MountainZone.com
MountainZone.com is the leading online site reporting on all mountain activities and sports, including climbing, skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking, hiking and photography. MountainZone.com is a publication of Vertical Media Group, Inc.
Founded in 1995, MountainZone.com had built a well-respected site — more than 50,000 pages of mountain sports news, 7,000 retail products and community features such as chat rooms and live Webcasts — by the year 2000. A summary of solutions developed by Alki Technology for the MountainZone appears below.
Quokka Sports purchased MountainZone.com in the winter of 2000 at which point many big dot-coms began disappearing as investors became increasingly skeptical and website revenue streams began to dry up. MountainZone became one such website and, despite the site's popularity and loyal user base, was taken down in late 2000.
MountainZone Returns!
MountainZone is alive and well today and Alki Technology is back in a familiar role as a primary provider of software solutions for the MountainZone.
Realizing the popularity of their brainchild, MountainZone founders purchased the website back from Quokka Sports in the fall of 2001 with a scaled-down version of the original site — much of the content, as well as the former e-commerce initiative, Gearzone.com, were removed for the re-launch.
Alki Technology and MountainZone.com
Following is summary of solutions developed by Alki Technology for the MountainZone under their original ownership.
E-Commerce Order-processing Pipeline
Designed and coded re-write of Gearzone.com online order checkout process. Moved in-line SQL calls to stored procedures. Re-wrote Cybersource credit-card debit module.
Designed intelligent by-pass of Cybersource module if server non-responsive, with queuing of orders and automatic batch billing.
Technologies: SQL Server 7.x, Javascript, VBScript, ADO, ASP, Commerce Server.
Site-wide Authentication/Profiling System
Designed and wrote pluggable user-authentication module.
Inclusion of module forces authentication of pages through a common custom profiling database.
Designed and wrote all database objects.
Technologies: SQL Server 7.x, Javascript, VBScript, ADO, ASP
E-Commerce Site Stabilization
Designed and coded re-write of Gearzone.com online order checkout process. Moved in-line SQL calls to stored procedures. Re-wrote Cybersource credit-card debit module.
Designed intelligent by-pass of Cybersource module if server non-responsive, with queuing of orders and automatic batch billing.
Technologies: SQL Server 7.x, Javascript, VBScript, ADO, ASP, Commerce Server.
Premium Store
Developed a collection of stored procedures that extract data from the e-commerce inventory database.
Technologies: SQL Server/T-SQL
Site Translation/Co-branding application
Designed and wrote site-wide automated co-branding app.
Technologies: Perl
Link Tracker
Developed a web-based link administration and tracking system. The application manages the links contained in the
newsletter mailings and tracks the user click-through activity.
Technologies: SQL Server/T-SQL, ADO, IIS, Javascript
Broadcast Email
Developed a newsletter subscription and user profile management system where users can opt-in for
various MountainZone.com mailings.
Technologies: SQL Server/T-SQL, ADO, IIS, Javascript
FTP Mailer
Set up a scheduled process that retrieves data files from an FTP server and emails them as MIME attachments
to the newsletter managers.
Technologies: Perl, Net::FTP module, Mail::Sender module
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