Road Sign Math

Hello faithful fans of Road Sign Math! I’m here to give you all an update on the future of our wonderful driving game. Anyone that frequents the website will notice that sign postings have dried up almost completely. This isn’t for lack of signs being found, I have about 50 of them in my incoming mailbox. It is however just a pure lack of time to do the work. It takes 10-15 minutes as it stands to post a single sign on Road Sign Math. You can do the math…

The challenge is actually even worse since when signs are posted that typically encourages people to submit more signs, which is great, but doesn’t provide any pressure relief on the backlog. The principle problem here is a serialized posting process limited by a very busy RSM Administrator!

I had big plans in the past of writing a brand new website for RSM built on Ruby on Rails. The idea was to create something sort of like the Geocaching website that would free RSM from the bonds of my time limitations and allow people to run with the concepts on their own. However, after a few months of trying to do this it became incredibly obvious that this was going to take far too much time. This path wasn’t viable.

However, in the time since then I’ve discovered WordPress. WordPress is principally a blogging package (RSM is currently running on a blogging package called .Text). However, WordPress has incredible flexibility thanks to WordPress Extensions, and it has a tremendous amount of momentum behind it. Extensions are out there that will meet the majority of the needs of Road Sign Math! In fact, in the new version we will have forums, tagging and hopefully even user-generated ratings!

There is only one big gap — obviously there is no extension that will implement the Road Sign Math scoring system. However, I’ve contracted with a consultant to build a WordPress extension that will implement the scoring system in the WordPress administration pages. Once this migration is over all Road Sign Math players will have a login so that you can all go in and post your signs yourself (in fact, if you have signs in the queue I will be sending these back to you to post yourself). In a week or so I will post a URL here so you can try out the new version of the site. There will be no new signs posted here as all my time for Road Sign Math will be spent making the migration to WordPress. It is possible that the new scoring system will lag the relaunch slightly, in which case we may go for a month or so without scores.

I’m very excited about this direction because I know it can get done. Stay tuned for more updates… and as always…

Remember,