In the beginning

This Blog is about my website http://www.sailracer.co.uk/

History

The site in its latest incarnation sprung onto the web in Spring 2007, some will be familiar with the SailRacer name from the magazine of the same title. This was launched and run by my sister Carole Lovesey and partner Rob Andrews a few years ago, as a printed publication lasting a couple of years before they started a family and Rob went to work for the Royal Yachting Association.

I have been the Secretary for the UK Mirror Class Association for a number of years and had developed a web system for managing race results, so when looking for a domain to offer this to a wider audience SailRacer was a natural choice, fortunately Carole and Rob were cooperative.

Managing the results

One of the challenges of running active class association like Mirrors is handling a large volume of results. There are well over a 100 Mirror events each month, these days people expect to see these results published quickly on the web, often on the day of racing.

Adding these to the web was becoming virtually a full time job, so I decided to apply some of my professional skills of developing web sites to come up with a web based solution. This involved designing a database that could store the results, the clever bit being the ability to upload results in different formats from a variety of sources. The system cleverly sorted and formatted the data before importing into the database.

The results could then be viewed on the Mirror website (http://www.ukmirrorsailing.com/) and being in a database easily searched. This delivered added benefits like being able to report on individual sailor performances, great when it was time to select for squads and Teams.

It was clear that over sailing classes would find this type of facility useful, so http://www.sailracer.co.uk/ came to live in 2007