by Contat Fred - Posted on 12/1/18 || Modifié le 2/19/24
Let's Kite will celebrate the beginning of August its 4 years of existence, and what an adventure it has become over the years! From a small personal project that aimed to gather the few kite spots in the Romandy region and the few weather stations, it has become over the years a true reference guide.
In the first year, Let's Kite displayed about 75,000 pages, which was already a great score for a local kite site. In 2021, the site displayed over 310,000 pages for some 38,000 kiters, which is just crazy. And for 2022, it keeps on growing month after month.
Let's talk a little technical
Originally, the very first version of the site was running on a well-known blog engine, Wordpress. But acquiring the weather station data every 10 minutes quickly proved to be quite tedious. So I decided to have a weather station data acquisition tool, content management for spots, calendar, and directory developed, while still using Wordpress for the public part (the frontend). That's how the site has been running for almost 4 years, and it was necessary to maintain 2 sites, the backend in Symfony and the frontend in Wordpress. Quite a hassle, especially when it came to implementing new features or debugging. I also noticed that with the increase in the amount of data, the site could take up to 8 seconds to load 100%. Not ideal to have a server running for 8 seconds just to display a page for a user.
The beginning of change
So, in October 2020, I decided to get my hands dirty and embark on a complete redesign of the site to use only the Symfony framework. The challenge was first to learn Symfony and php, because from my side, I had good notions in php, but not enough to develop a complete site. So a job that should have taken me 4 months actually took me a year and a half (There were long breaks!!!). Recently, to confront myself with the users, I launched a beta version of the site to see how the new version was received. I would like to take this opportunity to thank those who took the time to test and give me feedback. In fact, there were very few bugs but lots of small improvement requests. And I haven't finished improving all of that yet, but looking at the version 2 of Let's Kite, I noticed that there were the same kind of bugs, but the beta version (the one you are seeing now) was still much better.
So despite my perfectionist side, I decided to release a V3 that is not quite perfect...
Welcome to the new Let's Kite
Fred - Wind activist