For the benefit of new members, messages sent to all members will be archived here in this discussion thread:
15 November 2012
Hello everyone, I'm just wondering how many members use the facebook sign-in app to access Electric Seas? There might be a problem with it and we're trying to fix it. If you've tried it lately and it hasn't worked, then you might not be able to log in to report the issue. If you have this problem, please let me know. By the way, the facebook sign in app should just be a extra method to access Electric Seas but you should still be able to log in with your primary login and password, if you remember it. Unfortunately as the Admin I can't recover your password, but I can help you re-set your account. Please let me know if you have any problems.
Thanks,
-Greg
15 October 2012
Hello everyone, I just wanted to let you know that we have added a new page under the "Shop" tab: Buy / Sell Gear. Electric Seas members are welcome to use this page to advertise gear that they have for sale or are looking for. This page is especially for members to advertise used gear, like complete systems that they are upgrading from, extra components that they ended up with, wrong sized props, etc. These items should all be electric propulsion systems related. Sorry, I know someone has an extra Magma grill they don't want, but... Commercial vendors are also welcome to post ONE free ad here to advertise their services. This page will eventually evolve into something more elegant, but for now it's just a page with a numbered list of gear for sale, gear wanted. If you would like to place a free ad here, please contact me and if it meets our guidelines I'll post it right away. Happy sailing... and shopping!
Thanks,
-Greg
20 April 2012
Hello everyone,
As promised, here is your occasional "message to all members of Electric Seas." I wont make it a habit of clogging your inbox. However, I have wanted to say a few things to everyone for awhile but I have just been having too much fun with my electric boat lately and so haven't had much time in front of the computer. First off, as of the time of this message, we now have 130 members. That's great!! But I think we can have at least 10x that many before long! We have enough active members now that we are really having some interesting discussions in the forums and sharing interesting photos, videos, and very useful information. Thanks for your participation, please keep it up!
I wanted to mention a few more useful and important things about Electric Seas:
1.) The Electric Fleet. On the navigation menu, you might've wondered about the "The Electric Fleet." This is a section where we can post a direct link to a blog/ website for a well documented electric boat project by our members. One very good example is Capt Mike's Bianka. I'm sure there are other great examples out there, too. If you know of any others, please let me know and we'll put your project in the spotlight.
2.) The blog feature. Your profile on Electric Seas is actually your own blog space that you can use to document your electric boat project. Many people have other blogs on Blogspot/ Blogger, WordPress, or their own website or they use Facebook or other social media. Electric Seas is integrated with some of those services and if you want, we can create a direct link so when you post in WordPress, it also shows up on your ElectricSeas blog. Or you can just include a link and use your ElectricSeas blog as a gateway to your main blog to feature blog posts that you want. ElectricSeas also has a facebook page and it should also be integrated with the main website.
3.) The scrolling featured post. The first thing you notice front and center on the Electric Seas website is the scrolling featured post section. This hasn't been updated in awhile, but I want to refresh it more regularly with content produced by our members. This could be a section where if you have created a particularly interesting video or blog post, we can make a direct link to it for people to see in the spotlight. It's not necessarily a place for commercial advertisements, although at this time there are a few links that look like banner ads. In the future we might consider renting space here as a way to raise funds (to help pay for hosting of this site, Google Adwords, presence at boatshows, etc.)... but for now it is another free space to put whatever you think is important in the spotlight. Please let me know if you want something featured in the scrolling featured post section.
4.) New page under resources: "Performance database." People still have a lot of questions about the capabilities of electric boats. Some people seem to have the answers but usually the answer is, "it depends." So let's once and for all answer the questions about the capabilities of electric boats with hard data and post graphs and performance reports of our boats on Electric Seas. People will be able to see trends in the sizes and types and boats, motor sizes, prop types, etc. We should really be able to quantify what some of us have a general idea about and hopefully give newcomers more confidence in going electric. Please let me know if you want to contribute to this and want to offer up your project as a case study.
