MotorsportReg.com Blog (33)

2009 SCCA National Convention

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Just a reminder - we'll be at the SCCA National Convention Feb 19th-21st in Las Vegas. If you're at the convention, stop by our booth and say hi! We'll be giving demonstrations of our latest features and showing why organizations continue to upgrade from their existing systems to MotorsportReg.com. Our customer count now includes 150 organizations and 24 SCCA regions!

See you there!

Topics: Travel

Capable tech support is top desired attribute

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

InformationWeek.com chart showing top requested qualities in technology vendors

I found this article at InformationWeek.com interesting:

The #1 desired quality of a "most-trusted technology vendor" is capable tech support

There is a neat sidebar describing how winemaker Gallo evaluates vendors. They use a 12-point review process; half of which rates the company and half the product or service. The innovative part is where they also ask the vendor to rate themselves on the same criteria and then look for wide variances in the scores to identify perception gaps for closer analysis. Check it out for yourself.

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

A quick update from our secret number-crunching laboratory:

Events that don't require payment at time of registration have 50% more cancellations than those that do.

Yikes - cancellations are the bane of every registrar and club! Often they come at the last minute. And if you're left without any financial collateral, you could be the one holding the bag. With skin in the game, attendees who register and pay for events are much more likely to fulfill their obligations.

With our new deferred payment processing feature, there's no reason not to collect payment details at time of registration. The card won't be charged until you, as the organizer, say the registration is final and should be fulfilled. That can be immediately after you preview the order or much later like after the event takes place (SCCA regions take note how this jives with your "don't turn a wheel..." policy).

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Occasionally we hear from a customer whose members are having a hard time reaching MotorsportReg.com due to corporate web filters. Often the culprit is Websense which blocks things based on categories.

In the past year, we've been listed as Information Technology, Blog, Games, Automotive and who knows what else. We don't really fit well into any of those categories since we're by and large a transactional site much like Ticketmaster.com.

The good news is there is a way to get around this and it's dead simple: SSL. If you access the secure version of our website at https://www.MotorsportReg.com/. Just include the S in the address like httpS:// and you'll fly right by the filter! Game on...

Topics: FAQ

Follow us on Twitter

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Don't know what Twitter is? Your kids probably do. It's basically text messaging for the web. Or blogging in 140-character increments. Why do you care? Because in the event that MotorsportReg.com is unavailable, it's the way that you'll be able to stay in the know.

We believe in Reliability, with a capital R. That means that we worry about service outages before they happen. If we were to experience downtime on MotorsportReg.com that prevented the site from responding, you should still be able to come here, to pukkasoft.com, and see what's going on. But let's pretend that it's not just MotorsportReg.com that's down, but California finally broke off and floated away into the Pacific and the extension cords weren't long enough. Then what?

The answer is our Twitter feed. Since Twitter is an altogether separate service run by separate people on separate servers in separate networks (one in California and one in Virginia), the odds of us both being down at the same time is highly unlikely. Like asteroid-crashing-into-the-Earth unlikely.

We're also posting our upcoming outage notifications to Twitter. When we release new versions of MotorsportReg.com with enhancements, we typically take about 2-3 minutes to clear caches and reload the application. We already post these notifications to the site itself but if you're "following" us on Twitter, you'll receive 15-30 minutes advance warning before it happens. This will be especially handy for event organizers who frequently access the site.

We never promise to be perfect but we do promise to work as hard as we can to be reasonably close and always honest. This third backup mechanism is one more way of being as transparent as possible.

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

I spent last weekend with the wonderful folks in the Southeast Division of the SCCA at their annual convention and awards banquet in Jekyll Island, Georgia. We've been having a fairly cold winter in California and I was looking forward to a few days of warmth but as luck would have it, Florida and southern Georgia were experiencing record lows.

With the recent Atlanta Region upgrade from a competitor to MotorsportReg.com, I was on hand to evangelize the benefits of our service to the rest of the regions of the SEDiv. I had a thoroughly great time, both during the day with folks like NA of Registration Wanda Cecil and DA of Registration Betsy Speed, as well as at the banquet sitting with Atlanta chief staff Tere Pulliam and Butch Kummer as well as Howard Duncan from SCCA National and Glen Thompson, the RE for Blue Ridge Region. They are an entertaining bunch which came in handy since the banquet ran five hours long!

