Nordic Valley’s brilliant, zero-budget solution to trail/lift status | Hacker News Reader

Nordic Valley’s brilliant, zero-budget solution to trail/lift status

slopefillers.com

145 pointsmooreds26 comments

Glad you guys dig this. As the author of the story, a bit more context here might be helpful for the non-ski crowd.

The simple verison is that small resorts really do operate on minuscule budgets. When I met with the marketing director of this mountain, they were struggling to afford email marketing. Vail might spend more on a single print ad than a mountain like Nordic Valley does all year on marketing. This means that vendors struggle to build stuff that would solve their needs because there's just not enough money in the ski area's pockets to buy it. In other words; solutions like this aren't just clever hacks, they are often necessities.

This often manifests itself in turning stock, off-the-shelf stuff into things like ski racks or signage or tools. Some industry publications will even devote sections of their magazines to these hacks because so much creativity is born from them. This, however is one of the first times I've really seen it crossover into technology which is an awesome step to see happen.

Nice blog btw, I'll definitely be digging in. What do you think the chances of Nordic Valley's planned expansion are?

Thanks, been writing 3-5x a week for about a decade so let me know if you're looking for a specific topic and I can give a starting point.

Re: expansion - I think the odds are really, really slim. Ski expansions at that scale just don't happen in 2019. I wouldn't be surprised to see them expand to the ridge just south of the resort like they've been trying for the last few years (and who knows, maybe this is a play to help that move along), but nothing near the plans being outlined.

One area I've seen that also affect is the data you can get out of a ski resort. On rare occasions, a resort's site will populate its snow report from easily parseable data, but for the vast majority, you're stuck just customizing a scraper for the data because it's likely input manually through a CMS.

> The simple verison is that small resorts really do operate on minuscule budgets.

Yes, all small companies are like this.

old rental skis as a bench... the list goes on and on and it's charming every time!

My only quibble is that for resorts like Winter Park (3000+ skiable acres) compared to Nordic Valley (100 skiable acres) the larger resorts and their expansive boundaries require complex interfaces and even then they're seldom all that useful.

I grew up in Colorado but navigating the runs and maps of the big resorts has become meaningless given the scale and my own human failings, and despite my historical experience and knowledge.

Nordic Valley could display the entire resort as a heatmap indicating snow-depth and skiability because it is a small and compact set of runs. While when you take a place like Brighton or Vail or Breck and the sheer scale of the resort makes displaying meaningful data very difficult.

Everything old is new again! There's a little bit of an iframe renaissance happening, because even though iframes are a blunt instrument for combining content from different origins, they also have some really desirable features.

Cross-origin iframes are completely sandboxed, they can be styled quite nicely as transparent overlays with css, and they are supported on all browsers (including mobile).

Stripe Checkout uses iframes (in a super-nice, completely invisible) way. Intercom Messenger runs in (multiple, nested) iframes.

Our startup makes an in-browser video calling product and last year we started seeing people hacking together "embedded" video calling by wrapping our call pages in iframes. We thought, "that's cool!" and launched a full API to support this growing set of use cases. [0]

These days, if you want to combine interactive functionality on a web site, from multiple origins, you have several pretty good choices with different trade-offs: loading and using javascript libraries right in your DOM context, iframes, and (for patching in functionality at the user-level) Chrome extensions.

Here's to asymptotically approaching the Project Xanadu feature set. [1]

[0]-https://docs.daily.co/reference#iframe-hello-world [1]-https://thenewstack.io/ted-nelson-can-still-learn-xanadu/

I don't have any projects that currently use iframes, but another positive is that there's no Javascript required; which is important to some developers and projects.

I don't think iFrames ever went away. It's been a feature of embedded web software for as long as I can remember. I don't think there is a sufficient other solution. Injecting HTML into the DOM of an unpredictable set of pages is difficult/impossible without iFrames...

I love simple solutions!

It reminds me of a personal web site I built recently. I am climbing the 4000 footers of New Hampshire with my wife. It's a big challenge, to climb almost 50 of some of the biggest mountains east of the Mississippi, and a ton of fun for a weekend warrior couple.