5.) Groups and branded participation. Hopefully everyone understands that Electric Seas exists only to promote electric boating in an unbiased way. Electric Seas is the rising tide that floats all marine electric propulsion companies' boats. Branded companies are invited to use Electric Seas as a way to promote their brands, as long as everyone understands that everyone has equal access. Some companies will seem like they are promoted more only if they participate more. Does that sounds like free advertising? It is! Please use the groups section as a gateway to your main website or as a stand alone resource for information that you want the world to know. Electric Seas also could use the help of branded companies for the "performance database" page and so I want to ask all members, would anyone have a problem with it if we allow branded companies to sponsor this page? In other words, we'll post a free banner ad for companies on the performance database page if the company lets us list a few case studies or link to their company's case study database. Incidentally, just listing case studies about your systems is also a form of free advertising. Please make use of the groups feature on Electric Seas and let me know if we can work together on sharing data.
That's about it for now, thanks for reading. Also thank you for participating in Electric Seas and for sharing our vision of clean and safe marine propulsion. If you find Electric Seas useful or interesting, please let others know about our online community. A link to Electric Seas from your website also helps alot, since Google search bots notice that and thinks we're important.
Thanks,
-Greg
18 August 2011
Hello electric boaters,
Just wanted to give everyone an update on what's new with ElectricSeas. Things may have seemed a bit quiet here lately, of course because we're all just having too much fun with our electric boats to have time to sit in front of a computer. However, we've just made some recent improvements to the website that you might find interesting and useful. We're going to try to send out updates like this regularly to keep you updated and to keep the passion up for electric boats. If you don't want to get these updates, please let us know!
ElectricSeas is a platform for the worldwide community of electric boaters to share expertise, experience and our passion for safe boating and clean seas. Are membership is growing, slowly but steadily and as we do, ElectricSeas will become more useful for all our members. Our ambition is to become the #1 online resource for the electric boating community. Of course membership will always be free. ElectricSeas is maintained by the California registered non-profit Electric Seas Organization which is seeking 501(c)(3) status.
Recent updates to ElectricSeas that you may have noticed include:
1.) Scrolling marquee for featured content. Previously, the front and center block on the mainpage had a few featured blog posts from our members, arranged statically and vertically. The idea was to change this on a regular basis to spotlight featured content and give visitors something interesting to read. Now, rather than have to scroll down to read new content, featured content- which can include blog posts or videos from members, content found elsewhere on the web or possibly sponsored content, is now scrolled constantly. This will be changed up periodically to keep things interesting.
2.) Forums. Since the main purpose of ElectricSeas is to help unite the community and give people a way to communicate and share ideas, we've made it so the ElectricSeas forum is easier to find and use. The ElectricSeas forum can be found on the mainpage, with the latest discussion topics listed "above the fold" immediately when you look at the homepage. This area lists the forums by discussion topics, while the link on the navigation bar above lists the same ElectricSeas forum by discussion category. It's the same forum, but arranged in two places in a different format, since some people might prefer one format or the other. For convenience, there is also a quick link to the forum at the Electric Boats Yahoo Group, which also has some great discussions going on about electric boats. You can find information that you're looking for by browsing either forum, or you could even search the ElectricSeas site with the search box at the top right of any page.
3.) Chat. You may have noticed, but if not, please look at the bottom of your browser screen while on any page in ElectricSeas. There is now a bar, with collapsible box that goes accross the bottom of the page that says: Electric Seas Chat | # online. To the right of that, is a small icon that looks like a triangle with a line over it that opens the chat box. Now, whenever you're logged into ElectricSeas if you want to have a private chat session with any of our members, it's really easy! Of course it only works if you and other members are logged in so we recommend, especially company reps to always remain logged on to ElectricSeas, as this could be an easy way for you to provide quick technical support for your customers.
4.) Groups. This is a great way to help companies or other sub-groups within the electric boat community collect and provide specific information or community. For example, if you have specific questions about how to integrate solar panels into the Electric Yacht system, or how to regenerate with your Asmo Marine system, that might not be relevant to everyone, so let's have these conversations in the groups so the information is also easy to find. You can also post technical references, manuals, photos, etc in the groups to form a one stop resource for the group. Of course if it's for a company that already has it's resources at another website- by all means, please use the group as a gateway to your website and/or promote your company here. If you have a system that already has a group- please join the group! If there's not a group formed yet for your specific subset of electric boating- please form a new group!
