HalfEagle.com’s Blog

Another few spare hours, and a few more improvements to HalfEagle!

First, this image to the right here has been annoying me for sometime. Why? Because to speed up the site, HalfEagle has to do some caching of Flickr images. Unfortunately, that means that if someone deletes, changes the privacy, renames, or heck, even rotates their image on Flickr then the next time HalfEagle tries to display it, the visitor gets to see that ugly honkin’ image.

Ideally, Flickr would actually send a 404 not found error — at least that way HalfEagle could use some javascript trickery to make those broken images disappear. As it stands, I couldn’t figure out how to get javascript to detect a 302 redirect in an <img> src attribute. (Never mind the technical details, it’s only my way of sharing the pain of the hour spent looking for an easy fix.)

There is a fix in place but it’s not 100% effective. Basically the server goes and checks a random sampling of Flickr images every so often and deletes them if they are no longer available. This means less “this photo is currently unavailable” images but they will still occasionally appear.

Second, I’d really like to find a way to recognize the best Scouting blog posts being generated out there. I had a few ideas but they’d require a lot of traffic to HalfEagle to work. Until that time comes, I’ve started to gather data from PostRank™ and added a new page to HalfEagle that shows popular Scouting blog posts.

There’s more information on that page about how it all works and a link to PostRank’s methodology. It even shows the top 3 all-time most popular posts for each of the blogs on HalfEagle. So, if you enjoyed Lone Star Scouter’s stocking stuffers, you might be interested to see that blog’s three most popular posts.

(If you’re looking to increase engagement with your blog posts, the first thing I’ve noticed is that blogs with images seem to do a bit better.)

Finally, a made a few tweaks to the styling of the page. No more border between items, instead there’s a subtle shading of every other item. This allowed me to fit the items a bit closer together without too much visual distraction. This means more posts “above the fold” which will, hopefully, expose people to more Scouting posts.

Update: I’ve also added a new scroller to the Flickr image block. Let me know what you think!

Update: The Custom Google Search Engine has been updated to add all the sites included in HalfEagle. You can also refine your search by “Cub Scouts,” “Boy Scouts,” or “Venturers.” Let me know what you think!

Update: HalfEagle is now sporting a mini YouTube video bar (if you have javascript enabled) that cycles through recent videos from 17 different Scouting YouTube channels. Think your YouTube channel should be there? Let me know!

Update (last one today!): HalfEagle now offers browse-able archives going back to June 2007. Flickr images only go back to February 2008. However, it’s pretty neat to get to see more of the images and to see what kind of pictures are posted month to month. All in all, it’s been a pretty big day for HalfEagle!

Of course, with this many changes, it’s bound to have messed up something somewhere! If you notice any issues or would just like to share your opinion of the changes, please drop me a line by commenting below. Thanks and happy holidays!

First, a nod to KISMIF for mentioning HalfEagle this week. Their post reminded me of two things; my plan to add greater control over what kind of Scouting information you see here and the annoying little rendering issues on HalfEagle.

As you can see in the screenshot at KISMIF, there are occasions where some rather odd “Å” characters creep into the HalfEagle home page. There’s a lot of different blog software, server types, and character encoding issues out there in the blogosphere and HalfEagle tries to do it’s best to minimize those issues. The good news? After a couple hours of wrangling, HalfEagle is doing a much better job of:

• Handling special characters
• Displaying foreign language characters (sometimes found in the google news/delicious section)
• Normalizing capitalization of blog titles
• Displaying quote characters

It’s awfully ugly when all these issues happen to crop up in the most recent items, but those days should mostly be over!

While I was at it, I added a new feature. If you embed or link to a YouTube video in your blog post, HalfEagle will automatically pull a thumbnail of the video to use as your blog image. Let me know if you notice any issues with this new feature.

As far as adding greater control over what kind of Scouting information you see here, that will take more than a couple hours, so it’ll have to wait for a free weekend.

At the risk of shameless self-promotion, I’d like to share with the readers of HalfEagle a new site I’m involved with. As a Scoutmaster and Eagle Scout, I personally really like most of the products we are carrying or else I wouldn’t post about this here. That said, I do realize it’s off-topic so I’ll be brief.

The basic design of the site is from mockups that I prepared but has evolved a bit as we determined our initial product line. So I hope you like how the site looks.

TrailStop.com is a retail ecommerce site which carries BSA licensed products. I hope you like it and share your feedback with me (especially if you don’t like it!).

Since this *is* an off-topic post for HalfEagle, I’d appreciate if you contact me through the TrailStop feedback form. Comments will be closed here and we’ll resume our regularly scheduled programming.