About Cragwag
What's this then?
It's a blog aggregator - we gather together all the news from the climbing-related blogs of punters and pros alike, and munge them all together into one combined news feed.
Why?
Ever had one of those post-climb pub conversations where you say "You know what there should be? There should be a website that does X..." Well, I had that same conversation a few times, thinking there should be a site that aggregates all the climbing community blogs, and thought "well, sod it, I'll do it myself."
Oh. So what's in it for me?
You get all the climbing-related news, in order of newness, popularity today, or all-time popularity. You can either view it online, or get it as a combined RSS feed, for whatever feed reader you like.
Umm... RSS?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's just a quick and easy way for blog authors to get their posts publicised elsewhere. Readers can use a feed reader to see the headlines from lots of blogs in one place without having to visit them all individually.
Who's behind this site?
Me! Al Davidson - professional techie, decidedly average amateur climber, totally unashamed weekend punter.
Have I seen you about somewhere?
Maybe. Have a look at my photos on Flickr, I'm on there. I also have a technical coding / industry blog, and I tweet about whatever occurs to me - I'm @drsnooks on Twitter.
How do I add my blog?
Fill in the form. I'll check it and make sure it's at least vaguely climbing-related, and I'll either add it or.... not. Either way, I'll get back to you soon.
How do I ask or tell you something?
Email me! I'm apdavidson, and I'm at gmail dot com.
So what's that map thing?
The idea was to make a Google map to combine the information you really need when planning a climbing trip -
- Crag locations
- Nearest pubs
- Good places to get coffee and sandwiches
- Campsites, B&B's, etc
...but also - having once spent a long fruitless afternoon hiking around El Chorro in Spain, looking for the climbs that were in the local guide, but completely failing to find them - pinpoint not just the crags, but landmark climbs too. Imagine if you were wandering around Stanage, looking for a particular climb, but not quite sure exactly what route was in front of you. Wouldn't it be cool if you could fire up your iPhone app, and the GPS would show you on the map that you were inbetween Robin Hood's Right-Hand Buttress Direct and Bishop's Route.
Well, that's the idea, anyway. I'm working on it, in the ever-diminishing tiny scraps of what I laughably call my free time. Any help appreciated!
How does the "related.." thing work?
It's based on a semantic vector space. You take the text of each post, strip out some common "noise" words (like it's, a, of, etc) and then build a list of words and the number of times they occur. Now, you can treat each word as a dimension (e.g. 'cat' = x, 'dog' = y) and then you get a many-dimensional vector indicating what each post is about. You can then find the angle between each vector using some straightforward maths, and the posts with the smallest angle between them are the most related. It's not always perfect, but it's kind of neat. And as it builds up more data the vector space can be tuned and more stop words added, etc etc.
Some posts seem to have links that don't work
There's a known issue with the ATOM feeds on some blogs, particularly on blogspot for some reason, that the feed parser I'm using can't handle. The RSS feeds are nearly all fine, but not all blogs offer RSS feeds, some only have ATOM. Working on it...