3rd Annual Holiday Gift Guide for Boaters

This week, for the third year in a row, I published a holiday gift guide on the Daily Boater. Just like the previous two years, the 2012 edition includes a mix of fun, unique and practical gift ideas that any boater or nautically minded loved one would enjoy seeing under the tree on Christmas morning.

Once again, the gift guide includes products from trusted partners, such as a little cookbook filled with 800 (count 'em!) practical recipes: The Boat Galley Cookbook. Our favorite 'dream big' MegaYacht Wall Calendar is back for the 3rd year in a row, as well as several other products that I personally put to the test.

Of course, no self respecting boating gift guide is complete without personalized boating gift suggestions, and since I also own BoatNameGear.com, it was easy to come up with a few ideas. You'll find some neat gift items - mostly related to eating and drinking - in the Personalized Nautical Gifts section of the Gift Guide, and you'll find a mix of personalized and non-personalized boat-wear ideas in the Boating Apparel area.

Enjoy the 2012 Holiday Gift Guide for Boaters at DailyBoater.com.

If you have a unique product you'd like to include in next year's guide, or perhaps in our Father's Day gift guide, please contact me.

Your Quarterly Update

Quarterly is way too long to go between blog posts for someone who considers himself a blogger. Now that that's been said and is behind us, here is a little of what I've been up to...

I exhibited at the Norwalk Boat Show for the first time last month, and will most likely do it again. With my BoatNameGear booth on display I was able to gain a bunch of new customers right in my own home state, and reconnect with a few boaters that I've seen at other boat shows over the past couple of years. I was also able to make a couple of corporate connections, and am currently delivering a large order to a boat manufacturer for products they will use at the Fort Lauderdale show in a couple of weeks.

Technical issues seem to have plagued my multiple hosting vendors over the past 60 days. My old friends at OLM seem to have dropped the ball once again recently when a power outage seemed to leave them clueless. Every issue these guys ever have seems to put them in bind. Luckily only one of my sites, FirstBoat.com, is hosted with them. It won't be for long. I used to work for OLM, so maybe I am jaded having looked under the hood and having seen how messy the engine actually is under there. I always figured you're better with the devil you know than the one you don't, but I think it is finally time for a change.

Another frequent offender is Volusion. This is the e-commerce host that powers BoatNameGear. I switched to Volusion from Yahoo right after Christmas 2011 because I thought they looked more professional than a yahoo store, and they were also recommended in an article about a store that sells millions of dollars worth of UCONN gear each year. I had seen some bad press in forums about Volusion having trouble with slowness and downtime, but I chose to believe the good press about the company's improvements. I may give them some more time, as moving an e-commerce store is a pain in the ass. Hopefully they will get better.

Thirdly, GoDaddy had issues in September  - this is the first time in 10 years of holding domain names with GoDaddy that i have been noticeably affected by any issues with this company. I don't actually host any websites with them, but I have many domain names that forward to other websites - these domain names were down for about a day while GoDaddy sorted out their issues.

On another technical note, I've been diving into WordPress a lot lately since creating NortheastBoater.com on the platform. If it continues to impress me as much as it has been, I expect to be creating several new sites on WordPress between now and the end of 2013. This blog and several other sites I manage are created on Google's Blogger platform, and that certainly is easy to use and still has some advantages. If anybody is interested in my thoughts on Blogger vs. WordPress, contact me and I'd be happy to share my experience. 

Hopefully my next post will be a positive one about some funding that I am working on, and hopefully it will be sooner than 3 months from now!

Batting 1,000

Last week, Nautical Sites Media hit another milestone when I posted the thousandth article on the Daily Boater.

One thousand.

As I mentioned in my last post here, I couldn't do it alone. In fact, number 1,000 turned out to be a guest post by Carolyn Shearlock.  But whoa - 1,000 seems like a whole lot of articles about boating for what I still consider to be a young publication.

I hope people are enjoying the content and keep coming back for more.

Speaking of the Daily Boater, advertisers have started signing up for a new program called the weekly Marine Product Review. This is a program I started in partnership with Mark Sutton of MarineProductReviews.com in which we review a nautical product each Wednesday, and make sure that the product being reviewed gets as much publicity as we can muster across our mutual sites and social media accounts. This is the only paid, advertorial content on the Daily Boater, and to keep the quality high we reserve the right to turn away advertisers whose products we don't want to review.

More information for potential advertisers can be found here, and the first few reviews we've done so far can be found here.