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Brian Ghidinelli

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Strategery

Date

August 14, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

No, it's not really a word, but it's something you should be doing. Most of us are way too busy with jobs, life and trying to have fun with our hobby/passion/pursuit to think long-term. This is natural. But every once in awhile, you see someone else stepping up their game and you think, "huh."

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Topics: Customers, Marketing

Google Analytics Integration

Date

October 31, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Google Analytics tracks your motorsport event registration marketing efforts

For those nerdy number crunchers out there on our Premium Plan, we have an early Christmas present for you: Google Analytics Integration. You can hurry to your Account Options screen and input your Google Analytics Property ID (looks like UA-XXXXXX-Y). Once saved, we'll immediately start using it to record visitor statistics on the following pages:

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Topics: Marketing, Features

Kart Makes and Hotel Updates

Date

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Kart manufacturers added into vehicle listA few changes that we want to mention as we head into the quiet winter. The first is that we've added fourteen common kart chassis manufacturers to the vehicle dropdown list to help make it easier to add karts to your garage. While any driver can always use the "Other..." option to enter anything they want, seeing their brand listed provides a warm fuzzy that no blank text field can match. We curate this list to keep it reasonable in length but please let us know if we're missing any major brands. Karting, both indoor and outdoor, is become a major event category for us. We just recently helped Performance Racing Industry manage the Red Bull Kart Fight event that featured top karters and international race stars!

Updated hotel lists includes thumbnails, ratings and pricesAlso released last month was an update to our hotel program. We have been trialing a different layout for events held at Thunderhill Raceway in Northern California and have rolled out those changes to all venues. The sidebar now lists potential hotels with a thumbnail, quality rating and estimated price for the dates of the event being viewed.

Occasionally we received reports of hotels coming up that were nowhere near the venue. In one instance, a poor HPDE participant booked a hotel an hour away because our partner did not have any inventory near the track! As a result, we switched to a geolocation API that allows us to make sure the hotel is within a close radius of the venue or otherwise does not return any listings.

This work was primarily done by a new member on our team, say hi to Josh!
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October Updates

Date

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

We've been working away on many things including a new hire which we'll introduce shortly but we wanted to let you know about a few small updates released over the past month:


  • Filter reports by registration date: You've been able to sort reports by registration date for some time now but we've added the ability to filter by a start and/or end date to limit the number of results in your report. This request came from organizers who wanted to print reports in batches, especially detail reports. Now you can limit the report output from the Filter, Group and Sort screen using a new field at the bottom.

  • We're upgrading our hotel program to use Expedia's recent improvements. The latest template has an improved user experience, a map-based view that allows attendees to see where the hotels are located and integrates TripAdvisor.com ratings as a filter.

  • Internet Explorer 9 tweaks - we're constantly finding ways that IE9 doesn't play like it used to and making small changes. The latest fix restores the autocomplete functionality for adding members to an event.

  • Removed formatting and line numbers from Excel reports. Line numbers are redundant in the Excel output. We've stripped out some of the report formatting like cell borders to make it simpler and more easily customized to your preferences.

  • We've added quite a few validation rules over the summer. You can now validate most vehicle fields including year, make, model, color, official weight, tire brand, GCR/rules page number and log book number. We also added a variant of the membership verification rule that lets you check if the member is valid at the time of registration rather than the start date of your event. This is useful for events with long registration periods.




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Permanent number... or not

Date

November 1, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Allow alternates to reserved numbers is now an option

Drivers, and racers in particular, are fanatical about their numbers. Either they've purchased magnetic numbers or they have them, literally, painted on the side of their car. No matter the reason, we have drivers call us all the time telling us they simply can't register because their number is not available.

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Topics: Features

July Uptime

Date

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

We use Pingdom as our primary uptime monitoring tool. Although we use two other systems to ensure that Pingdom is correct, it has the best reports and most accuracy. We receive notifications if our servers go offline for even a minute so we can jump in the batmobile and spring into action. Thankfully, most of the time we just sit around, sipping pina coladas with little paper umbrellas. Unfortunately, some of our competitors are not quite so lucky; here's the report for July 2011:

July 2011 website uptime comparison between MotorsportReg.com and two competitors

Everyone will experience downtime at some point, but the question is whether this is a chronic problem and fundamental shortcoming or if it is an extraordinary, unusual event?

Here's a report going back to April of 2007 (4.25 years) on the three sites listed above in the same order:






SiteOutagesUptime %
Site #116399.56%
MotorsportReg.com999.99%
Site #39999.74%


Knocking on wood over here, we are very proud of this record. It's the result of our investment in infrastructure, people and services. Although this uptime isn't recognized like a new feature or updated design, it is every bit as important and we want to say thanks to the people who keep us running shiny side up.

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Topics: Misc

Hiring a Web Developer

Date

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Just a quick note to let our subscribers know we are hiring a well-rounded web developer to help us build the future of MotorsportReg.com and other services. If programming and sports cars are two of your passions, this might be the gig for you!

See the full details at http://www.pukkasoft.com/jobs.
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Guaranteed

Date

May 29, 2014 by Brian Ghidinelli

Since we started MotorsportReg.com in 2003, savvy potential customers have been asking us a smart question:

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MyLaps Orbits Integration Guide

Date

October 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Time - photo by battsimon @ flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/spbatt/3928384579/)Courtesy of timing and scoring whiz Jim Graffy from SCCA Oregon Region, we have a concise how-to guide for bringing MotorsportReg.com data into MyLaps Orbits (formerly AMB Orbits).

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Topics: Features

BMW CCA Strategic Thinking

Date

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

BMW CCA, photo courtesy of BMWCCA.orgI'm a huge proponent of learning from others. Knowing what everyone else is doing, either from a competitive or a collaborative viewpoint, is a big advantage when it comes time to make your own plans.

The BMW Car Club of America has some very smart leadership. They are one of the very biggest marque car clubs in the United States with more than 73,000 members. In March they published the results of a Q4 2010 survey and a leadership caucus held in their North Central region as part of their board meeting minutes.

While many of their issues will be unique unto themselves, there are some survey result disparities between new and existing members and existing and lapsed members that I found interesting. I thought that many chapters or regions of larger organizations would benefit from thinking about the leadership slide deck and how it applies to their local operation.

I hear many local leaders lament that the National organization doesn't do more to recruit and retain members but it is the foot soldier on the ground of the local organization that is responsible for the member experience. It's one thing to get people in the door but most clubs suffer with high churn indicating that we either don't position our value well or that we do a poor job of delivering on the position.

Most of the questions asked by the BMW CCA are relevant to any car club. Try asking a few of them yourself.

BMW CCA Q4 2010 Membership Survey Results (pgs 47-56)
BMW CCA North Central Caucus slide deck (pgs 29-44)
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Topics: Customers

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