We've been putting information into a spreadsheet to track our progress, and I decided it'd be fun to make a web site, where you can see the mountains we've done, the ones we haven't done, and see our trip reports and photos. I started queuing up a database and thinking about a UI to enter the hike data into, but then I realized: why not just use our google spreadsheet as the database, directly?

I did some research and you can set up a google sheet to be publicly available as a CSV. So when you access my web site, it simply downloads the CSV at that public URL, parses it, and uses it to power menus and individual hike report pages. When we finish another hike, we simply add another row (like we always had!), and the web site gets a new page made almost instantly. The code doesn't even authenticate with Google, since the data is public, and the whole thing runs pretty well!

That's pretty cool. How long does it take to load a page with that setup?

Each page takes a second to load usually, but it's a dopey Heroku web dyno, so it takes just about that long to load the landing page that doesn't go down that code path.

I lived on Mt Moosilauke for a summer back in the day.

In my mind the piece that makes this so appropriate is “The backend is the frontend”. Does anyone know of other platforms/services where this approach is possible?

I don't know if this is exactly what you were thinking of, but Epic Games is using Trello to visualize their work on their store. They are well behind their competitors, so this is a way to show people that needed features are on the way.

https://trello.com/b/GXLc34hk/epic-games-store-roadmap

This is one of the best demonstrations of "start with the simplest possible thing that could work" that I have seen.

There are some things out there where people just want to see the relevant information. Nothing more, nothing less. A lot of companies are trying to dress up the pig when all we want is to eat the bacon.

Weather reports for example. The weather widget in google search is quite simple while still showing everything I need to know in one view. The weather widget on my phone has these ridiculous animations and only shows me one day at a time. Just show me the high, low, and clipart of a cloud dumping rain.

So just in case you didn't notice it, the Nordic Valley team has simply put a docs.gooogle.com read-only link and put an iframe around it.

This is actually super interesting to me from both a company intranet perspective and for spinning up quick-view pages for my home gdocs instance.

This reminds of https://www.glideapps.com/, which was posted on HN a while back.

This sounds like an elegantly simple solution.

This also brings back fond memories working for a larger resort and my team building an integrated lift status system. Simple API on top of a relational database, easy to use web application for lift operations to update lift status in realtime, integrated PDF generation to print reports for numerous front-desks (think all the main lodges, hotels, and businesses in town to receive and print). The big win was a large number of large plasma screens running out lift status flash application in various lodges with long runs of HDMI to proxy servers all getting pub/sub realtime status updates. The Flash application had continuous polling via AMF to our proxy servers with a cache layer, etc. and it was pretty well received by guests. We also had the same API support all mobile apps at the time. The big customer-loving feature was getting alerts when a lift was about to open on a bluebird powder day and get that to them in near realtime often before many of the "lifties" knew.

I may be remembering wrong, but I recall an intranet site at my school using some ActiveX and DHTML trickery to get spreadsheets for school events showing in the browser (IE of course). The fact that this is now possible on the Internet with no gotchas is exciting.

I recently built a little trivia game for my friend, and not wanting to spin up a database, I used Google Sheets as the backend.

My friend can edit the sheet at will, and the app pulls the data in via JavaScript. Google already sets the right CORS headers.

I tried this a few years ago and ran into some speed issues ( http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/1359 ). Is that something you've encountered?

There are a few interesting hacks you can do, the calls are slow to an individual cell (I think like 50-100ms). If you need arbitrary cells, you can use a sheet formula to put the desired result in a single cell.

For example I had a sheet that had hundreds of columns that the headers would change over time - instead of reading through each cell, I just used CONCATENATE(), read a single cell then split it in my program after pulling it.

I live in a valley with a very large nordic (cross country) trail system and they have GPS tracking on all of the groomers. It's super useful as skate skiing is very condition dependent: https://skitrails.info/report/methowtrails

This is the value prop of tools like Airtable, right?

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