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About This Site

Anyone out searching the web today knows they can find just about anything and everything dealing with whatever specific topic they are looking for. Go search for Allaire State Park on Google and see how many results come up. But, sometimes what comes up is not enough. Do you want to find a place to jog and another to bike while camping Sussex county? It is just a mess. This is where (I hope) GetOutsideNJ.com will come in.

Our Goal

The goal here at GetOutsideNJ.com is to catalog parks/businesses/anything that gets you outdoors in New Jersey. We then allow visitors to browse through our locations based on counties/towns within the system. A location will include about what can do in the park.. where you can actually park.. if your dog is allowed.. can you play golf in the fields.. so on and so forth. You can also search by physical location (by county/zip/radius), amenity (dog park/nature center/etc), and activity (jogging/hiking/biking/mountain biking). Then each location will contain a good bit of detail (descriptions/history/etc), with added content (like maps / photos and eventually trail routes) connected to it.

Social Networking / User Contributions

In addition to being able to search the boring content we have provided, you will be able to add your own. Within a few months of our initial launch, we'll be offering a social networking / user contribution aspect of GetOutsideNJ.com. You'll be able to add new (basic) location information, mark locations as a personal favorite or as a place you want to check out, create itinerary for a weekend of fun, or just do nothing but blog about why you hate people who litter.

Initial Release of GetOutsideNJ.com

The initial release of GetOutsideNJ.com will include a search-able catalog of all the State/National parks in NJ. From High Point to Sandy Hook to Cape May Point, we are going to do our best to gather quality information for you. Next we add anything outdoorsy.. like camping/mini-golf/paint ball, you get it. Once we have a good amount of data in the system we'll start implementing the social networking angle of the site. That is when the fun begins.

Enough for now. Check back often and follow us on Twitter (twitter.com/GetOutsideNJ) for updates.

Long-ish answer.. My current site (carabs.com) gets a good bit of hits (during the warmer months). It is not very usable and somewhat dated. It is all older programming.. which makes it not so upgradeable (it is 3 year old programming that I am not very proud of). I would like to share a whole lot more with people, but it is not the place for it. Summer 2008 my GF and I started to brainstorm what we could do next. So I started the programming for GetOut within a CMS I created to use for some clients I have. By about April 2009, we were Very close to completing our first go at it. We a few hundred parks with a lot of info (from years of photos/GPS data/hoarding all the park maps I can find). As we started to plan our "launch", we started to ponder how we could actually make cash with this. Which then made us think about opening it up for others to add content. Which made us realize that we were not ready for prime time.. and I programming from scratch. 6 months later, I am not even to working within the GetOut programming. I am plowing through the programming that just controls bits and pieces of it.
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