Archive · 2008–2016
HalfEagle Blog
News and notes from HalfEagle: 35 posts by Gregg Hilferding. See also Follow HalfEagle on Twitter and About HalfEagle.com.
2016
Wood Badge Movie Clips
Serving on a staff of a Wood Badge course? Frustrated with dealing with the DVD that has all of those movie clips? Do you wish you had just normal movie files like .mp4 or .mov files that you could embed in a Keynote…
Five secrets to building patrol spirit in your troop
Many years ago, I authored a guest blog for Bryan On Scouting’s blog. This post has, incredibly, continued to drive requests for the food challenge and patrol competition information mentioned in the post. Unfortunate…
2015
Wood Badge Recruiting Tools
Are you staffing an upcoming Wood Badge course? Wood Badge courses are unique in that there is a minimum quantity of participants required for a course to be approved. In some councils, it can be a struggle to meet th…
2011
New Site Pages (and a secret project)
I’ve created a new type of page on HalfEagle, site pages! In the main HalfEagle feed, there’s a small link at the end of each summary that says “From Site Name x hours ago” which now connects to that site’s page on Ha…
2010
HalfEagle 2010 Year in Review
Last year I put together a post of interesting HalfEagle Stats from 2009 and I want to continue the tradition! I think this was HalfEagle’s sixth year online and clearly we’ve come a long way in that time. Let’s see i…
Show Your Thanks, Recommend a Scouting Blog!
Clark Green recently published a great post on just how much work it is to be a great Scouting blogger or podcaster. He also shared some ways to support the Scouting blogs you love to read. Well, I have a third option…
New Scouting Search Engine, Blekko!
I’ve recently heard a lot of buzz about a new search engine called blekko. I checked it out today and thought it was pretty cool. Since it’s still in beta, it feels a lot simpler and more straightforward than Google s…
HalfEagle is now International!
After receiving a second request to add a Scouting blog from the UK, I decided to take a look at the state of Scout blogging in the country where Scouting got started. It didn’t surprise me at all to find quite a few…
Topic Pages are back + Twitter bot fix!
Dan at Scouting News let me know about a problem with the HalfEagle twitter bot. Those silly question marks are gone now. Thanks Dan! 🙂 I realized today that all the topic pages had gone missing. This was not intenti…
Ongoing Site Maintenance
Please bear with me while I give HalfEagle some much-needed attention. Expect some changes to appearance, functionality, and content based on the great feedback you’ve given me. 🙂 I also have a backlog of new blog su…
HalfEagle Survey Results (and winner!)
In January, I asked the folks who visit HalfEagle to fill out a short survey. I even offered a $25 coupon for TrailStop.com to a random survey filler-outer. I’d like to share some of the insights from that survey as w…
HalfEagle Survey – Enter to win $25 off TrailStop coupon!
I’d like to get an idea of where HalfEagle’s audience would like to see the site go! Please take a few moments to fill out this survey and, if you’d like, register to win a $25 coupon for TrailStop.com. Thanks! 🙂
HalfEagle 2009 Year in Review
I really enjoyed reading Dan’s Out with 2009, In with 2010… blog entry over at Scouting News. It was so cool to see that HalfEagle was his #1 referrer in 2009. It’s exactly the kind of thing I was hoping HalfEagle wou…
2009
New! Scouting Podcast Section
I noticed a couple interesting conversations in the world of Scouting podcasts that took place this week. First, was this blog post over at Boy Scout Trail: Yesterday, I was asked by a nice fellow in Irving to let you…
Twitter Integration with Post Rating
I’ve noticed that there are a lot of Scouters on Twitter. You can already follow @halfeaglebot on Twitter and get updates whenever new posts show up on the HalfEagle home page. But I wanted to do even more. 🙂 The fir…
HalfEagle Scouting Topics Pages
When I first made the sidebar area to promote Mr. Townley’s newest book, I wasn’t sure if I would really like it. In the end though, I was very pleased with how it worked out. I also said I’d be doing something like i…
New popular page & better image handling!
It’s been quite a couple weeks for HalfEagle. Between Twitter’s DoS attack crippling @halfeaglebot (and parts of the site itself) and the temporary outage of PostRank’s service over the weekend, I’ve really felt like…
HalfEagle Bloggers – I need your help.
I got an email last night from one of the bloggers whose content is included on HalfEagle. It seems there maybe a problem with how HalfEagle checks your site for updated content. The problem? HalfEagle may be accessin…
Spirit of Adventure Reviews on Home Page
You probably noticed a change to the home page of HalfEagle. Namely, that block in the right sidebar with a picture of the cover of “Spirit of Adventure” and some links to book reviews by HalfEagle’s Scouting bloggers…
Better URLs and Archived Thumbnails
Recently, Jerry at The Scoutmaster Minute had to change his domain name. It turned out to be quite difficult to fix the links to his blog on HalfEagle. I had only been storing the Feedburner URLs and not the actual UR…
MyScouting Community – Add me!
The official BSA social networking site has surpassed 8,000 members! As previously reported, the Scouting Community site has forums, groups, and every member has their own profile and blog. While cruising the site tod…
300 links visited in ten days!
Since HalfEagle started tracking links almost ten days ago, over 300 links have been visited! Interestingly, the tracking script has had over 3,000 hits, but those are mostly search engine spiders, robots, and scraper…
HalfEagle Live! (A Twitter Experiment)
I’ve always enjoyed the site twistori because it is such an interesting experience to watch the random connected together. Since I’ve been on somewhat of a Twitter roll this holiday weekend, I decided to see if I coul…
New Way To Access HalfEagle: Twitter!
My Troop got back from a weekend campout today a little after 12. By the time all the Scouts were picked up and the Troop gear had been dropped off, I was pretty tired but also pretty excited. We have a lot of really…
Technical Difficulties — Now with Flood Control!
When I checked HalfEagle today I was very surprised to see just two sites filling the entire first page with posts! I quickly disabled both sites to find out what had happened. In one case, the blogger had simply post…
Scouting Twitter Stream and a new Scouting Blog
Steve B. recently brought up the subject of Twitter so I went and took a look to see if people were tweeting about Scouting. Turns out, lots of people are mentioning Scouting all the time. Not much of a surprise there…
2008
Popular posts and *less* broken Flickr images
Another few spare hours, and a few more improvements to HalfEagle! First, this image to the right here has been annoying me for sometime. Why? Because to speed up the site, HalfEagle has to do some caching of Flickr i…
YouTube videos and *less* weird characters!
First, a nod to KISMIF for mentioning HalfEagle this week. Their post reminded me of two things; my plan to add greater control over what kind of Scouting information you see here and the annoying little rendering iss…
New site for buying Scouting products
At the risk of shameless self-promotion, I’d like to share with the readers of HalfEagle a new site I’m involved with. As a Scoutmaster and Eagle Scout, I personally really like most of the products we are carrying or…
BSA Innovation Engine Built-in to HalfEagle
As previously discussed by the blogs included on HalfEagle, the BSA has a website for Scouters to share and vote for ideas to improve the Boy Scouts of America. To support this effort, HalfEagle includes recently post…
Test Posts
One of HalfEagle.com’s sources was doing some testing with using Flickr to post images today. Unfortunately, HalfEagle.com wasn’t quite smart enough to tell the difference between a real post that should be displayed…
Faster & More Scouting Pictures
I’ve moved over the fetching of new Flickr images to the new and improved caching mechanism. Originally, there were only three groups to which HalfEagle subscribed: Scout Pioneering scouting 50 States of Scouting This…
How does HalfEagle pick it’s Scouting blogs?
At the beginning, HalfEagle.com had to pass only one test: It had to be useful to me. After all, I’m part of the “target audience” for this site, so if I don’t even like it, why should you? And second, if I don’t want…
HalfEagle.com updated! Faster, more colorful
If you visit HalfEagle.com you should notice the page looks quite a bit different. I’ve just finished cleaning up a lot of the backend code associated with fetching the different blog feeds. While I was at it, I did a…
An apology
I’m not much for apologies, but I definitely owe one to everyone who has stuck by HalfEagle.com. I built this site about nine months ago and have had little opportunities to improve it. That situation is improving and…