A Community of Sailing Blogs

UPDATE: The sailing blog collection has been discontinued. It was a fun project, but without that many users, it became a bit expensive to run 😄 Thank you all who participated! ❤️

There’s a lot of people actively sailing (or dreaming about it as we do!) and at the same time publishing blogs and YouTube videos about their adventures. Here’s my humble attempt to bring this community together, with the help of some computer wizardry and magic.

Firstly, though, I want to give credit where credit’s due.

When I started googling for “sailing blogs”, one of the first search results was Ellen Jacobson’s The Cynical Sailor & His Salty Sidekick and its extensive list of over 250 blogs. I’ve used this list as the starting point for the “community”, so thank you for your wonderful work!

Without further ramblings, click the link or picture below to open the Community of Sailing Blogs (further down I added some nerdy details for those who are interested).

https://community.nakedsailor.blog

A Community fo Sailing Blogs
A Community of Sailing Blogs

Why Make a New List?

Ellen’s list is by far the best I’ve found, but even so, I did see some opportunities for improvement.

  1. Among the 250+ blogs there are quite a few blogs that haven’t been updated in many years. That’s quite ok, obviously, since everything doesn’t have to be fresh and new all the time. However, it would be nice to know which blogs are among the active ones with just one quick look. 
  2. Modern bloggers don’t just blog but have Youtube channels (maybe no blog at all!), Instagram accounts etc. It would be nice to have a community of all sailing related social media accounts, not just the blogs. 
  3. (A lot of crazy visions about geotagging, artificial intelligence and other thoughts not quite developed enough to be presented yet :))

How Does it Work?

Without going into too many details, the computer starts out with a list of blogs (feel free to add to that list, please!), then “reads” through them and tries to extract the following information: 

  1. What other social media accounts is the blog using.
  2. Which are the ten newest blog posts (if has blog posts) and which are the ten newest youtube videos (if has youtube channel).

After the information has been extracted, the computer calculates an activity score (on the site card it’s shown just above the title) using the following algorithm:

  1. Each post (blog or video) is given 25 points divided by number of weeks (starting with 1) since the post was first created.
  2. The activity score = all the points are summed together.

So if the site has one blog post published no more than seven days ago, and one video published two weeks ago, the calculation will be: 

activity score = (25 / 1) + (25 / 2) = 37,5

The computer currently recalculates the scores once a day, but this might change.

My Site is Active But Activity = 0?

I’m sorry! And blame the computer, obviously 🙂 Seriously, though, please leave a comment and I’ll try to figure out why.

Here are some things that help: 

  1. Publish a public feed (RSS/Atom) of your site and link to it from your home page! (Don’t use blocking plugins that prevent non-humans from reading it.)
  2. Link to your YouTube channel from your home page! Once the computer finds a valid YouTube channel it’s easy to check for the most recent videos. 

Happy Reading!

In this blog post I’ve used the word community a lot, but after following some sailing people on Instagram (and being followed back), I actually got a bit excited. As I was checking out what people were doing with their sailing boats (and dreams) all over the planet, itt really started to feel somewhat like a community.

So, here’s my small humble addition. Hopefully you’ll enjoy it, and if not: please tell me what’s wrong and I’ll try to fix it 🙂

19 comments

  1. Oh man Oh man Oh man! You just threw kindling on the fire. I now have so many more blogs to go look through!

    You are Da Man! Thanks so much.

    Reply

      1. Unfortunately not me. Wish it was. But me and my wife are looking forward to our own adventures. We are looking at purchasing a 388 here in Melbourne Australia next year so I will follow your blog with interest.

        Reply

        1. Ah, my mistake 🙂

          Nice that you are considering a 388! This far into the process everything has gone rather nicely over here, but still a long wait until we get to sail it. I’ve actually never been aboard a Hanse that isn’t attached to a dock, so we’ll see how that goes 😀

          Reply

  4. Hi Mikael
    It’s great that someone has put a collection of sailing blogs together, however, I can’t seem to load the page with the blogs. Is there a problem at the moment? My blog, Seagull Dreaming is on the Cynical Sailor site, so it is most likely on yours also – but I can’t see any blogs at all!
    cheers
    Andrew

    Reply

    1. Thank you for letting me know! It’s working for me (Mac/Chrome, iPhone/Safari), but I’m pretty sure there’s some problem/error that you’ve managed to find and I need to correct :). I’ll publish a new version of the page sometime today (with some less loading before showing the blogs etc), so I hope you have a chance to try it after that.

      What device and browser are you using?

      Best regards!

      P.S. Your blog is indeed on the list 🙂

      Reply

    2. Now there’s a new version. If you have a chance to try it out, please let me know if it works better now!

      Thank you,
      Mikael

      Reply

  8. Hi,
    The search function seems a bit off as sometimes it works ( get 1 page of blogs as an answer) and sometimes not still get all the pages for the same word. Can’t quite figure out why???

    Reply

    1. Hmm! Thank you so much for the feedback and I’ll have to make it more intuitive for sure 🙂 If possible, let me know a word that you’re trying and I’ll see what happens myself?

      – Mikael

      Reply

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