Dear users, some of you might have noticed the appearance of Google ads on Slashgeo's website. Here's some explanations. Our website and services have been provided ad-free during our first 5 years. Hopefully, Slashgeo is driven by your contributions and a team of volunteer editors (want to join? :-), but the occasional donations (see related right-hand side box) has never been enough to cover hosting expenses. Our open budget indicates we're about $4,000 in the red. It's actually not a major problem, but we're looking for means to reduce our monthly deficit. Slashgeo is managed by a registered non-profit organization. In order to reduce annoyance, there is only one ad displayed, and settings we modified to remove sexually-oriented ads and the like. During Summer, we tried to experiment with ads, but our account was quickly closed due to a suspicion of click fraud (which I still don't understand). Now that we're using Drupal and that user clicks are properly tracked, we shouldn't run into similar problems. That said, please don't click on ads unless sincerely interested by it. Thank you for your comprehension. -- Alex

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I haven't forgot! Two years ago we had the audacity of identifying November 13th as the "Make Slashgeo Known to the Community Day".

Before I serve you the same ramblings than last year, let me remind you of our 5-years anniversary and unavoidable statistics. And the good news is we finally are running on a modern engine... now just little more time is required to squeeze the best out of it. We're slowly getting there.

I can't believe I took a few minutes to build a Facebook page for Slashgeo! Don't hesitate to "like" this page, even if it is mostly empty at the moment. I also have a Slashgeo Twitter account (which is more of a personal account), and no, you won't get our usual aggregated geonews stories from that source, our RSS feed is there for this purpose. Among the creation of our Facebook page, I found out someone already "stole" the "/Slashgeo" page on that social network. Strange. Maybe even stranger, is the Slashgeo account on YouTube, used by nothing less than a group of spanish singers! :-) Life can be surprising... well, it has already been 4 years that Slashgeo's dot-com counterpart started serving p0rn! :-)

So, here's what the "MSKC Day" is all about:

"It's November 13th again! Your mission is the same and still very simple: if you like the site and find it useful, you must tell one of your colleagues about Slashgeo.

[...]

As I said last year, our small team of volunteers provides this geonews aggregation service for a community we love and we want to make sure people who might benefit from it actually know that it exists! It takes only a minute to send an email and fulfill your mission :-) (with enough missions accomplished, you'll gain experience and levels and be able to develop new geospatial skills ;-)"

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Good news! The 4,714 old Slashgeo stories published during our first 5 years of existence have been migrated and are now accessible on Slashgeo again. There are however a few limitations:

• The previous user comments have not been migrated.
• All old URLs are broken.

These two items could eventually be fixed but would require resources we don't have at the moment. Also:

• The imported stories don't have 'tags' associated to them. This means the main way to find them is by doing a search, not by following links to tag pages.

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A bit more than five years ago, I got married. And then a few days later, when spending too much time in front of the computer was possible again, I launched "SlashGISRS" with two colleagues on September 23. About a year after, SlashGISRS became Slashgeo. In the course of the past 5 years, it has been both a success and a failure. We initially had difficulties posting stories in a timely manner, but the content was there. And then running the site was, and still is, much more work than expected, the community did not participated as much as anticipated. After a crisis in that saw the site going on indefinite hiatus for over 2 weeks, a new crop of editors joined me to revive the site. Thanks to them and our users, Slashgeo survived 5 years! It has also been a success, we recently shared the stats: over 4,700 stories published, thousands of registered users, tens of thousands of daily hits and several thousands of RSS subscribers. This means some people seems to appreciate the geonews aggregation work we do. And there's good news. A month ago we finally migrated, our "Slashgeo's reprojection", to a modern content management system for the benefit of our users and editors. There's still a lot of work ahead of us, but we're on the bright side of it. In addition to users and editors, we would not be there without the support of Shane, our former host, and of Jim of MapTogether who helped us make the switch to Drupal. The main challenge for the next year (s?) will be convincing you, our users, to help us make the site more relevant and alleviate some load on our team of volunteer editors by participating more actively, whether by sharing comments, submitting stories and sending in a small, or big, donation. Enjoy the site! Let's hope for another 5 years? :-) - Alex, aka Satri

