For the past few months I’ve been working on a project called Discover Karting that aims to centralize kart racing series, tracks, and events. Having finally got it to a point where it’s not terrible to use on a mobile device I figured I’d share the project with the larger community to get some feedback.
At the moment my roadmap looks like this:
Develop a pipeline for easily adding tracks, series, events, and classes
I originally started building this site because my family and friends would ask me on a weekly or even daily basis when my next race is, so I figured I’d put together a calendar of sorts that I could share with them. It seems to help them and I figured it might help other too.
Not really, Mylaps is primarily about showing you events that have happened whereas Discover Karting focuses on helping you find future events you might be interested in attending.
The site is also meant to be much more than just that.
As an example, once I find the time, I’ll be updating the Policies & Guidelines and Facilities & Services tabs of the various tracks and series to include notable rules and/or standard procedures that newcomers might need to know. Two examples I can think of off the top of my head are the rule at Badger about not allowing kart stands beyond the bridge, and that both Norway and Gateway Kartplex require pre-tech inspections, whereas KCA only requires a pre-tech form.
I’ve set up the track-series relationship such that a series’ events automatically inherit the relevant Policies & Guidelines and Facilities & Services from their associated track(s); these inherited items are then merged with anything defined directly at the series level.
This means that someone used to KCA rules that takes part in their first Margay Ignite Challenge race might know ahead of time that while KCA allows cameras on helmets, the Margay series does not. It also means that someone visiting a track for the first time would be less likely to push their kart past the bridge and almost die of embarrassment when informed of the rule. Not that I would have any experience in either case!
I like the idea. It’s good to get more information online about karting and organizations. It can be a little difficult to find information in my experience. Good luck with your project.
Off to a nice start with the aesthetics for sure and still something that’s needed I think.
I started something similar (but much worse aesthetics) around 2016 or so. You can see some of it on waybackachine: KartPulse - Kart Track Directory
At the time around 25% of sprint kart tracks didn’t even have an entry on Google Maps so I made submissions for those and built a track directory along with a social network, galleries, articles, galleries, event\race directory, classifieds etc. The track directory didn’t quite touch on rulesets but it did identify tracks that were running 206 (Before it became ubiquitous like it is today), track lengths, associated clubs etc.
I took the site down about a year ago (which I regret a little now if I’m honest as there was some good content there.) The idea was to create a resource to explore and engage with all types of karting… in a semi-modern web experience.
Biggest challenge, predicably enough, was getting the data and keeping it current. Next challenge was dealing with the bugs on the platform ecosystem (Socialengine).
Anyway, I’m here to brainstorm ideas or give my thoughts on how NOT to do things
Off to a nice start with the aesthetics for sure and still something that’s needed I think.
Thank you
Sounds like the track directory was almost everything I’m aiming to build. I say almost just because I’m not trying to make Discover Karting a social network since at this point everyones already chosen their flavor. Articles would also be great, but someone would have to write them since I barely have time during the summer to build this out and I’m not about to miss races just so I write about other races. I also wasn’t going to put effort into something resembling a forum since we already have Reddit and (the far superior) KartPulse
That said, I’ve been adding and refining a bunch of these features in parallel, but right now the priority is as follows:
Track\Series\Event\Race Directory
Public profile you can share with friends/family that updates when you add or remove events
Event\Race Directory Class list
Series\Club Rule(books) and Regulations
Information about the Track\Series facilities or services (I.E. Margays big truck that you can buy parts from if you need it or track rental availability/pricing)
Gallery (Partially implemented using photos I took. I’ve already done some neat things using an AI pipeline to extract kart numbers from pictures so you can search the gallery by number)
Weather alerts. Works keeps me busy so I’ve almost been caught out by rain on race day.
If it becomes popular perhaps Alpha timing, mylaps, racemonitor, etc would consider granting API access?
The way I plan on handling the data freshness challenge is through a mixture of responsible AI use and hopefully convincing some of the track and series operators to lend a hand via the admin portal I’ve been developing.
I’m most of the way through the process of splitting the project into a few chunks to make it more manageable, once that’s done I’m going to create a service that subscribes to the various facebook or other social media pages for the tracks and waits for updates. Once something is posted, (change to a race date or a picture of an excel screen capture that contains a race day schedule as an embedded word document) the AI Agent will identify the track/series/event the update pertains to and create an update request that’ll be queued pending a humans approval. All that’ll be left to do is review the requests once in a while. In my tests AI has been good enough to get it right 90% of the time.
Oh, and I’ve also been working on a request system that users can use if they notice something isn’t working, want to add a track or series, or even if they just want to complain about their day.
This has taken me a while because for as much as is visible in the public facing site, there’s a ton of work that’s been done on the backend to try make maintaining this viable over the long run. I really think it’s doable.
Anyway, here are a couple screenshots from the admin dashboard:
