HalfEagle.com’s Blog

I noticed a couple interesting conversations in the world of Scouting podcasts that took place this week. First, was this blog post over at Boy Scout Trail:

Yesterday, I was asked by a nice fellow in Irving to let you know about ScoutCast – a series of podcasts for Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts, and Commissioners.

Second, was a tweet this morning by Cubmaster Chris:

PTCers: National wants us to promote Cubcast on the PTC website. What do you think?

I’m pretty excited whenever I see BSA National embracing technology, particularly when they are using technology to deliver more information for volunteers. I have to admit though, I’m not really a podcast listener. I can read faster than I can listen, and when I am receiving really useful information I want to take it in as quickly as possible. (Which is why HalfEagle is so text-focused instead of audio-focused.)

Now, the nice fellow in Irving, Texas hasn’t contacted me. :’( But I’m not going to wait for an email from him to add a feature I should have added long ago.

Due in large part to the efforts of PTC Media who already brings together the best volunteer Scouting podcasts into one place, it was a snap for me to add a new podcasting section. You can now listen to the most recent episode from each show straight from the HalfEagle home page. What this section looks like is shown in the box to the right.

Here are the great Scouting podcasts included (in alphabetical order):

• A Cubbing Minute
• An Hour A Week?
• Around The Scouting Campfire
• CommissionerCast
• CubCast
• Leader’s Campfire
• The Scoutmaster Minute
• True stories of Scouts in Action
• Value of Scouting

That little purple icon is the link to subscribe to the podcast directly in iTunes. When you find one you enjoy, you can click that icon to have iTunes deliver new episodes to your computer and iPod automagically.

Of course, you can also click the podcast title (in brown) to go directly to that podcasts page or you can click the podcast site title (in gold) to go to the home page for that particular podcast.

I really hope this feature brings more attention to Scouting podcasts like the rest of HalfEagle does for Scouting blogs.

As always, your thoughts and feedback are appreciated!

P.S. If you’re curious about the semaphore scouts in the section header graphic, they came from the Semaphore Translator available on InterNETional Scouting.

I’ve noticed that there are a lot of Scouters on Twitter. You can already follow @halfeaglebot on Twitter and get updates whenever new posts show up on the HalfEagle home page. But I wanted to do even more.

The first step to that would be to let folks integrate their Twitter account with HalfEagle.com, and that feature is live starting right now. What can you do with this fancy new integration? Well, not much yet. I plan on adding all sorts of social goodness and giving you tools to more easily share the posts you like to your Twitter followers.

New Post Rating Bar

Until then, there is one feature that you can only access if you sign in to HalfEagle using your Twitter account. That feature is post rating!

Once you sign in, you can give posts a rating from 1 to 5 stars. I hope to be able to use everyone’s ratings to recognize the best content that our Scouting bloggers produce. There is already a popular posts page on HalfEagle, and these new ratings will power a new “top rated” page on HalfEagle.

Let me know what you think of this new feature and make sure you rate your favorite posts!