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Earlier today we announced some glitches with the daily newsletter, turns out no emails at all were sent for the last 10 days. Good news is these problems are now fixed - that's why you may have received an unusual amount of emails from Slashgeo today. While I have your attention. We do plan to migrate the old stories to this new system, ideally in the coming weeks. I also have tons of geonews to share with you.. I'll be sharing them in the coming days and weeks. You're always welcomed to help us if you find any pertinent geonews out there. Thank you for your comprehension. Alex, aka Satri

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No daily newsletter has been sent last week. We are investigating the problem which should be solved shortly. Thank you for your comprehension. People reading us via the RSS feed were not affected.

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I quick note to apologize to our users who, in some cases, have not been able to access the site this week. We just found a DNS record conflict and fixed it. Now it's true, the new site will be available to everyone soon. Sorry for the inconvenience. If it's your first time on the new site, please see below the stories that were published this week. You may also want to register to our new daily newsletter to get the geonews in your mailbox. I will attend FOSS4G next week. Other Slashgeo editors will take care of the site and publish your submissions. Thank you for your comprehension.

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Do statistics matter? Yes and no. Yes because it confirms we have users who seem to appreciate the geonews aggregation service we provide, thus justifying all the volunteering work we do for a community we love. No because it's only statistics. While our fifth year anniversary will actually occur later this month, let's use the recent website migration as an excuse to look at the stats today. After 5 years online we:

• Published 4,714 stories.
• Users contributed with 3,445 comments, but a significant amount of it was spam comments that got deleted (spam should be a problem anymore on the new Slashgeo incarnation). 264 different registered users published most of the non-anonymous user comments.
• We had 9,266 registered users. But the true number of registered users is probably closer to 3,000 (last Spring), because we suffered from bots registering ghost accounts lately.
• We generally got between 25,000 and 40,000 hits every day, with a total for the 5 years of over 25,8 million hits.
• There was close to 2,000 users reading us via our previous Daily Newsletters (if you want to continue receiving it, you must subscribe to it again on this new Slashgeo website)
• There was 3,084 people subscribed to our RSS feed, plus the 4,179 people following us via Google Reader.
• Our most active single story had 32 comments (next one was 24).
• The 10 most active Slashgeo editors individually published between 10 and thousands of stories. The site would not exist without this collaboration of volunteers.
• The site also rely on user submissions, with some 7 users got over 10 story submissions published. With the gold medal going to user 'geognerd' with 17 published submissions.

Have I forgot anything? So, if you're a company and want to benefit from the traffic we get, you can contribute to the site to get visibility in several ways, including getting into our top donors list (right-hand side column). With the new Slashgeo, we should have access to much more precise statistics for the future, not that they matter that much. Don't hesitate to contact us to improve the site and contribute to it. Read More »

While the DNS propagation is in progress since last Thursday, it may still require a few days for everybody worldwide to have access the new Slashgeo website. Thank you for your patience. Geonews aggregation will soon resume.

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Welcome to "Slashgeo's reprojection" :-) After 5 years running over the Slashcode engine, we just moved to Drupal. For the majority of you, it means we will continue to regularly publish geonews, but on a website that will, once we complete its configuration, provide more features and flexibility. Important notes:

• Old user accounts have not been migrated and will not. Please register again in order to share comments and subscribe to the daily newsletter
• We haven't migrated the old stories and comments to this new site yet. We might in the future. Search engines won't be happy with all those broken URLs, but so be it.
• There will be bumps. Please allow us some time to configure the site properly. Sharing suggestions and bug reports with us is encouraged!
• An example of a minor bug we're already aware of: there are comments in the right hand side "Recent comments" block that non-admin users should not actually see. Sorry about that.

Alex, aka Satri, for the Slashgeo editors Read More »