Welcome to the new planetmountain website

After months and months of development, Planetmountain unveils today its new website featuring a responsive, mobile-friendly layout, a new site navigation and a more pleasent user experience.

The project of an online magazine was born in 1996, when the internet - in Italy at least - was in its embryonic stages and the photos we published couldn't be much larger than a stamp, otherwise they'd be impossibile to upload via the old 56K modems. Over the years the site has followed all the different stages of the evolution of the internet and until yesterday the programming language used to run the pages reflected all the diverse phases of this constant and rapid change.

The old site has now been completely updated and reprogrammed, and the site navigation has consequently been transformed substantially. News, which historically represent the most important section of the site, is still first on the menu, whereas rock climbs, ice climbs, via ferrata, treks, big mountain routes etc are all grouped under "Routes". Crags, photos and videos have been brought to the forefront, and all content is now seamlessly integrated into everything we publish. The homepage reflects this redesign and contains more content and is far longer and... yes, we are happy with the new site, and we hope you are too!

Future
At times planetmountain has been described as "the online archive of the last 20 years of mountaineering" and, despite the fact that this is not true in the slightest (if only!), what is true is that we jealously guard every article we've published. We have therefore tried extremely hard to lose anything, absolutely nothing from our archives and this is why some of the pages are still very much "work in progress". It will still take some time to complete the upgrade, and if you come across something that doesn't work perfectly, please don't hesitate to let us know. This major update is undoubtedly an important step in the development of planetmountain, but there are also other interesting and stimulating projects underway for the future. Stay tuned.

Thanks
It is impossible to thank everyone who has helped planetmountain over all these years. Impossible, but I'll give it a go. First of all, I would like to thank those who founded this project together with me, namely Francesco Piardi, Nicola Tremolada, Francesco Tremolada, Vinicio Stefanello and, at a later stage, Federica Barrucci. Vinicio obviously deserves a special mention for having incessantly led the entire project for over 20 years and until last summer. I obviously also have to thank the now defunct publishers Vivalda Editori, in particular Mario Dalmaviva, which allowed us to transform Mnet (that's what the site was initially called in 1996) into PlanetMountain in 2000.

Then I would like to thank all the sponsors who have believed in and supported this project: without them, planet simply wouldn't exist.

My final thanks go to those who have provided a deeper meaning to planet over these last 20+ years: our readers. To those who faithfully browse the site every day, and to all those who have contributed to the magazine by sharing their stories of climbs, ascents and adventures. Planet has always wanted to open the doors to everyone, and talk not only about 8C boulders and 8000m summits, but also about the more "down to earth" love for the mountains that we all share.

Thank you for placing your trust in planetmountain. I wish you all happy and safe days out in the mountains.

Nicholas Hobley 11/09/2023

PS Special thanks also to the team that worked on the new version of Planetmountain: Blaz Kemperle responsible for UX/UI, and the Explico developers Graziano Gobbato, Alessandro Perissinotto and Davide Nadin. Nice one.