meanwhile we continue to hope that these major centers will follow the lead of the others and set up email submissions. We also continue to hope that Colorado, with the last remaining bulletin not in the net, will decide to participate. PAGE DESIGN The pages were all cleaned up a bit, mostly on the top and bottom. Especially the footer part, which is now consistent and looks a bit better. A link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation 'Blue Ribbon' campaign against net censorship was added across the bottom of each page. While we intend to keep this site non-political, this is an important issue with large potential impacts on the internet. So we decided to join the many other sites sporting this banner (We did put it across the bottom of each page rather than the top.) We encourage everyone on the net to at least learn something about this issue. EDUCATION We recently received a burst of mail from students asking questions for school projects. There is now a list which students can subscribe to to ask questions and discuss projects, questions, etc. There is a second list for teachers. Subscription links appear on our education page. We will be working more on K-12 education issues once the season winds down a bit more. NEXT Our next task will be to develop additional material for the Education page, work on seeking additional sponsors, and do some log file analysis. We are also planning our attendance at the International Snow Science Workshop in October. We hope to give a couple papers/presentations and to have several people attending. Finances for this are still uncertain, but we are optimistic about it. The big thing lurking ahead will be moving machines as OSU PEAK becomes PEAK, INC. This should be transparent to users, but will inevitably involve a great deal of work and trouble-shooting on our end. After the transition we will also have to begin paying some level of fee for our server resources. Jim Frankenfield Director, CSAC http://www.csac.org snow@csac.org