Important Site & Network Updates!

Hey everybody! It’s not to often that we do site updates, but generally when we do it’s a pretty big update which is why we like to make these posts, the only real difference here is that none of these updates have happened yet. Over the past few months, even years in some cases, we’ve been testing out different ways to promote and share our content with the world. The most recent highlight of that struggle was our seeing our work in printed glory in the 2010 edition of Fins + Skins magazine.

Along the way we learned a lot of lessons, we stretched out to create new projects like Rockstar Lures, Fishing Fury Forums, and LegendaryFishermen. In all our successes and failures there comes a time to take all you’ve learned and focus it like a laser beam into what works best, unfortunately somethings get blasted into oblivion during the process. This post is exactly that, we’re going to be focusing harder on what’s working for us, and blasting away some of the stuff that isn’t.

FeedBurner

We will be dropping feedburner support! This means that if you subscribe to our rss feed you’ll want to make sure that you change the subscription URL back to fishingfury.com (RSS, RSS 2, RDF, ATOM), because the feedburner feed will eventually stop updating. We apologize for this, but for all that feedburner gave us, we simply lost a lot of the specialized tracking I setup in analytics, and most of the so-called ranking sites out there fail to update their statistics from the sites that provide the data they rank you on. Rubbish!

The Official Fishing Fury Gallery

Believe it or not, the official gallery is moving again!* It’s even hard for me to believe, honest. The official gallery will coming back home to FishingFury.com (http://www.fishingfury.com/gallery/) thanks to the wordpress 3.0 custom post types, and a few weeks of sleepless nights for me to write all the hooks and templates. We moved the gallery back here to wordpress for several reasons, easy comment moderation, avatars, super-fast gallery creation and editing, and better SEO. The only thing we’re losing is the view counts for the photos, instead we’ve planed to replace this with a simple favorite/like style counter, and from there we can gather the data to rank photos by popularity. Well, what are you waiting for go check out the new home of the Official Fishing Fury Gallery.

* Links to and from the old gallery will be redirected in the next week or two and the domain will likely be repurposed in to some new venture down the road.

Legendary Fishermen

We will be closing Legendary Fishermen in the near* future, so if you have a blog there and want a backup that you could say import into wordpress.com, just email us and we’ll get it for you. We’re very sorry to everyone that signed up and participated, we’ve got your emails written down and will have some cool prizes for you to show our appreciation. Legendary Fishermen was a great idea to create, or rather start, a site for fishermen to create their own blogs, communities, etc. The site and it’s content is actually created by the people on it rather than by say, Clive of myself. Unfortunately, I don’t think it quite worked out. I honestly feel like buddypress just wasn’t as quick and easy for people to pick up. The blogs got quite a bit of use, but all the community aspects were bare. It would take a lot of time for me to get the design perfect, and still requires a lot of time to maintain, time that could be better spent writing.

* There is no planned date, likely not for months and after everyone has their data.

New Sponsors

Over the next month or two we will be adding a number of new sponsors and announcing some new ventures and partnerships. I don’t want to get into too much detail yet but the upcoming announcement will explain everything and I hope that everyone will be supportive and as excited as Clive and I are.

New Forums

Sometime before or just after the new year we will be migrating our forum away from SMF and into VBulletin. The new forum software is much more robust and we’ve even got a number of great features and rewards lined up for our most active and prominent members, and even a very special surprise for those of you that participated in the legendaryfishermen.com experiment.

Fins + Skins Magazine

Clive and I are working towards getting a number of copies of the Fins + Skins magazine that we will most likely be using as prizes for upcoming contests and giveaways. So stay tuned for your chance to win a copy!

Your feedback is appreciated

We’d love to hear from you about ways that we can improve our site, as well as your enjoyment and interaction, so if you have any ideas or suggestions please feel free to let us know in the comments below.

Thank you all very much and we look forward to beginning our 7th year of bringing you the most exciting fishing content the world has to offer.

Fishing Fury Opens Registration

That’s right we’ve decided to open up registration again, and with that a lot of features we’ve had waiting in the background for weeks now.

By registering for an account you’ll be able to subscribe to email updates and get notifications when new posts are made, very useful for Contests and Name That Fish posts. You’ll also enjoy moderation free comments, no more waiting for us to approve them, and localized comment avatars! Gravatars should still work, if you have one. We even have a few features for contributors.

It’s also time to start moving forward with things like stickers and t-shirts. I don’t want to give too much away but I will show you some artwork that will be on both stickers and t-shirts. Check out this cool Fishing Fury script by my good friend and tattoo artist Alie K..

Seriously though, there is a huge stack of work to be done around here and exciting things for the future. 2009 will definitely be our largest growth period so far.