| Date | Update or Event |
|---|
| 2009-11-08 | Updated most isolation lists to use actual isolation distance, not an approximation to the nearest higher neighbor. Rewrote the isolation help topics, too. Added the N.C. Lookout tower list, and fixed some code bugs. |
| 2009-10-18 | Added new locational data fields for climber accounts. Upgraded the site to use ASP.NET 3.5 and SQL Server 2008. Fixed some bugs in the site due to the way Internet Explorer 8 displays standards-compliant web pages. |
| 2009-10-03 | Updated the HTML for the site to XHTML 1.0 Transitional, mainly for better Firefox compability. Also added "Quick Login" and "Quick Search" functions to the main banner, and added this "Site History" page. |
| 2009-08-07 | Database updates: promoted a batch of provisional peaks; added Las Vegas Mountaineers list; updated county prominence lists for New England. |
| 2009-07-25 | Database updates: promoted a batch of provisional peaks; added the Western States Climbers and Japan 100 Famous Mountains lists; several other minor bug fixes in the data. |
| 2009-05-11 | Added the ability for users to update or delete peaks they have provisionally added to the database. |
| 2009-01-04 | Added Google Maps showing locations of peaks to the List pages, including color-coding that shows peaks climbed by a logged-in user. |
| 2008-12-05 | Added the ability for registered users to add provisional peaks to the database. |
| 2008-02-09 | Upgrade website to ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005. |
| 2006-03-17 | First users sign up and start logging ascents (not counting family and friends). They had to request an account via e-mail. |
| 2005-06-03 | First Paypal donation received. |
| 2005-04 | Create a login system and start working on the ascent logging functionality. This turns out to be a bigger project than I anticipated. I discover that serving up peak lists and other content is one thing, but when user input is in the picture, the issues multiply greatly. |
| 2004-08-02 | Peakbagger.com is turned on in its current form as an ASP.NET-driven site. The old Mountain Explorer site is now gone. The new site has over 100 data-driven peak lists and many other of the current features, but no ascent logging. |
| 2004-05-02 | Deploy first test Peakbagger.com site to my IP address at the new hosting company. Peakbagger.com still points to the old Mountain Explorer site. |
| 2004-03-09 | Arrange for hosting of an ASP.NET site and start actively developing a completely re-written site that access a database of thousands of peaks. |
| 2003-08-08 | I met Edward Earl, noted prominence researcher. He had some valuable suggestions for the database, including adding the contour interval to peaks and saddles where exact elevations were not known. |
| 2002 | During this year, I spent a great deal of time drawing the range boundary polygons for the Peakbagger Range Classification Scheme. My goal was to have a set of shapes that could be used to assign any peak in the world to its correct ranges. |
| 2001-07 | For the next few months did a great deal of updates to the peak database in Europe and other parts of the world outside of North America, adding lat-longs and checking elevations against map sources. Records indicate updates were done for Spain, France, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Antarctica, Mexico, Brazil, and Greenland, including many country-by-state high point lists. |
| 2001 | At some point during 2001 the main peak list is moved from an Excel spreadsheet to a Microsoft SQL Server database. I toyed with MS-Access for a bit before discarding that platform and deciding to go all-out for a serious database solution. The transition took some time, with many schema updates and interim data migrations, but at end of the process the Peakbagger.com database was in the physical form that it remains in today. |
| 2000 | The latitude/longitude columns of the master peak spreadsheet were a major project about this time, as were most of the US county high points in the west and northeast. |
| 1999 | I started adding huge numbers of peaks to my master Excel spreadsheet, including many from the GNIS for the USA and the BGN gazetter for the rest of the world. |
| 1997-10-16 | I met John Roper and Jeff Howbert, noted Washington-based list compilers, and we compared our lists of Cascade Range peaks. John was impressed that I had found a new, correct prominence saddle for Mount Adams. My Excel spreadsheet was pretty well developed for Washington, and I was now adding lots of prominence information. |
| 1997-10-09 | Get the domain Peakbagger.com switched to Hiway Technologies after registration snafu. Then I move all the old "Mountain Explorer" content to the new domain, and the web site is now branded as "The Mountain Explorer at Peakbagger.com". It's still the same lame old site, mainly my trip reports. |
| 1997-09-30 | Registered the domain Peakbagger.com. |
| 1997-08-18 | Posted a journal of my climb of Mount McKinley (Denali) to the Moutain Explorer site. |
| 1997-07-26 | At a US State Highpointer's convention in Colorado, I met Andy Martin, who sold me his "County High Points" book and got me hooked on a whole new level of peakbagging obsession. |
| 1996-05 | The "Mountain Explorer" web site goes live at www.accessone.com\~gregsl\ . Most of the site's content is trip reports from my mountain hikes and climbs--with no database technology, there is only one peak list (8000 meter peaks). Although pretty lame, the site generates some interest, due mainly to the lack of other mountaineering sites at the time. |
| 1996-04-22 | Sign up for new internet service with Accessone ISP and start working on first web site. |
| 1995-04 | Get on the internet for the first time with a fly-by-night ISP that folded after a couple months, after I had pre-paid for a year. |
| 1994-11 | Finally recognizing the drawbacks of large text files for database tasks, the master peak list is moved to an Excel spreadsheet. I also started adding latitude-longitude information to peaks at this time, starting with peaks in the Southern Taconics in Connecticut. I was using a digitizing tablet and the USGS topographic map. |
| 1994-03 | Following through on my idea in Bali, I concatenate all my random text files of peak lists into a single large text file with one line per peak. This file is still full of errors and poorly formatted, but it does represent the real genesis of the Peakbagger.com database. |
| 1993-10-08 | While watching a dance performance on vacation in Bali, I had the sudden idea that I should combine all my random peak lists into one master file that had all significant peaks together in one place. My idea was to limit the list to peaks such as country, state, and mountain range high points, and peaks on famous lists such as the Colorado fourteeners, New Hampshire 4000-footers, or 8000 meter peaks. I even started listing the peaks that might be included in such a list. |
| 1992-11 | Spent time trying to write a book tenatively called "An Insider's Guide to US Mountains" that never really got anywhere. As part of this project, I created a huge mountain range taxonomy that is the ultimate source of the US part of the Peakbagger Mountain Range Classification Scheme. Also, some of the peak and range descriptions on this site come from stuff written for this proposed book. |
| 1991-1993 | Around this time I was working on several large text files of lists of mountains from around the world. This includes several poorly-researched lists of world country high points, US county high points, and major world summits. One of my key early sources was Michael Kelsey's "Hikers and Climber's Guide to the World's Mountains", an endlessly fascinating tome but hardy an authoritative reference. Also, world atlases were pretty much all I has for most of the world. |
| 1987 | I start work on a master computer text-file list of all the 3700-foot peaks of the Northeastern USA. Although this is a classic "threshold" list, I was very aware of the need for a rigorous prominence cutoff. So I thoroughly researched the "vertical rise" for all peaks with less than 1000 feet of prominence--above that, its status as a separate peak seemed beyond doubt. The "W" in "Mount Washington" that was typed in for this list has survived many transformations and is still in the master Peakbagger.com database. |
| 1984-06 | My initial peakbagging obsession was the New Hampshire 4000-footers, and by mid-1984 I had hiked to 42 of the 48 summits. Almost done with that list, I transferred my obsession to the US State high points, and by the fall of 1984 I had visited 20 of those summits. |
| 1969-08-10 | A peakbagger is born. My father took me on a hike up Cannon Mountain in New Hampshire, but we had to turn back short of the summit, perhaps because he had to carry me part way up. I recall being very disappointed at not reaching our goal. |