What inspired me to work on the site today? Well a comment from Mark W., a JASM for Troop 1616 in Soldotna, Alaska asked that his blog, Scouting Maniac, be added to HalfEagle. It’s a great blog to get the perspective of a youth leader who is transitioning to become an adult leader. It’s been added to the site and is already appearing on the main page. Want to see your Scouting blog on HalfEagle? Check out the criteria then post a comment to that page for a review.

While I was at it, I used AddThis to get an easy to use bookmark/sharing button. It was a very easy service to use and will provide some neat statistics, too. Assuming anyone uses it.

I also added a favicon for the site. What do you think? 

Finally, I went ahead and added Google Analytics to HalfEagle. What with the popular posts page and archives, it will be helpful to know if people actually use those pages.

Change means bugs, so please let me know if you experience any difficulty with 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!

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.

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.

To support this effort, HalfEagle includes recently posted ideas with a special format to encourage voting. When you see the “VOTE” icon, make sure you click and cast your vote!

Update: Thanks to Dan from Scouting News for pointing out the BSA Innovation Engine is still “professionals only.” As noted in my comment below, HalfEagle will temporarily not show BSA Innovation Engine results to avoid frustrating our many volunteer readers.

Now, HalfEagle should be a bit smarter in this regard. This post itself was a test to try out the new filters. How did this post slip by them? Well, in case the filter ever makes a mistake, I can manually tell HalfEagle that a particular post should appear.

If you ever have a post that doesn’t show up in HalfEagle that happens to contain the words “test,” “testing,” or “test post,” please let me know and I’ll turn it back on.

• Scout Pioneering
• scouting
• 50 States of Scouting

This was mostly because each new group slowed down the loading of the home page even further. Now that HalfEagle uses the new caching mechanism, it can subscribe to many more groups, and it can subscribe to overlapping groups without having duplicates of the same picture in the cache.

• Cub Scouts
• All Things Scouting
• Boy Scouts of America in Deutschland!
• “Best of” group
• Jamboree 2007
• One World, One Promise Scout Centennial
• 21st World Scout Jamboree
• Boy Scouts of America

And these are just the groups that caught my eye for having a multitude of contributors and interesting photography. There are even more Scouting photo groups to check out. If you have any recommendations, please link to them in the comments.

Of course, more groups means more varied pictures. You might load up a page and only see Cub Scout pictures or International Scouting pictures. HalfEagle currently has a pretty strong bias toward Boy Scouts of America at the moment.

If there were a way for you to indicate a preference for a particular area of interest (not just for pictures, but for all the different sections), would that be something you’d use? Personally, I think it would be a neat feature every time I think of it, but I don’t think I’d ever personally use it. Tell me what you think and I’ll use your suggestions to decide how to proceed.

Of course, that was a long time ago (nine months on the Internet is roughly equal to nine years in the real world). In that time many more Scouting blogs have been created. The word “blog” is pretty broad and in Scouting we have everything from SPL’s who use their blog to communicate with their troop all the way up to our Chief Scout Executive who uses his blog to help lead our national movement. (Let me save you an hour or so of online sleuthing; his blog is internal to BSA National Council.)

Since HalfEagle needs to be useful to more than just me, I’d like to discuss the criteria for adding a blog to the site. Your feedback on these guidelines is welcome and, if you think your blog meets them, then you should apply. (Details below.)

So what blogs go on HalfEagle? I look for blogs of (a) current Scouters (b) who discuss what they are doing in Scouting right now, (c) relate those stories to either past Scouting experiences or experiences outside of Scouting, (d) write their blog for an audience larger than their unit or council, and (e) always add commentary when repeating general news.

Let’s break it down:

• current Scouters Scouting is a living, breathing, growing movement. HalfEagle is about where we are now and where we are going, not where we were 30 years ago (although that’s important, and covered in c. below).
• who discuss what they are doing in Scouting right now Where’d you camp this month? Got pictures? Where’s your next long term camp? How are you going to get there/pay for it/maximize it?
• relate those stories to either past Scouting experiences or experiences outside of Scouting Has Scouting always been the biggest part of your life? How’s it changed? How’s it stayed the same? What else have you done in life? How did Scouting help/hurt? How does the clergy/military/corporate America/blogosphere compare to Scouting?
• write their blog for an audience larger than their unit or council Is your blog written to be useful or entertaining to people who don’t already know you? If most of your posts intended as announcements for your unit, district, or council, then it will be hard to justify adding your blog to HalfEagle which has a national audience.
• always add commentary when repeating general news Everyone is excited about the new uniforms, the new merit badge books, etc. and everyone is going to blog about new happenings in the Scouting movement. But no one wants to come to HalfEagle and see 10 headlines in a row that all read “Centennial Uniform Available Today” that each have the same boiler-plate announcement. Always add your unique take on things.

Of course, these are only guidelines and they will change and evolve as the site grows. But, if you think your blog meets these guidelines, drop a comment below and I’ll check out your site. I won’t promise to add your site. But I promise to consider your site and email you an explanation privately if I choose not to include your blog.

Originally I was using sIFR to provide attractive headlines for each blog entry. Unfortunately I had to disable that because of the performance issues on the old server. Rather that turn it back on, I tried to build a good basis for an HTML only design of the page. Eventually, I’ll turn back on sIFR. Since the site itself is fast, fast, fast, a slight client side speed hit should be okay.

The best news of course is that the site is fast. There are now three different cache mechanisms to speed up the page… Caching of the source RSS feeds, a database cache, and an image cache. Flickr, Google News, and Delicious are still running off the old slow way, but the bulk of the slowdown has always been the blogs themselves.

I hope you like it! I’d love to hear your feedback on this version of the site design.

The next step for me (which I won’t get to for a week or so) is adding some features now that I have a robust backend.

The home page of HalfEagle.com has been, since it’s conception, poorly coded. I’ve yet to really optimize it in any of the ways that I have planned. It’s also suffered from being hosted on a very strained shared hosting plan. Basically HalfEagle.com was competing with thousands of other websites for a tiny bit of server power.

Considering that HalfEagle.com goes out and scours quite a few different websites to build it’s page, it needs quite a bit more server power than a lot of web sites. The good news? I’m writing this post from HalfEagle.com’s new home… a very high powered server in a very high quality datacenter.

In comparing the old server to the new, I can tell the difference. The page loads in under 5 seconds now, which beats old page loads time ranging from 30 seconds to, well, “go run some errands and hopefully it won’t have timed out.”

Now that the biggest bottleneck is cleared, it’s time to do some additional housecleaning and adding some of the features I’ve been planning. Watch this space.