It was great to put a face to many of the people we've spoken to over the past couple of years and I punctuated the weekend with South Carolina Region signing on to convert their solo, time trials and club racing programs to MotorsportReg.com. Do-everything-for-everyone Regional Executive Nick Hallman finally relented and let us give him a hand! :) We'll be carrying some of the load starting with permanent number and season subscription registration for his solo program starting next week which we're excited about.

Lots of more new customer news to come!

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

When I started Pukka Software in 2002, the MotorsportReg.com service as it exists today was available at pukkasoft.com. It wasn't the most intuitive nor multi-purpose domain in the world so I registered MotorsportReg.com in early 2004 and we've been there ever since. My business partner from my former design and technology consultancy whipped up a quick and simple type face for MSR that served as our logo for the last four years on the website, t-shirts and print materials.

We wanted a little more "character" for our logo and received a wide variety of ideas from a design shop. Ultimately, we came up with something we thought provided continuity but gave us a few more options depending on the target medium, size and color depth.

An update of our previous logo with a little more character

We also scored a shiny new favicon graphic that shows up in the address bar while browsing MotorsportReg.com - a little red M to complement the new logo.

I am especially thankful for the great input we received from our customers when we posted in-progress versions to our organizer forums. That thread was one of the longest we've ever had! :) I think the results speak for themselves and we've received a lot of positive feedback. It feels good to step into 2009 with a fresh look!

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

If you're planning to attend the 2009 SCCA National Convention in Las Vegas, I can pass along a incredible hotel deal we scored today.

The convention rate, using code "SCCA09", is $70 for Wednesday/Thursday and $120 for Friday/Saturday for an average rate of $95/night and a total of $380 plus about $40 in taxes. This deal, from Booking.com, costs just $304 plus the same $40 in taxes. That's $76 off! I've heard that times are tough in Vegas right now so I'm not surprised to find a lower rate turn up.

You can buy us a cocktail to say thanks... see you in Vegas!

Topics: Misc

Next generation form builder on its way

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

On the drawing board for six months and in development for three, the next generation of our drag-and-drop registration form builder is about to go live this next week:

Because we eat our own dog food, we found numerous places to improve the editing process and create accelerators for tedious tasks. The first iteration of our form builder brought a whole new level of flexibility and control - letting organizers put anything anywhere with drag-and-drop, create dependencies and complex validation rules. Combined with new capabilities like order form branching, all of that is wrapped into a slick user interface that works on Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome and Opera on all major platforms. And just for fun, we made it about 3x faster too!

Looking back at my development notes, it's inspiring to see the progression of a user-centered design process like we use here. It starts with rough sketches on scrap paper, to pen-and-ruler designs on grid paper, to a short specifications document and feature description to early betas and finally the finished product. At each step along the way we incorporate user review, feedback and usability studies to determine how effective each change is going to be.

Stay tuned, we'll be posting a short screencast to demonstrate some of the new features that make us giggle like schoolgirls.

Topics: Features

Seen at the RunOffs...

June 11, 2013 by admin

Justin Hall's MotorsportReg.com-sponsored Spec Miata at the 2008 RunOffs

Spotted at the 2008 SCCA National RunOffs at Heartland Park in November: previous Spec Miata Challenge winner, Koni Challenge and World Challenge racer Justin Hall's Spec Miata lining up to do battle. Motor issues kept him out of contention in qualifying but he fought back from a 15th starting position to finish 6th overall. Photo by Paul Zimerman Race Photos.

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2009 SCCA National Convention

Capable tech support is top desired attribute

Requiring payment reduces cancellations

Getting around Websense and other web filters

Follow us on Twitter

SCCA Southeast Division Convention and Awards Banquet

Our new logo!

SCCA Convention Hotel Deal

Next generation form builder on its way

Seen at the RunOffs...

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