We just redesigned our discussion forum areas to be much more attractive and usable. There are several odds and ends that we still need to do but I think you enjoy them much more.

Here are a couple of things that you will see very soon:

• The images for the forums and the topics will change based on whether you have already viewed them or not.  This will help you find newly posted items.
• You will be able to add photos to your posts (like I do here in the blogs) so you can include pictures of gear or photos from a recent trip.

Here are a couple of images from the new forums.  Feel free to try them out now!

The last week or so we have been working on improving the RSS feeds for our blogs and news stories.  RSS feeds allow news reader programs like feeds.reddit (web), NetNewsWire (Mac OS), SharpReader (Windows) and Straw (Linux) to collect our latest stories and put them in an easily readable form along with other news providers.

Up until now you could follow abbreviated versions of our stories through our news feed.  We have improved this significantly so the feeds from our blogs contain the fully formatted content.  Enjoy!

We now have all the basic (expected) functionality for blogging.  Here's a complete list of features:

• Editable title area (banner)
• Customizable background color
• RSS feed (news readers can automatically detect new blog entries)
• A short (snippet) and long blog entry.
• A fully customizable blog sidebar
• Two-stage publishing of blog entries - this means you can enter your blog entry and look at it before deciding to make it visible to your readers.
• Timed publishing of blog entries - If you want to write your blog entries in advance then you can control the date and time that the blog entry becomes visible to readers.

A collection of choices to include in the blog sidebar including:

• About information including a tagline and a picture
• A generic blog logo
• Blog Roll - collection of links to other blogs
• Tag Index - A custom list of categories for people to find your blog entries
• Links to your most recent entries
• An archive of old entries
• A seasonal hiking graphic

The final piece we added was archiving of old blog entries.  Now a list of months shows up in the archive on the right sidebar of the blog.  If you click on a month you see all the blog entries abbreviated from that month.

The other new feature added is the ability to edit existing blog entries.  If the edited blog entry was already visible to readers at the time of the edit then the entry is marked as edited with the date and time.

Every morning I post stories about hiking to the Hiking Ideas site.  I use a variety of tools to monitor the latest stories around the Internet.  It never fails that the majority of hiking news is negative.  Most stories are about some tragic fall, some hiker is lost, a hiker was attacked by an animal, etc. etc.

I actually get angry when I see all these stories because it's not representative of the hiking sport.  As a result, I made a vow to myself to not post the negative stories.  Having said that, I violated that rule this morning.  I posted a story about the search & rescue team finding one of the hikers dead on Mt. Hood.

The story of the Mt. Hood hikers has captured my attention and the attention of many people across the US.  I've been praying that they would find these guys alive but it doesn't look good now for the other two hikers.

As a result of this story I've decided to adjust my posting policy.  I will attempt to be fair and representative.  That means that for every 100 or more positive stories I will post one negative.  Let me know if it seems like I deviate from this.