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.