I would like to share my ideas about minigolf-related Internet services, which I will not do because I don’t have time for it. But maybe someone else gets inspired by these ideas, and will do some of these projects.


Minigolf search engine

When we planned minigolfnews.com website in November and December 2008, one of our ideas was to make a search engine in Google style, which would find all minigolf websites, all results, everything related to minigolf.

In the style of Google Photos, the search engine would also give clickable thumbnail links to minigolf photos, by keywords such as player’s name, competition, town, country, etc.

Erik is running the minigolfpics.com website, and many minigolf clubs or private persons have their own photo galleries somewhere on the Internet. Searching for photos of a specific person can be very difficult. A search engine would collect information from all known minigolf photo galleries, and show links to the photos as thumbnails.

We never created this minigolf search engine, because we don’t have the time and energy for it, after all the work running this minigolf news service. if someone else has time and energy, go ahead and do it. We can possibly give some advice and assistance.


Historical minigolf photo archives

The golden age of film cameras ended 10 years ago. Many minigolfers have historical photos in their wardrobes, from major tournaments of 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s. It would be a great service to scan old minigolf photo galleries, and publish them online for everyone to see.

But scanning and editing old photos takes quite much time and energy. I have scanned hundreds of old minigolf photos from the archives of Harry Grönlund, Ari Ahrenberg and Juha Wellenius:
http://www.melekh.net/mg/photos/

Then I scanned yet a thousand more photos, from the archives of Sibelius Park MGC:
http://gardengolfer.com/photos/

But after editing the first 29 photos, I realized that I have many other uses for my time and energy, so I published the rest of the 1000 photos as a zipped archive, unedited just such as they came from the scanner. I will not edit these photos in the foreseeable future.

If anyone has historical minigolf photos in the wardrobe, getting them scanned and published online would be a positive service for the global minigolf community. Especially if you include footnotes explaining the year and place where each photo was taken, and list the names of known persons in the photo.