5.) Personal profile pages. Your personal profile page on ElectricSeas is your own personal free blog! Please use it to document your boat project or promote your company all you want! The Ning platform that we're built on is rather limited but they're always coming out with improvements. One thing that is available now is integration with WordPress. If you have another WordPress blog and don't want to repeate your efforts, please let us know and we can install an app to have your WordPress posts re-post on ElectricSeas. Or you could just cut and paste or do an RSS feed to list your posts from another blog. Unfortunately, Ning is still working on integrating Google's Blogger (Blogspot) platform, so that's not as easy, but of course you could also just list the URL prominently on your profile page and cut/paste your favorite posts. If you have any posts that you especially like, please let us know and we will certainly feature it on the featured content scrolling marquee, front and center on the mainpage. We're always looking for interesting content, so please let us know if you want your content featured or if you find anything interesting on the web that you think should be featured!
Most importantly, ElectricSeas is all about YOU!!! Please let us know what you want out of this website or if you have any suggestions for how to improve and make this the best possible platform for promoting electric boating. If anyone wants to get more involved and become a co-Admin, also please let us know. ElectricSeas will also be much more useful, the more members we have, so please help spread the word and if you know of anyone else who might be interested in joining. You can use the badge at the bottom left column on the homepage and post it in an email or on your own website.
Please contact me or any of our members anytime if you have any questions or want to talk about electric boats. I'll try to get back to you right away if I'm not out having fun with my electric boat!
Fair winds,
-Greg
29 May 2011
Hello everyone,
Just wanted to give you a quick update on a slight improvement to the site. We've changed the mainpage blog (homepage, middle column) a little bit. The idea for this is to showcase "electric boating news and insight" for anyone who visits the site, so people can easily see what's going on in the world of electric boating. This will display "featured" content, which will be limited to the top 6 featured articles that our members write or find on the internet. Everyone is welcome to submit articles. Your own personal page on Electric Seas is your own blog, and you can use it to post updates on your project or anything you want. If you would like your own personal blog post to be featured on the mainpage blog, we can certainly feature it as well. Please send me a message and from the admin panel, I'll set your post to feature on the mainpage blog for everyone to see front and center. For mainpage blog posts, please also include a photo.
Let's get the word out about electric boating!
-Greg
26 April 2011
More general info to file under How to Use ElectricSeas:
In case anyone was wondering what it means to "add someone as a friend" on Electric Seas... it's a feature built into the Ning platform, that makes it easier to send messages to people. Of course we're all friends on Electric Seas, but if you want to specifically add someone as a friend on this platform, then if you want to send a message to more than one person at a time, the message feature will allow you to select among your friends, otherwise you can only send people messages one person at a time. I wish the Ning platform would just automatically make everyone friends, but I guess that's just a strange little bug.
Thanks,
-Greg
24 April 2011
Hello everyone, I'm really sorry but it looks like we got our first spam member. Pauling has been deleted. I was hoping that requiring members to submit a profile picture (or a picture of their boat or company logo) would help filter out the spammers, but apparantly that's not enough. Now new members will have to be individually approved unfortunately, which will slow down the growth of our network somewhat. Please tell everyone you know who is actually into boating and would be interested in joining us, to please join and when I (or another future designated admin) sees that they're real they'll be promptly approved.
Also, while you're reading... please feel free to post or forward to me to post, any interesting news articles that you find or material you want to post yourself. I'm going to try to keep a regular routine of posting something new and original on the blog at least once per week and more often stuff found on the web (whenever I find stuff) but please feel free to do the same! Posting stuff on the blog works best if you use Windows Live Writer (free download) and keep the first photo no more than 250 pixels to the right so it preserves the layout and the text doesn't get cut off in some browsers.
Keep it charged! ...and please no flowers...
-Greg
13 April 2011
Hello Everyone,
I just wanted to let you all know that we've made some slight changes to how we're managing the mainpage blog and some of the older posts have just been re-edited. The original intent was to feature original posts by our members and also include posts from all around the web in the form of short snippets of text (followed by "read the rest...") from articles that are related to electric and green boating. This is called "aggregating" news, like what Google News and many other services do to collect relevant news on a subject in one place to make it convenient for readers. Of course this aggregated content is appropriately referenced and linked back to the original source, which benefits the source as it is an incoming link to their site, potentially brings them more views and helps the author spread their content to more viewers.
