The Outdoor Parent is a collection of surfers, climbers and skiers who have embarked the greatest adventure — parenthood — and lived to tell about it. Stories, perspective and reflections on parenting, children and the outdoor lifestyle.

As I recently became a father, I expect I’ll be pouring over all these articles.

I suspect many of you are in the same position, so let me know if there are any other great resources out there like this one.

I recently stumbled on this site and was impressed by the depth of each review. Each has a video of their hold testing along with suggested uses for your climbing wall.

They have a great variety of reviews on many brands of holds you don’t often see in your local gyms like Sequence Climbing, Three Ball Climbing, Teknik, Climb It, Atomik, and Project Holds; but also some of the bigger players like Nicros, Metolius, and EntrePrises.

As more climbing blogs proliferate, one thing driving me nuts is how so many posts are written on trip reports, climbing areas, and photos with no mention of the actual climbing location!

Please, fellow climbing bloggers consider to mention the area’s location in your post. No need to give directions or beta, just provide me with a frame of reference for what I’m reading.

I understand that many times post are written for an intended audience of those the climber knows personally; but trust me, with search engines and feeds, your readership is usually larger than you think.

I love the fact that there are so many new blogs out there written by climbers. It’s an exciting time to be a climber using the Internet, now that there are more options than just RockClimbing.com and static websites of climbers (as was the case three years ago).

One of the aspects of writing for this blog is trying to provide content that my readers find interesting and relevant. I’d like to hear your thoughts as often as possible though. Please leave a comment letting me know what types of blog posts you’d like to see or any other thoughts / opinions you may have.

Here are a few of the new benefits readers of All Climbing will now see:

• The Intense Debate comment system enables conversations within the commenting section. Replies to other comments are indented at different levels to make it easier to follow the various conversations.
• Commenters can have profiles and avatars that are stored on a central server at Intense Debate. This profile can then be used across other blogs.
• Each user also has a reputation attached to their identity that is displayed whenever they make a comment. This is similar to what you see on sites like Digg.

Comment on this post below and tell me what you think.

TeamGearedUp.com

Climbing Narcissist

Are we being nit-picky on the subject of regular updates and RSS feeds? Maybe, but we’re bloggers so what do you expect?

Seriously, since the climbing.com blogs don’t offer up the ability to join the conversation, the other climbing blogs have to provide the ability to do so.

I think it’s an interesting and relevant topic and can only help all climbing blogs focus on good content as well as community participation.

Blogs are more than just personal diaries. That simple definition fell by the wayside a while ago. There are certain features that identify a blog and have made them so popular.

Without diving into technical details, lets just focus on three features a “real” blog needs to have. The first is RSS feeds. Feeds allow the reader to subscribe to the site’s content without having to return to the actual web site to check for new posts. A feed is added to a feed reader and now the news comes to you. Unfortunately, traditional media outlets don’t understand the power and popularity of feeds yet and still think all their advertising revenue is dependent on you actually visiting the web site directly. Many people have written about why this is wrong, so I’ll spare you.

Next are blog comments. Where are they on Climbing’s Pro Blogs? Engage the rest of us in the conversation with these pros. This is the most compelling reason to have a blog. Enable readers to become a part of the conversation by sharing their related thoughts on the subject at hand.

Instead of a comment form at the end of a post, we’re treated with a garish ad to subscribe to the mag:

Finally, how about some trackbacks. A usually unnoticed feature, trackbacks essentially let blogs automatically communicate with each other providing links that track back to the post where a mention of the article was made. Again, this functionality fosters more traffic to the blog and helps establish a community.

Don’t get me wrong. The content from these climbers is great. Unfortunately, I’m not going to visit Climbing daily to see if there’s anything new from them.

It’s easy to add these features and make some real blogs. Come on Climbing, help us out here before you become irrelevant in this age of new media.

Technically, these are all easy features to add. What is Climbing afraid of? I welcome comments on this – what does everyone think?

To be honest, I have now found so many I don’t think I can do them justice in the short posts I was planning on making.

Instead, I’m going to write up summary posts covering several of these blogs each time with a brief description.

I feel this will still achieve my dual goal of exposing my readers to new content as well as promoting these blogs for their owners.

As always, let me know what you think and continue to send in those suggestions.

For a sample of the quality posts, check out this one on bouldering impacts in Rocky Mountain National Park.

My only suggestion for long term success would be to consider moving off of Blogger to a better hosted blog like WordPress or TypePad. Blogger makes commenting way too difficult and in my opinion this is a fundamental factor in growing a sustaining community around a blog.

Regardless, I highly recommend subscribing to this blog.

Today’s climbing blog is the Bivouac Blog by Anne Skidmore. I found Anne‘s blog while looking at some climbing art done by Emilie Lee. Check out Emilie’s work – it’s amazing.

Anne’s blog is pretty new so let’s hope she keeps posting on more New England climbing topics.

I’m starting off the new series with a blog that’s not quite pure climbing, but one from a company all climbers are familiar with – Patagonia.

The Cleanest Line is described by the company as a

weblog for the employees, friends and customers of the outdoor clothing company Patagonia.

The Cleanest Line has a heavy focus on environmental activism and outdoor activities. There’s little overt promotion of the company’s products on the site which is why I’ve included it in this series.

Also, check out a recent post their Dirtbag Grant Winners.

Finally, it appears that there are more and more dedicated climbing blogs so I can finally begin this series. My goal is to focus on a different climbing blog to give them more exposure and provide additional quality reading for my subscribers.

There’s no time table for each post in the series, but I’ll be getting them out as often as I can. The more diverse climbing writing and content I can promote the better.

If you author a climbing blog and would like me to include it in the series, please contact me with details. For this series, I prefer the contact form to comments on this post.

The first is a blog titled The Climbing. This brand new (June 2006) climbing focused blog already has some good product reviews (Petzl Zipka, Arc’teryx Vapor Harness) and promises to have a heavy focus on gear.

With the recent proliferation of blogs and all their surrounding technologies, I hope to create a climbing blog to move this effort a bit forward in my own small way. In my web searching I’ve found very few true blogs for climbing only, so maybe I’ll be a bit of a pioneer for this niche. We’ll see how it goes and hopefully the site will gain a few readers along the way.

If anyone has any comments, concerns, or questions (especially thoughts on improving the site), please contact me.