The web server has been going through a number of software upgrades over the past week and while there have been some outages of service sporadically during this time, everything should be running fine now. If you have any trouble with the site, don't hesitate to email: support@paddleswap.com

Of course, searching geographically using PaddleSwap's latitude/longitude search capabilities has always been easy, but for those that routinely want to check major cities quickly, there's now a City Search page that has a small list of major American cities on it. PaddleSwap will continue to expand the depth of sites searched in the United States as well as starting to branch out and index listings outside of the USA as well. Look forward to that in the future!

It's been a long time coming but web listings (non-PaddleSwap) are now listed on the map alongside PaddleSwap listings. You'll notice that there are three different colors for markers. Depending on how accurate the web listing's location was determined to be, you may find it under the state-wide (or region essentially) marker, or you may find it under a specific city marker.

The city marker is pretty straight forward. Even for a large city, it seems pretty intuitive. The state/region marker takes a bit to get used to because it is plotted in roughly the center of the region, so it appears to have a location, when in fact, the location for those listings is somewhere within the whole region. That may or may not be close to the marker location for that region if the region/state is REALLY big and covers a lot of territory. I will try to come up with a better solution for representing this fact in the future, maybe using a shaded overlay when you click the marker that highlights the region area. Opinions and ideas are always welcome.

For those interested in racing, there are some Texas Water Safari movies posted that I took last week. Enjoy!

Ever since the non-PaddleSwap web listings were incorporated into this site, they have been excluded from the Alerts system.

Part of the reason for this was that most of the criteria that drives the Alerts doesn't apply to these external web listings. There simply isn't enough quality information on these listings to provide a way for you to search, for example, by Capacity of boat.

However, keywords and location Alert criteria could be used to search these external listings. So, starting today, you can simply check the checkbox on the "Add Alert" page to search these listing using keywords or location. Of course, you actually have to specify a keyword or location in addition to checking this box, but that seems like common sense.

I'm really excited about this new feature, as you can now realistically be kept up to date on any possible leads for new paddling equipment across a whole gamut of websites with minimum effort. Hopefully you'll agree.

You'll notice a new orange icon in the header; that's the RSS feed icon. You can click there to subscribe to the PaddleSwap RSS feed that lists the latest 10 listings on PaddleSwap.

Currently the RSS feed is limited to just true PaddleSwap listings, not listings from 3rd party sites.

Enjoy.

The External Listings Search Page now has a search field to restrict to certain web sites only.

In the past you could have restricted your search to a particular region of the country but in some regions there were multiple web sites so you had a hard time finding the listings from the smaller web sites that might be buried by say, hundreds of Craigslist listings.

Plus, I routinely look at the the www.luv2paddle.com and www.texaskayakfisherman.com sites, and with this new search field, I can filter for those.

You'll notice a new Google button at the top of the PaddleSwap page, and that is a link to add PaddleSwap listings to your general Google Maps page. In other words, whenever you are using Google Maps, you can simply click a checkbox and all PaddleSwap listings will be overlaid on top of whatever Google Map you are viewing.

There is also a keyword search field on the mapplet that lets you filter the listings on the map by keyword. I will likely add more search criteria to the mapplet in the future, but for now keywords seemed to be the most important.

You can turn off the mapplet at any point or if you wish, even delete it. Hopefully you'll find it convenient; I'd love to hear if anyone does.

--Kevin

A while back I had the thought of putting together a mini, Google-like web search of paddling classified ads. Well, recently I built a rough version of this and incorporated it into the Search and Latest Listings pages.

Why? Well, there are a lot of great used-gear paddling sites out there and I thought it would be a great service to everyone if I displayed boats that loosely matched search criteria of PaddleSwap boats, with the idea being that if you couldn't find what you were looking for on PaddleSwap, you might find something listed on another paddling-related page.

None of these external listings are saved/hosted on my site, and I don't want to. These are other people's listings and sites, and they deserve all the credit, or traffic, that comes from that information. And to that end, linking to their sites can only help them gain some extra exposure.

Now, I do have to store some basic information about the listing on my site, such as well, obviously the link itself, some text to build the link, and I do try to make a rough approximation of the listings location. That's the only information stored on my server, but even Google has to store this type of basic information.

I don't have a lot of paddling sites incorporated into these external listings yet, but I plan to look around and incorporate a few more. I don't want to include too many, low quality, general sites because you end up getting trashy listings, like people trying to pawn off their float toys, revolvers, etc. My scripts are semi-smart about that kind of stuff and try to strip it out, but in the end there are a lot of ways to list that junk and it's just easier to avoid sites that have a higher noise to signal ratio. One of those might be EBay. Currently I have them in the search, but I am routinely seeing off-topic listings, so I might reevaluate that site.

Hopefully this little service will be a nice feature for helping people locate boats/gear, which is all PaddleSwap was ever really designed for.

I'll be posting any PaddleSwap specific news here in the future.