Although aggregating news is generally thought to be a good idea and is convenient for readers and beneficial for the source, alike, in terms of Google search it can potentially be seen as duplicate content and can harm our site's performance in Google search. So from now on content that is featured on the mainpage blog will be completely original and aggregation will be accomplished with an original introduction statement followed by, "read it here" and a link. I think it's still a good idea to collect news from around the web about electric/ green boating and we'll continue to do that, maybe preceded with "Found on the web!" We'll also strive to come up with our own original content as a community. If you find an interesting article or have an orginal article that you wrote yourself, please forward it to me (or a future designated admin) and we'll post it to the mainpage blog.
Thanks,
Greg
12 April 2011
Hello Everyone,
Just wanted to let you know about a couple of cool new things going on with Electric Seas:
1.) Electric Seas is now "Partners" with The Solar Village and Green Marine RePower. Please check them out under "About" -> "Partners."
2.) Electric Seas now has "User Groups." Under the menu tab for "Members" -> "Groups" you will find a few user groups established for a few electric boat manufacturers. We can establish whatever and as many of these sub groups within Electric Seas that you want. I'm not sure if this is what everyone wants or can see a need for at this time, but potentially I think this can be very useful, especially if manufacturers want to have manufactuer- specific discussions that go into detail and you want to keep info all in one place, rather than it getting lost in the main forum. Also this can be a place where you can gather documents/ manuals/ data etc. about your group in particular. Of course this isn't meant to replace your other web presence, i.e. you can of course use this group as a gateway to your main website or your facebook page. Feel free to experiment and make into whatever you want!
3.) The Commercial Directory has just been updated/ repaired! When it was cut and pasted from the old WordPress site, all of the internal links had to be redone and that was a big pain. But it works now and we're going to strive to maintain it as THE most complete and comprehensive source of commercial information on the web about electric boating. I'm sure we're missing something- if you know what it is, please let me know and I will update it right away. If your company is listed there, please check the accuracy of the information.
4.) If you would like your own yourname@ElectricSeas.org email address that goes to your email service inbox of your choice, please let me know! With our webhosting service we can sign up our members with their own email forwarding. It's pretty cool, my address Greg@ElectricSeas.org actually gets sent to my ffmagellan@gmail.com inbox transparantly, but the first one is easier and more fun to tell people!
5.) I am just about to send a huge tsunami of targetted emails to certain people in the boating world, inviting them to join us on Electric Seas. Of course, this website will be a lot more fun and useful the more people we have with us. Please tell your friends and spread the word!! Also, it would really help us all out if you can put a link to Electric Seas on your own website, which Google will notice and will help us gain rank in Google searches. That actually makes a huge difference and is something I am really personally working on now. Please help us out if you can!
I hope you're all finding Electric Seas to be useful and fun to use. Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions, anytime!
Keep it charged!
-Greg
11 April 2011
Want to get creative with your "My Page?" Now you can customize the look and feel of your profile page. Just click the "Customize My Page" link under your photo on your My Page.
You can also make some easy changes to make your profile page more useful, like click and drag the profile text box to the top, if you'd like so the "latest activity" feed is below your profile info. You can also add HTML to the text box and include your own widget to make your page more interesting. We're still looking into how you can integrate your profile page with your own facebook page so you can use facebook as Electric Seas and vice versa. There's lot's of possibilities. Please feel free to use your profile page on Electric Seas as a channel back to your main website to promote your business or boat project.
Let's have fun with this!
-Greg
29 March 2011
Hello everyone,
Here's just a few more things you can do to customize your profile and start to make Electric Seas more interesting. First, everyone saw that they can go back and edit their profile info, right? If you think of something later you can go back and add more to it, no problem. As you start to do more on Electric Seas, the "latest activity" feed on your profile will get longer and will push down your profile info. However that might be something you want at the top of your profile so people see it right away. You can click that whole box and slide it to the top, over the activity feed so it stays on top. Also, the text box is very useful. If you click the small HTML button on there you can paste any kind of widget you want. You can even stack multiple widgets on top of each other. At the bottom of the page I think it says, "add a widget" and you can add any of the small number of ones they suggest, or even better you can do a Google search for widgets and find your own somewhere else on the web- that way you can stream weather reports, current news, games, or whatever to make your profile more interesting.
Also, the email messaging service on here is very useful, I think and works just like the other services you're familiar with. Another thing I want to suggest- of course Electric Seas will be more interesting and useful when more people sign up- so please tell as many electric boaters about this possible! Please spread the word. There's even a "friends-invite" link in the sign-up box, please feel free to use that and invite other electric boaters!
More to come later,
-Greg
