René's old blog

Tag: Paddling Planet

  • Paddling Planet overhaul

    Paddling Planet overhaul

    I’ve completely redone the Paddling Planet site.

    The site was originally built with some software called planetplanet, but nobody maintained it any more. I found a replacement, but it wasn’t much better.

    A nagging email from Google about the need to update analytics tags promoted me to rethink.

    I never have to worry about such things with my WordPress sites. The plug-ins update automatically, and so do tags, metadata, schemes and whatever else is happening behind the scenes of a web site.

    I decided to convert the site to WordPress.

    There are some plug-ins available for RSS aggregators, but many were overkill and in all cases I would need a premium version to do there site properly.

    In the end I rolled my own.

    A home-made plug-in manages the links (using the hidden links manager in WordPress), retrieves the feeds regularly, parses them and inserts the information in blog posts. Any featured image is downloaded and added to the post.

    All this happens entirely within WordPress. There are no external programs or cron jobs involved.

    A (very) slightly modified standard theme handles the display, but just about any theme should be easily adaptable.

    The aggregated RSS and Atom feeds are there, courtesy of WordPress.

  • Paddling Planet update

    Paddling Planet update

    Paddling Planet has been running for over ten years now, but due to a change of server I’ve had to replace the software behind the site.

    The old software hasn’t been updated for years, and is by all means abandoned. After a bit of fiddling, I have managed to make things appear not entirely unlike before.

    Please let me know if something is broken, presuming there are still people using the site 😜

    www.paddlingplanet.com

  • Paddling Planet errors

    There are a lot of errors on Paddling Planet recently, mostly HTTP errors 404 (Not Found) and 409 (Conflict), but they all relate to Blogger and change all the time, so I assume the fault is at Blogger.

  • New blogs on the Paddling Planet

    I’ve been sitting on some updates for the Paddling Planet site for a while, but now they’re all in. The new ones are: I’m sorry for the belated updates, but the Venetian waters have been more severely underpaddled that I had anticipated 🙂

  • Paddling Planet

    We’ve had Paddling Planet running for over a month now, and it seems to be reasonably popular and well used.

    The site has about 100 visitors each day, which hopefully translates to well over 100 visits to the blogs on the planet. Few people linger on Paddling Planet, the average visit is less than 3 minutes, which is by design. Visitors are supposed to continue to one or more of the featured blogs, not hang around on the planet. It is supposed to be a place of transit, not sojourn.

    About 45% come directly, that is from a bookmark or by typing in the address www.paddlingplanet.com. Some 51% come in via links from other sites, which I would consider the preferred way. Very few come via search engines, only 3,5%, which is acceptable since the site has no original content.

    The Paddling Planet is most frequented from N.Europe (GB,Scandiavia,Baltic) 41%, N.America 31%, W.Europe (Germany,France,Benelux) 12%, S.Europe 7% and Australia/NZ 6%.

    How can we improve the Paddling Planet?

    Here are a few suggestions. Feel free to add more in the comments.

    • Tell people about the Paddling Planet
    • Write often on your blog – so we keep it lively
    • Configure your feed – a short summary seems to work the better
    • Suggest new blogs for the Paddling Planet
    • Add a link to your blogroll

    That last one is worth repeating: link to www.paddlingplanet.com so your readers can find all the other blogs too. In the end we all stand to gain readers by promoting the Paddling Planet. Blog readership is not a zero-sum game. We do not necessarily lose readers by sending them on to others, and by actively promoting the Paddling Planet, we can all help sea kayak blogging getting bigger and better, so add www.paddlingplanet.com to your blogroll 🙂

  • Sea kayaking blog aggregator – Paddling Planet

    I’ve set up a web site which automatically collects news from sea kayaking related blogs through their RSS feeds.

    The site is at http://www.paddlingplanet.com/

    The idea is to collect all the sea kayaking related blogs in one shared news stream so you only have to look in one place.

    My hope is that it will make it easier for newcomers to the sea kayaking world to discover new kayaking blogs, and for old-timers to stay ajour with what is being written on the various blogs.

    The web site is updated each hour based on the contents of the RSS feeds of the included blogs. No content is copied or stored on my server for any longer than it appears in the blogs RSS feed. The web-site also presents the blog posts in aggregated news feed in several formats.

    If you like the idea I would like to ask all of you for a bit of help launching this site. Help could be:

    • posting on your blogs about it,
    • adding it to your blogroll,
    • telling other sea kayakers about it
    • or telling me of blogs to include in the subscription list.

    For you as bloggers, this can be yet another way of getting your posts out to a wider audience.