MotorsportReg.com Blog (37)

Private Labeling Arrives

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

A key part of our 3.2 release cycle is the introduction of private labeling to MotorsportReg.com. This has been frequently requested and we're excited to bring it to fruition in three flavors:

Landing Pages - we'll be making available customizable http://clubname.MotorsportReg.com landing pages that can include club logos and colors and will only display their events instead of the full calendar. We have some other exciting ideas for this in the future.

Privatized Sites - for large organizations wishing to roll out MSR nationally for their chapters, we can deliver a customized site using their domain name like http://reg.Club.org. This version can look and feel more like their own site but still uses the same national MSR system.

Private Instances - for clubs that wish to carefully control the relationship with their attendees, we can now host a fully private instance of the MSR application that does not share any data with our national system and hides the MSR branding. The service can be highly customized to the needs of these groups.

Here are a couple of examples of #1: http://SFRSCCA.MotorsportReg.com and htttp://GGCBMWCCA.MotorsportReg.com

These three options give us the flexibility to match the needs of different clubs. We've got a big announcement for our first customer to use #2... as soon as that contract is signed!

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

With less than four weeks notice to advertise the new online registration process, more than 40% of all entries for San Francisco Region's first event came through MotorsportReg.com. Like with our other customers, attendees love how much faster it is to get registered. The good news is with creating their account out of the way, future registrations will be even faster.

Most of our customers see more than 90% of their registrations come online after a few events. Some of them have even dropped their paper registration forms altogether. It's clear that our system is saving people time - both the organizers and the attendees.

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

I don't think there's anything better than having to use the tools you create to reinforce what is good and what could be better. On an average day, we sign in to MotorsportReg.com sometimes dozens of times to make changes, help organizers or respond to customer inquiries.

For the San Francisco SCCA, we have been helping monitor new registrations to ensure member and transponder numbers are being entered. Although it's a statistically small number of people who fail to enter these numbers, it's immediately obvious that, like the inquiries we respond to, organizers are frequently sending the same emails over and over and over again.

It's perhaps a small lesson but there are two things we've learned from eating our own dog food for a few days. The first is that we need to make it easier to send emails, particularly very similar messages, to individuals. We already have some tickets in our issue tracker for this but being spoiled by SproutIt's Mailroom, which automatically suggests responses to incoming messages, makes us realize we need something similar for outgoing correspondence.

The second is that we could eliminate those emails altogether if organizers could arbitrarily flag which fields in our general profiles are important to them and should be required. This one is trickier since the general contact profile is shared by organizers and is created before they register for an event but we have heard the complaints about missing membership numbers and have experienced it first hand. Now we have an idea of how to fix it.

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

It's official: the largest region of the Sports Car Club of America, San Francisco, has gone live with MotorsportReg.com!

We'll be providing online registration for their road racing program which typically comprises 10 weekends per year plus a licensing school. Each event attracts between 200 and 300 drivers fielding a total of 300-400 entries.

We are thrilled to be working with "the region that knows how" and provide a positive example for the smaller SCCA regions who also want a top notch online entry system that can handle clubs both big and small.

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Up until 5 minutes ago, all open and close dates on MotorsportReg.com were midnight Pacific time, based on our servers in California.

There is a small contingent of East Coast drivers though, and you know who you are, who want to register at 12:01am to guarantee they get into events. Unfortunately that works out to be 3:01am Eastern time. That made a few people, uhh, impatient.

So let the stampede begin: basic timezone support is now live! Organizers can update their accounts under "Club Profile". All future registrations will be subject to midnight in the time zone of the club.

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

It's been a busy month since our last entry here. We've been diligently interviewing and checking the references of our top candidates for our engineer position and working to bring our first Dojo-powered widget to fruition in the form of our Student-Instructor assignment tool.

In the past, our assignment tool simply listed all of the students with a select box of instructors. This was easy to use but also easy to screw up; too many or too few students for each instructor or double-booking an instructor for a given run group. It also forced quite a bit of HTML down the pipe causing slow page loads for folks without broadband.

Enter our new and improved editor! Instructors and students are now organized in a grid with a dynamic list of students showing how many assignments each student has. The list of instructors is only downloaded once making this new version about 75% faster. It's impossible to double-book an instructor in a run group and easy to make sure each student has what they need. Changes are saved right in-line without any page refreshes making the tool faster and easier to use.

We'll be continuing to add more desktop-like enhancements to our tools leveraging our professional user experience backgrounds. The email blaster and packages / inventory editor are both slated for similar updates and additional functionality soon.

Let us know what you think!

