You probably noticed that there is a new layout for paddlinginstructor.com. I decided a couple of months ago that the site needed to get a new paint job and while I was tinkering under the hood, I decided to do a full engine and transmission overhaul.

With just under 2400 articles, I decided that the menu structure needed a bit of tweaking to help find old articles a touch easier. I also dropped a large social networking element of the website that nobody was using anyways.

There are still a lot of bugs to still get worked out and broken URL’s to connect back-up. The biggest so far is getting comments displaying again throughout the site. It should get itself sorted out sometime over the weekend.

I hope you enjoy the changes. If you don’t well there are other sites you can visit.

I’m off for a week teaching in Wawa, Ontario on the north shore of Lake Superior so I won’t be posting anything until I get back.

I’m excited to be working for Naturally Superior Adventures teaching a Paddle Canada Level 2 and BCU 3* course with instructor extraordinaire, Bonnie Perry who hails from Chicago, US of A.

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See you soon!

I'm off on vacation. Back the first week of May. Have fun out there kids!

Though it looks like things have been quiet here over the past week or so, there has been a flurry of activity behind the scenes. Over the weekend I rolled out a new system that handles the site content. You shouldn't notice too much of a difference except that the template has changed slightly but the change will allow for some added functionally including a much stronger article tag system then before.

This is the biggest overhaul the site has gone through in the five years it's been around and of course that means that many of the pages URL's have changed so it's another thing still on my list to get cleaned up with Google.

Some might have noticed that I have also changed over to Discus comment system. It's a bit more stable then the system I was using before (intensedebate) and it allows me to migrate comments if the page URL changes down the road. For some reason intensedebate doesn't provide that feature.

Finally the biggest change (and the one I'm most proud of) is the change of copyright on the site over to a Creative Commons license. Making the switch over to Creative Commons is something I have wanted to do for quite some time. Its win win for everybody because you get to make use of and modify the content without stealing it yet I still retain some control over the content by saying you can't use it for commercial use. Just remember that the license is only available to my written text, photos that I have shot or images on the site that already have a commons license.

As far as future plans, the next big one is an overhaul of the events calendar. I'm doing some initial testing of a new system that should make adding your paddling events to the website much easier. If all goes well look for that to roll out sometime over the next 2 weeks.

Ok, that's it for now. Feel free to return to your normal (work avoiding) surfing.

I checked the article counter a couple of weeks ago and was super surprised to discover that the old article odometer was about to click over to 2000. Here we are with 2000 articles written and still having fun.

How did this site get going you might ask? Well, when I first started teaching others how to become instructors, I noticed that they were often cutting their teeth trying to develop their first lesson plans and looking for basic resources. Everybody was trying to figure out where to find ideas or new games and I thought that if there was one central resource location for new instructors then they wouldn’t need to waste time looking but rather put that time towards enhancing their teaching and presentation skills. That’s were the idea for paddlinginstructor.com started.

After a couple of months of scouring the internet I had amassed a small collection of teaching resources which are available for download for free. My goal has always been to provide more then just teaching ideas directly related to teaching somebody how to canoe or kayak; I wanted a wide collection of resources not specifically related to paddling because to me; being a good instructor isn’t about your ability to teach a skill, it’s about transferring your passion of the sport to a new student. A good instructor knows the skills but also knows about the environment, weather, bugs, the stars and how tides work. The students will never remember that you knew the key points of a forward sweep, they will remember the turtle you pointed out while on a short afternoon trip.

PaddlingInstructor.com opened up shop on March 13th, 2006 and since then has grown into the mini monster you see today.

Below are some basic stats for the number nerds:

Thanks for a good times (except for the death threat) and here is to 2000 more.