700 sailing blogs - now what?

[mglonnro]

Originally Posted by Eagleray

Great effort and tags would be great - perhaps you can put put in an auto code that adds the main tags as it calculates everything else.
Cheers

Originally Posted by Codetrader

My guess is there hundreds or even a few thousand more bloggers sailing the seas. I'm thinking make it something like this and simple categories:


Circumnavigation

SE Asia
South Pacific
Hawaii
...

I will try to figure out a way to do this today. Main challenges:

- Have the computer figure it out "herself" or make a mechanism for people to do it themselves (hiring editorial staff is not a possibility ). It would be fun to solve it with AI but probably even more fun to get other interested in contributing in the good old fashioned way

- The AI challenge: how to figure out categories and tags based on the just the text and/or videos of the blog.

Re the latter challenge here's my rough idea so far:

1) Try to figure out the geographic location for each individual post separately by acquiring chart coordinates (using Google) for all capitalized words in the title/post. If there is some apparent cluster of coordinates (or only one), then assume the post is written there. Problem here is to figure out the difference between "Jane" and "Gibraltar".

2) Maybe check for some continuity between posts so that if posts 1 and 3 are located in the Bahamas, post 2 might be as well.

3) Use Google again to generalize into categories from the coordinates (ie long lat => Turku => Varsinais-Suomi => Finland => Europe ...)

Let's see where this ends up

[john61ct]

Location is not at all of interest to some.

Technical topics covered is another dimension.

Crowd-sourcing to suggest new tags. But "mods" must curate the approved taxonomy or chaos creeps in.

Per post is more useful than the vlog as a whole.

[Jen_sail]

I think this is a really wonderful idea!! It can be hard to spread the message and so this is a lovely way to help bloggers get their content out there I added ours

[mglonnro]

Originally Posted by john61ct

Location is not at all of interest to some.

Technical topics covered is another dimension.

Crowd-sourcing to suggest new tags. But "mods" must curate the approved taxonomy or chaos creeps in.

Per post is more useful than the vlog as a whole.

Yes. I published a new version yesterday with better search and such, but crowd sourced tags would be cool. Just have to code it

[mglonnro]

Originally Posted by Jen_sail

I think this is a really wonderful idea!! It can be hard to spread the message and so this is a lovely way to help bloggers get their content out there I added ours

Thank you so much for the positive feedback! :heart:

[bluenomads]

How about ability to sort by recency - top is blog updated most recently.

Sort by where the person is in their last entry (ie. where they started or came from isn't as interesting to some people as where they are right now).

Ability to sanitise choosing only sailing or power/trawler sites (noting that some have a foot in both camps ).

[jmh2002]

Originally Posted by jmh2002

Thanks a lot for making this. I was wondering if your site could publish an RSS feed or two?

- Firstly a push to RSS feed when a new blog is added to your list

- Secondly, if I understand correctly that you check the various blogs for updates, then maybe a separate RSS feed can publish when there are updates from blogs?

This also might help from a bandwidth point of view, preventing the need to load the whole site.

THANKS again

Any possibility that RSS can be added too please?

[mglonnro]

Originally Posted by bluenomads

How about ability to sort by recency - top is blog updated most recently.

Certainly! This should be easily done.

Sort by where the person is in their last entry (ie. where they started or came from isn't as interesting to some people as where they are right now).

Yes! Have to solve the location intelligence first, though.

Ability to sanitise choosing only sailing or power/trawler sites (noting that some have a foot in both camps ).

And you chose the word "sanitise"

[mglonnro]

Now there is a version where it's possible to choose "Sort by newest post" in a dropdown. This is pretty cool, actually!

Also the site is "real time" in the sense that you can just leave the browser open and it will refresh whenever there are new posts. Currently I'm running the "scraper" about once a day, but trying to figure out some arrangement to be able to run it more often.

(The small number in the upper right corner is how long ago the most recent entry was made.)

[mglonnro]

TAGS! I added the tags!

So here's how it works:

Picture 1:

- Top 30 tags are listed below the search field and can be used for filtering blogs (click on them). Selecting #couple AND #outremer will only find blogs that have BOTH tags.

Picture 2:

- When the site is opened, all the tags are shown below the title.

Requires login (currently uses Google or Facebook as login provider):

- Click on any tag to vote whether the you think the tag is good for the site (YES = vote tag up, NO = vote tag down)
- Add any new tag you'd like to the site.

... so that's that. There's a lot of new things, including user authentication and management, so I'm sure there are bugs that might have creeped in. Please let me know if you find any. And as usual, suggestions for improvements are dearly invited!

Direct link to site: https://nakedsailor.blog/sailingblogs

[Pelagic]

Originally Posted by Codetrader

My guess is there hundreds or even a few thousand more bloggers sailing the seas. I'm thinking make it something like this and simple categories:


Circumnavigation

SE Asia
South Pacific
Hawaii
Pacific NW/Alaska
West Coast
Central America/Panama Canal
Caribbean
North Atlantic
Inland Waterway
East Coast
Florida
Europe

ETC
ETC
ETC ETC
Mediterranean
etc
etc


Word will get out and this thing will explode.

I agree, for research purposes

...Location, Location, Location would be my primary sorting tool for searching relevant video blogs.

To order by Country or Cruising Area and search all sailing blogs relevant to that location.

That would be very useful !

[mglonnro]

Originally Posted by Pelagic

I agree, for research purposes

...Location, Location, Location would be my primary sorting tool for searching relevant video blogs.

To order by Country or Cruising Area and search all sailing blogs relevant to that location.

That would be very useful !

And before the computer is smart enough to automatically determine location, all blog owners and blog readers are now dearly invited to add the locations as tags. So go, tag!