The Outdoor Journey » Multisport Blogs

Good News from BlogRush

hak — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 22:02:08 +0000

More good news on the BlogRush front.

1) They’re adding new colors so the widget will be better integrated into your blog’s design.

2) They’re adding a new “Fitness” category! It’s only a matter of time before we can get a triathlon or endurance sports category.

If you have a multisport or fitness blog and haven’t signed up yet, please consider doing so. The more people we get using this free service, the more tri-evangelism we can spread across the Net.

Enough blog business for me for today. I got sucked into a little comment debate on Thursday’s “Letter from a Special Forces Team Leader” and hopefully will have things calmed down. It’s off to the pool for a swim-run brick with my daughter Amanda. She has her first kids’ tri next weekend and she needs to get her practice in.

As for me, it’s three weeks and change until my last tri of the season, the Pumpkinman (click to view a video of last year’s race). It has a grueler of a hill that takes you from Lake Mead to Boulder City.

Some folks from Pro Cyclery (the team I haven’t played with since early summer when school started up) will be out there tomorrow a.m. to ride the course. Although I’m sure I’ll be dropped within a couple of minutes, it’ll be a good test to see if I need to put another cassette on the back so I can save my legs for the run, or if I’m good to go as is.

Find your edge and dance upon it.

hak

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Sharing Some Multisport Love

hak — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 15:42:20 +0000

On Saturday, I wrote about a new blog promotion service called BlogRush. What this service does is share your blog with others who are subscribed to the service. You’ll see the series of links to other sports blogs (the only category available to us now) in the bottom right of our sidebar. If you refresh this page, you’ll be presented with another series of links.

So, why should you care?

If you write your own blog and want to share your love of multisports with others, sign up. It’s free and you earn “credits” for every page view. For example, if 100 people visit your blog every day, a link to your blog will be shown on 100 other blogs.

Take a moment to reflect back on why you did your first triathlon. At some juncture in your life, you were inspired by a co-worker, friend, Ironman television coverage, or perhaps something divine, to say “Hey, I want to tackle that challenge.”

Once that decision was made, you most likely turned to the Internet in search of more information. You probably found a couple of blogs that struck a chord with you and here you are today.

Since BlogRush launched last weekend, they’ve served over 40 million blog headlines. That’s a lot of people we can expose to multisports. That exponential growth has caused some problems with a few blogging wienies trying to take advantage of the system. Here’s an excerpt of what the folks at BlogRush have up their sleeves for the future:

What Weâ€™re Doing About These Issues

1. Weâ€™re moving to a MANUAL REVIEW process. No more automation. We will be reviewing ALL blogs submitted to BlogRush. If the quality of the blog is poor, they will not be allowed to participate. Weâ€™re going to start reviewing ALL the blogs that are currently in our network and will be disabling the accounts for poor quality blogs.

2. Weâ€™re continuing to add security measures to our system and we will be mass-removing any and all cheaters that we discover. We will not rest until the cheaters are WIPED OUT and kept from abusing our network. The manual review process will help eliminate most of them as legitimate bloggers that have put in the time to create a decent blog arenâ€™t the types that are going to be abusing the system.

All of these changes will only benefit our users â€” it will increase their click-through rates and drive more traffic to their blogs. It will also make sure that the blogs their widget links to are only quality blogs.

I want to have as many of my fellow tri-bloggers join the network as possible so we can have enough participants to get our own category and not have to share with the NFL bookies.

To join, just click here.

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How not to use your fitness

hak — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 12:00:06 +0000

“The key is to build up swim and bike fitness and then not have to use it.”

A great concept from Ironman Canada champ Gordo Byrn as told to Mat Steinmetz.

Some other great reading from the past week:

Find your edge and dance upon it.

hak

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The Fedofskinator strikes

hak — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 17:59:07 +0000

I work with people whose highlight of the day is when there are leftover donuts from a meeting. Seriously, we have one guy who will check his mail slot in the break room at least 12 times a day in the hope that there are still crumbs of a stale blueberry muffin on the table. Then there’s the guy who cuts the donuts in half so he won’t eat the whole thing. Problem is, he comes back to eat the other half five minutes later.
These are also the same people who shoot me strange looks when I bring my bike into my office and proudly point to their large bellies and say,”Man I wish I could do that. I need to exercise some more. Oh yeah…we’re going over to the wings place for lunch, you want to come? Oh yeah, that’s right, you don’t do lunch with us do you?”

“It’s not that,” I reply as politely as I can. “It’s just that I have a lot of homework I need to get done.”

Weirdly enough, dumping the group because I have to do homework doesn’t hurt anyone’s feelings. Dumping them to go train, well, that’s another story.

They just don’t get it.

And that’s what Elizabeth beautifully nailed in this post: Pusher (Wo)Man.

Find your edge and dance upon it.

hak

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New tools

hak — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 22:16:31 +0000

If you find my work inspirational or simply an outstanding example of why ordinary people should never, ever, blog, than this latest Journey upgrade is for you. At the bottom of each article is a series of buttons for De.licious, Digg, etc. that will allow you to bookmark the current post.

The second upgrade is for those who have started conversations in the comments section. You can now subscribe to a particular discussion and I (well, my smart computer) will kick off an e-mail to you any time the conversation is updated.

Who loves ya?

Have a great weekend everybody. I’m off to study more chemistry and to see if I can actually sneak in some training this weekend.

Find your edge and dance upon it.

hak

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