Topics: Features

3.2.0 Is Live + Roadmap

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

After 42 revisions, 3.1 has come and gone, the last update brings better presentation to the 2% of our users who are still accessing MSR with IE5 on a Mac. Now we get to move on to some fun new things that organizers have been asking for and start to accent the application with AJAX improvements.

For 3.2, we're going to focus on refactoring a couple of core pieces that could be improved upon and adding a handful of new features. We'll also be sprinkling some AJAX features in where it makes sense. The highlights include:

Fees & Inventory Editor - make it easier to see the relationships between packages, inventory and assignments and add the ability to make batch changes. AJAX will support cloning and saving without refreshing the screen.
Instructor-Student Assignments - it is easy to over or under-subscribe an instructor due to the lack of tracking in the application. Real-time totals and a new grid presentation will make allocating instructors to students a much easier task. AJAX will be used to fetch detailed information on request about a student to help make the assignment.
The concept of a session timeout will be removed via a small AJAX ping. As long as the browser is open on MSR, the user will stay logged in (at least for organizers).
Integration of Google or Yahoo! maps into event detail pages
Update the WYSIWYG text editor to the latest revision which uses a new "sprite" technique to radically improve toolbar loading time over competitive products. This feature and its implementation was actually suggested by us.
Email blaster redesign will expose more of the backend data we collect and manage about email campaigns as well as make it easier to send "quick" email in the system to members.

These are a few of the 23 open tickets that are slated for this next iteration which may last for the next 30-60 days. Feedback encouraged if you've got a particular wish!

Topics: Features

Cloning Perfected

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

I'm sure this is a headline we'll all see some time in the near future, but today it means event cloning. One of MotorsportReg.com's most-loved features is the ability to change a couple of dates and names and then clone a previously successful event without having to do all of the setup from scratch.

The idea is to prevent a user from starting with a blank slate. Blank slates take a lot of energy to figure out and a lot of inertia to reach step two. Fewer choices (just asking for what's different) makes it easier to use.

When organizers set up fees & inventory, they have the option of making an inventory item create a "shortcut" assignment when purchased. The clone tool however was not able to carry these shortcuts from event to event which led to confusion: "where did my assignments go?!"

As of 3.1.40, events are cloned in the perfect image of those that came before them. Now if I could clone just a little bit of Michael Schumacher...

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

We need more help! We're looking for a rock star web engineer who knows how to figure things out and get things done. If you're interested in motorsports of any type, this is a great opportunity to combine your passion and your work.

You'll be working with company founders to help shape our products and then implement them. You'll be a key player as we expand our current product, grow into new verticals and open new business opportunities.

On our small team, we share responsibilties and collaborate. Your role is part developer, part entrepreneur, part jack-of-all-trades and part product manager. You'll interact with customers directly and help brainstorm how we can save event organizers time and provide a better experience for attendees.

Server-side, our technology platform is CLAP: ColdFusion MX, Linux, Apache and PostgreSQL. Client-side, we use the Dojo toolkit and are introducing AJAX to streamline the user experience. We manage our projects with Trac and Subversion. Experience with these is preferable and Java skills would be a big advantage as we move to leverage more of the underlying JRE in ColdFusion. If you're already a Java stud, you'll have no problem making this environment cry uncle.

We don't expect you to have all the answers. If we asked for someone with experience in every specialty we touch, we would never fill the job (everything from Javascript and Ajax to PGP and credit card encryption). We do expect that you have a passion for figuring them out and learning.

If interested, send us a note and start a conversation. Tell us what you've done in the past and what you want to do in the future. If you're a gearhead, share the details.

June 11, 2013 by Brian Ghidinelli

Our support inbox frequently receives inquiries from driving school instructors asking how to make our system recognize their status. "It says I am only an attendee but I have been instructing for 5 years!"

Since each club (and indeed, even each chapter within a larger club) has differing qualifications for who can instruct at an event, only the event organizer can mark a member as an instructor.

The short answer is you must contact the event registrar and have them update your account. This is a one-time procedure that recognizes your qualification for the club.

Some organizers have expressed interest in being able to search the database of instructors to find additional volunteers if they are short on staff. We agree this would be a useful resource for organizers in a pinch (and discounted or free track time available for the instructor) and are seeing how we can make this work sensibly.

Topics: FAQ

Organize awesome events.Our all-in-one event management software keeps organizers sane & attendees happy.

Private Labeling Arrives

Success

Eating Dog Food

San Francisco Region SCCA Signs On

Let The Stampede Begin

July Improvements

3.2.0 Is Live + Roadmap

Cloning Perfected

Job Opening: Web Engineer

FAQ: How do I make myself an instructor?

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