Gallery Updates – Mystery Lake

In keeping with my promise to get on a schedule of updating the gallery I’ve added some 70+ photos to the Mystery Lake 2004 album, which should complete one of the greatest bass fishing galleries you’ll ever see. I’ve included three enticing photos below. Don’t forget you can comment on individual images!

View all 86 images of “Mystery Lake 2004″…

PS- I will be posting a 2010 contributor contest entry tomorrow morning!

More Site Updates Coming Soon!

With the arrival of a new year comes the time to examine where you are and where you want to be by this time next year. Every year since we started this site we’ve been overwhelmed by growth and feedback from our community of friends and this year should be no different. As our viewership grows, so must we, so must our content- and unfortunately sometimes so must the cost of running and maintaining this site, both in time and in money.

2010 Contributor Contest Results

We’ve collected all of your entries together and will be making the final decision on prizes this week. We’d like to publish one or more of these a week, while we get our prizes together to surprise the winners, leaving the very best for last. There is some good news for those of you that do not win one of the top three prizes though, everyone that submitted an entry will receive a prize- your very own copy of Fins & Skins Magazine 2010 where Clive and I wrote several editorial pieces. It’s like a piece of Fishing Fury history!

Blog Updates

In the next few days, though probably not until this weekend, I will be making several updates to the blog including some minor cosmetic changes. Other changes you might want to be aware of are:

1. Removal of the WYSIWYG comment text box, this has prevented most mobile phone users from commenting and very few users actually use this feature.
2. Adding an MGID widget under posts, we’re going to try some content sharing and see if it works out for us. The widget will only be displayed when viewing the single post page, not indexes- and only for non-logged in users.
3. Trying some social networking widgets, again. (Twitter, Facebook, etc)
4. Removal of OpenSky store links. We had a wonderful time working with OpenSky and their team, and would definitely recommend it to other bloggers- but we simply don’t have the time to dedicate to really pushing the store as much as we’d like.
5. More videos! This year I’m going to not only try to take and upload more short video clips, but I’m also going to start going back and pulling out never before seen clips from our video library dating back to 2004!
6. More reviews! We have a ton of reviews that we want to complete this year, including several reviews of fishing rods, reels, and even a ton of great camping equipment.
7. More galleries! Now that we’ve got a great and integrated gallery system we’re going to have to start buckling down and getting these uploaded- I want to shoot for at least one gallery per week if possible.

Forum Updates

Pretty soon I will be biting the bullet and buying a copy of VBulletin 4, and once we’re ready we will be migrating our current forum system over. VBulletin is a far more mature forum system than our current software (SMF) and will include several great features that are going to take the community aspect of our site to the next level!

Looking for Sponsors and Contributors

With the new year upon us and the increasing pace of growth we’re looking for new sponsors and contributors. If you’re interested in writing about fishing and other topics frequently discussed here please read our contributor guidelines and contact us, if you’re already familiar with wordpress and looking to blog regularly we’d love to get you signed on.

And We’re Back! But Where Are You!?

Well that was rather unpleasant. I was all set to have a great weekend and then our server decided to die! This pretty much ruined most of my saturday, sunday, and now monday night and set me back several hundred dollars (good thing I got paid early this weekend). The good news is that we’re back of course, and the bad news is that we seem to have lost several posts and comments. Not to mention the fact that I’m going to have to give away free stuff just to make myself feel better.

Post in the comments below for your chance to win a 2010 copy of Fins & Skins Magazine with several contributions from Clive and myself.

So fishing fury was down all weekend, what did you do? Did you even notice? Tell me what you did on the weekend and monday night instead of spending your time on fishingfury.com and how you managed to cope knowing how hard I was working and how many more grey hairs I’ll probably get from this.

The comment I like the best wins, comment as many times as you like.

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.

Upgrade to WordPress 3.0

I’ve gone ahead and upgraded us to the new WordPress 3.0, and so far it’s pretty nice. We’ve also re-enabled a lot of the social media features of the site like Facebook. If you have any problems please comment below and I’ll get them taken care of ASAP. I hope everyone had a safe holiday weekend and makes it to work on monday without too much of a hang over!

Some Spring Cleaning

We’ve made some changes to the backend tags and categories this week. We’re both trying to get things more organized, but also trying to clean things up a bit. If you have any issues of find broken pages or RSS feeds, please let me know.

This summer will likely bring a number of substantial changes to Fishing Fury, and the future beyond that is even brighter. Clive and I are both excited by where things are heading and we’re looking to launch a new layout on May 1st, which will make this the fifth re-design of our website since it was created in 2004.

We’ve got a lot more surprises planned this year, so make sure you’re in the know. Register for our newsletter and don’t forget to join us in our forums.

Photo credit: She Knows