Conditions / Current Status Hack

[gopherhockey]

I started out needing a hack to do updated trail conditions for mountain bike trails in our area, but then thought there could be a lot more uses for a hack like this... general trail conditions (snowmobile, hiking, skiing, mountain biking etc.) or other conditions (surfing perhaps?) and even status of systems (perhaps server status - down, up, under maintenance etc.)

The idea is simple, I just have a difficult time getting it accross so I apologize if I'm not completely clear. You can look at these two pages as examples (where i got the original need/idea):

http://www.joinomba.org/trail_reports.html
http://www.bikemn.com/trailconditions.jsp

What you would see on the initial page would be a table of (lets use trails since that is my original need). You would show the trail name, condition, brief description, date, and userid as a minimum. (to be fancy, the trail condition could pull up an icon, like the weather hack does)

Moderators (or whomever has access) could click on a button to update a trail. They would be taken to an editor (perhaps just copy the newreply.php for the most part) where they can edit the "condition" and the notes and re-submit. That would update the status screen with the new information.

I'm not sure just how else to describe it other than showing the above examples. I can think of many that could use something like this if it was written general enough. All one would need to do is change the label "Trail" to "Server" and the conditions from "wet, dry, soggy, etc." to "up, down, under maintenance" and one would have a great IS type notification system for users.

I'd be willing to help out with the general display part, but cannot do the coding (I just don't know enough on that side).

Thanks for listening... if interested, please let me know...

[gopherhockey]

I was thinking eventually this type of hack could also automatically generate results if used to get weather, or perhaps running a ping against a server and reporting "uptime" etc.

Just a thought.