About RiverBoss.com
History
RiverBoss.com began as a personal project and launched with little (no) fanfare on January 20, 2011. As a web developer and avid angler I was surprised to find no single website where anglers could view Steelhead Alley river conditions on one page and in real-time. As I built-out RiverBoss the ideas started to flow, and hover-activated river graphs were implemented, along with current weather conditions and forecasts. RiverBoss 1.0 featured 11 rivers, all in Steelhead Alley.
As the spring steelhead season wound-down, I had time to review our visitor analytics. Surprisingly, RiverBoss tallied a few hundred visitors. In the 2011-2012 steelhead season, we notched a few thousand visitors. Yes, I trolled the message boards to read comments about the website. My favorite: "It's a great website, but it's not much to look at." RiverBoss.com 2.0 featured 11 rivers, all in Steelhead Alley.
In early 2013 we gave the website a facelife, and in the fall of that year we launched the mobile version of RiverBoss 2.0. We got a lot of traffic, 50% of which was mobile-based. Still, she could be prettier.
Now
Edit - RiverBoss 3.0 definitely did NOT launch in January, but it did launch in May!
RiverBoss 3.0 launched in January 2015. RiverBoss now features all 9,048 rivers, creeks and streams monitored by the US Geological Survey, supplemented with NOAA current weather conditions and extened forecasts for each of these locations. We store a huge massive amount of data that is delivered almost instantly via an in-memory database that is ridiculously complex. I do not understand it.
Non-registered users are geo-targeted and delivered a list of "Rivers Near Me" - an imperfect science. Registered users may create a custom "My Rivers" page and edit what they consider to be low, good and high conditions.
Because mobile and handheld traffic is approaching 70%, we have paid special attention to the mobile interface. Yeah, it still might not be the prettiest thing, but it's functional and it's responsive. We'll keep working on it.
RiverBoss.com is developed by Aetomic Marketing in Cleveland, Ohio. Thanks to all of our programmers for making this happen, especially Gauti Selvaraj who was instrumental in pulling the pieces together.
Ryan Valentine
Angler, Web Developer