• Books and stuff
• Campfire Skits
• Campfire Songs
• Camping Recipes
• Dutch Oven Recipes

• Activities
• Downloads
• Games
• Scoutmaster's Minutes
• Spoken Table Graces
• Sung Table Graces
• The Jungle Book

Online (Linked) Resources:
Links: 13,045. - July 12/08.

Scouting Units:

• Canada
• International
• United States

Scouting Information:

• Activities
• Backpacking
• Badge Requirements
• Blue and Gold
• Bugle Calls
• Campfire
• Camping
• Camp Cooking/Dutch ovens/Food, etc.
• Camporee
• Canoeing
• Ceremonies
• Clipart/Graphics
• Crafts
• Cub Roundtable Files
• Cub Scouts
• Eagle Scout
• Equipment
• Fires
• First Aid
• Flags
• Games
• Hiking
• History
• Humour (Cdn.)/Humor (U.S.)
• Jungle
• Klondike Derby
• Knots
• Leaders
• Maps
• Miscellaneous
• Morse Code
• Museums
• Pinewood Derby
• Pioneering
• Raingutter Regatta
• Reunion
• Roundtable
• Scouting Wisdom
• Songs
• Space Derby
• Spiritual
• Stories
• Survival
• Tiger Cubs
• Troop Information (U.S.)
• Uniform
• Webelos
• Webelos Badges/Belt Loops
• Websites
• Woggles/Slides
• Winter Camping
• Woodworking
• Word Search
• Zipped Files

Welcome to my scouting website.

Drop by again when the urge hits you, but make sure you bookmark this page first!!! (CTRL-D)

June 25, 2008:

I'm still updating on a daily basis. I tried working with an offline version of my data file, but that proved to be 'awkward', so I wound up not updating the online file for three weeks. That's not very satisfactory, so I'm looking at other things.

In the meantime, I've accumulated a ton of links and 'stuff' from the Australian and United Kingdom scouting programs, and those are now available to look at. I still have to create the hypertext for the unit level links, so they'll be along shortly.

=====

Some comments:

Additions:

Yes, I’ve actually visited the sites that I’m including here. Yes, I’ve actually browsed around the site. Yes, I’ve actually spent time reading stuff… history references always get my attention, as do favorite activities and stuff like that. I tend to avoid photo links and photos of individual camps/outings, unless they’re High Adventure/Once-every-ten-years Trip photos and then I’ll look through them. But I won’t look through all 713 photos from the trip that are on the website. I've also avoided the more linked to 'popular' sites.

My comments on the sites:

As a general statement, I don't comment much more than 'Information about the (enter section here)'. The fact that I have made the comment more-or-less indicates that the site is active, there is information on it about the (enter section here), and is worth visiting. I'll sometimes make a comment like it's a 'slim' site: not much information, or it's a 'contact sheet'. I'm not impressed with Javascript or 'professionally' done database-dependent sites, especially if your site is less than 100 pages. Yellow fonting on a white background is hard to read. Purple on black is also hard to read. But all of these options are your choice and although they're not mine, I'm not going to say that.

What is an 'Outdated site'?:

Have a calendar page and don't update it. Feature a hike on your landing page that you took in 2004. I can sort of generalize that if a unit has their own domain, then it’s a maintained site. If they’re using a free space site like Tripod or Geocities, chances are pretty good that it’s not going to be maintained. There are exceptions, of course. The Geocities-type and/or Tripod-type advertising is very, very distracting and lessens the impact of the information, at least in my opinion. And, yes, some of the advertising is not suitable for scouting sites.

Oh, and if you want your site in Google, my recommendation is to update your calendar constantly. Based on what I've seen Google give me in terms of replying to a response, it will most likely be your calendar page.

Keep it simple. Don't date your website changes; it's just another bit of information that you'll have to maintain, and nothing will rile your visitor more than seeing something like "Last changed: December 12, 2001". Everybody's site is "Under Construction", so don't state the obvious.

What's an 'Aged site'?:

Not quite “Outdated”. Maybe updated two/three months ago. The site looked like it was maintained on a regular basis and everyone packed it up to attend summer camp, so it hasn’t been updated for a small period of time.

What am I looking for?

When I go to your site, I'm looking for two main things:

• I'm new in town and I'm looking for a place for my son.
• I'm looking for something to inject into my current program to make things interesting.

And if you have/had a wonderful idea for a meeting, add it to your website. Scan your handwritten notes if you have to. If it's a great idea, your reader won't need a fancy copy.

How do I find the sites?

I started with a handful of 'seed' sites, and then simply recorded every offsite link for every site that I visited. I sort of figured that if the person running that particular website thought the offsite link was important enough to have it on his/her site then I should at least check it out. I'm still recording offsite links, but my file now has over 17,000 unvisited links. That should take me some time to get to all of them, or to at least check them out. If you'd like to send me the URL of your scouting-based site, use this link.

Adding links.

I'm currently adding links in a 'sort of' alphabetical process. Today I'll do URLs starting with 'A', then tomorrow I'll do 'B' and so on. I aim to add 50 new items a day, and that 'typically' takes me about two hours, but I've seen myself spend up to four hours, either because there are a lot of dead sites/not useful sites for that sequence or there's a lot to look at for the sites I'm visiting. I'm now doing re-visits but they don't show on the site yet, but that's getting there.

What's a Wayback Machine?

It's really the Internet Archive. It's a super resource for looking up sites that are no longer around. It's not perfect, and at times it's awkward to deal with, but if I've annotated a link as a 'Wayback Machine' link, I've actually accessed the link. Webmasters can also opt out of the Archive accessing your website, but if you don't do back-ups, then this is the only place to look to recover files. I'll probably not go to the Archive if I get a 404 error for, say, holy_smokes_what_a_boring_scout_troop.com. I'll probably go over to the Archive and look around if the URL is: excitingscouts.com/this_is_a_great_camp_activity.pdf . Last I heard, the Archive had something like four petabytes of web pages stored. That's four million gigabytes of information. Billions and billions of pages.

The Last Paragraph

Yes, I'm really retired, but I'm still involved in Scouting.