Iowa Deer Blog

I've been traveling a lot lately, both for work and pleasure. Right now my family and I are out in Frisco, Colorado. The mountains never cease to awe me with their granduer and beauty. It's been snowing up here a lot lately which has made this trip that much more fun - powder makes for great skiing. A lot of you probably don't know that I love to ski. I grew up in Michigan for several years as a kid right next to a ski hill and I got hooked then. It's amazing when you learn something as a kid because you never forget. It's much harder to ski aggressively now than it was when I was 17, but I still try. This trip has been tough - me and my two oldest boys have strep and we all had to get on antibiotics. My oldest son wanted to ski yesterday and I could barely get him down the mountain. One run and done. Oh well, it still beats a day at the office!

As far as the site goes there has been many more changes. One of the big changes was syndicating YouTube videos in the Iowa Deer Gallery. We now can pick up any video from YouTube right here in our own gallery. Someday I hope to have it so you can upload to YouTube too any video you want to share and it will get posted right to the gallery.

The site keeps getting busier and busier and that is due to the new changes and the great core group of guys on here that are IowaDeer.com. I can't wait for the shed hunt. It's been far to long since I have caught up with most of you. Well gotta go now. Hope all is well with you and yours.

Brian

The site continues to evolve into something bigger and better than it has ever been. The Iowa Deer Gallery is now up and several beta testers are uploading videos as I type. And all of this is fed in a live stream to the homepage. The vision of a live homepage is now a reality. With the addition of the live posts from the Iowa Deer Forum and the most recent photos from the Iowa Deer Gallery the homepage has a life of it's own! IowaDeer.com continues to evolve. Please stop back by to witness the continuing metamorphosis of IowaDeer.com into one of the world's best online hunting websites.

It's been far too long since we updated the homepage and thanks to Adam Oswald (aka adamo on the forum) we now have a beautiful new homepage. The new homepage includes a live feed of the 5 most recent posts to the Current News section on the Iowa Deer Forum. We are very excited to have this new homepage for IowaDeer.com and welcome any feedback you might have.

Our next step in the site redesign includes a photo gallery for Iowa Deer Fieldstaff members. Each FSM that wants their own Gallery will be setup with their own album where they can upload, edit, and share photos with other Iowa Deer members, family and friends. Please check back for additional site improvements that are in the making. There is a lot more to come for Iowa Deer.com and 2008 it is going to be an exciting year around here!

Welcome to the Iowa Deer Hunting Journal site. If you are new on here please take time to visit our other member journals by clicking on the links in the Blog title bar (red image) above. We have several Field Staff Members who have been posting to their journals and there is already a lot of great information contained in this journal area. Thanks for visiting the Iowa Deer Journal site!

Brian

aka

DeerHunter

Well the blog beta site blew up last night. Not sure why, but something screwy is going on with the database on the server. It's not isolated to just our journal site. Crazy. I hope to get it sorted out soon. In the meantime feel free to blog away. If it goes down again it only takes me about 2 minutes to bring it back up.

As far as the forum goes, I increased the file size limit for attachments up to 150KB. We had some discussion in the field staff forum about the need for a file size limit and I determined that it was worth increasing the attachement size limit. I may go a little further if I get enough feedback from the Field Staff.

I did some work on the photo gallery last night. I am still not happy with the gallery and it needs a lot more work. We need to determine if a gallery is that important to us or not. I have my doubts sometimes.

Well after watching the biggest superbowl upset in history today finds me behind the computer again at work. I had a few moments to kill here before a meeting so I thought I would post some site updates. The Iowa Deer Blog is turning out really nice. So far Top_Heavy and glasgowm have started a journal and let me tell you theirs are a lot more interesting than mine. I have enjoyed reading their posts so far. I really hope we can get some other interest in the journal areas. These blogs are publishable as RSS feeds so readers from around the world can check in and read the journals.

As far as site updates go - we are in testing mode for the blogs and if all works out OK we will go live with it in the next week or so. My next big plans include getting our advertising banner system in place and completing the photo gallery. We will need some good gallery moderators if anyone is interested please let me know.

Well I hope you all have a great Monday and productive week. Talk to you later.

I can't stop improving the site. Something is wrong with me I just finished upgrading our entire site. All the weather information on Iowa Deer Weather comes directly from the national Weather Service and NOAA and is as up to date as those to govt agencies keep it. It's now a direct feed to both agencies data steam. It took a lot of work, but I think we have one of the best weather sites anywhere. It's easy to use and powerful for gathering the information you need. Some of the larger weather sites I have tried like weather.com make their pages overly complex to navigate, have too much advertising, and you can't find all the relevant current weather information quickly enough. I tried to make our site very user friendly. Take a look - I hope you like what you see.

We are also looking into some other advertising programs for IowaDeer.com. The site has grown to a point where it is more expensive to maintain. You may be seeing some different ads in the near future on the IowaDeer homepage and forum. More to come...

We are continuing to work on new features for the site. The photo gallery is a work in progress and we hope to have it up in the next couple of weeks. We need to find some willing Field Staff members to help moderate the gallery. If you are interested let me or John know. The blog site as you can see needs some work. I am working on putting together a great skin for the blogs and getting our volunteer accounts setup. If you are interested in your own blog let us know. You must be a Field Staff member to have your own blog. More information to follow. Thanks

Welcome to the new Iowa Deer blog! The Iowa Deer blog is designed to have a community of blogs where members can share their outdoor experiences, information and any other news and information that they wish to share. Our hope is to start with a handful of Field Staff member blogs from some of the sites most active and experienced Field Staff members. Please check back frequently to read the latest journals from the Iowa Deer Field Staff.