December 2007 Archives

It’s been a great year for flightglobal.com with plenty of online activity – we’ve added forums, image galleries, archives, blogs, widgets and loads more, as well as continuing to carry comprehensive job ads and publish news and analysis that sets the industry benchmark.

Next year promises to be no different with a redesign, new blogs, new features and other such goodies to look forward to.

And just in case you’re in the mood for something a bit light and entertaining over the festive period why not try out our Take Off Challenge game in which you can pit your wits against your peers by testing your flying skills. The highest scores will be entered onto our leader board.

Alternatively, if you’d prefer something a little more nerdy then you can have a stab at our Aircraft Recognition Competition where you simply have to match 20 edited aircraft pictures with their correct model type. If you are lucky, you could possibly win £100 (GBP)...

All that remains is to say … joy and good will to all!

Love,

The Flightglobal team

This courtesy of Maverick's Jetwashed blog:

"So after much deliberation (and the occasional argument thrown in for good measure), the winner of this year's flight competition has been decided.

The team really have been impressed by the standard of entries, with the overall winner being boxer 03 (from the Power and Glory category):

This photo is the front cover of this week's (11th December) editition of Flight International magazine. As well as this, boxer 03 will receive £100 (GBP) and a framed copy of the magazine.

The category winners can all be seen here and they all feature in the magazine too.

A big thanks to all the entrants and get ready for the return of this competition next year. In the meantime, please let us know any suggestions you may have."

One of the projects that’s been rumbling along on Flightglobal for some time is that of digitising our archive of images and cutaway drawings.

The original step was to put a selection onto our prototype gallery software found here …

Since then we’ve set up the Community Server- powered platform AirSpace and seen that the images functionality on offer there is a more appropriate place for our ongoing image project.

Subsequently, we’re now in the process of transferring the various galleries and collection into equivalent galleries on AirSpace.

This is not a job that can be done over night but it does have some merit.

The advantages that AirSpace brings to a user include:

• Tagging
• Tag clouds
• RSS
• Rating
• Commenting
• User contributions
• Selectable sizes

The advantages it brings to us at Flight include:

• Search engine optimisation
• Expandability
• Better metrics
• Administration

Paul, our Images Coordinator, is looking after this project and you can see some of the galleries already going up. For example these cutaway galleries:

• Aeroengines - Jet Cutaways
• Aeroengines - Piston Cutaways
• Agricultural Aircraft Cutaways
• Business Aircraft Cutaways
• General Aviation Cutaways
• Civil Aviation 1949-2006 Cutaways

We’ll be running the new galleries in parallel to the old version until the migration is complete. At that point we’ll take the old versions down and redirect any traffic.

At that point we’ll switch our attentions to the remaining half a million images stacked neatly in boxes waiting to be scanned in …

Well, the competition to get your photo as the cover of Flight International has now closed.

Given it’s the first year we’ve run the competition and that we announced the concept fairly late in the year, we’ve been blown over by the quality and quantity of the entries.

The judging panel comprised of myself, Community Editor Stuart Clarke, Images Coordinator Paul Gladman, Flight Editor and Deputy Editor Murdo Morrison and Max Kingsley-Jones, Managing Editor Andrew Doyle, and Art Editor James Mason.

The judging process dominated this morning’s agenda, with a good level of debate drawing out the process.

Eventually though the category winners we decided and we got our teeth into the big one – the front cover shot.

Actually, the decision was fairly universal and I’m sure when you see the image everyone will understand why. It truly is a special photograph.

We’ll be publishing the six category winners including that cracking cover shot in the 18-24 December issue of Flight International so look out for it then and on Flightglobal from the same date.

Thought you might like to know who is beavering away behind the scenes at “Teamglobal” to produce this wonderful site.

There are, in fact, a lot of people at Flight that contribute significantly to Flighglobal but who also have other responsibilities – I’ll no doubt blog about them in future.

But this bunch is the full-time dedicated website team and an have various responsibilities on the site

Myself
I’m Michael and I’ve had the pleasure of running the site since March 2007.
I look after the editorial direction and strategic development of the site, via the medium of long and frequent meetings.

Babs
Babs is Flightglobal’s Content Editor. She coordinates the works from our collective journalistic talent and decides what makes the home page and section home pages. She also blogs on the Flight International Blog and is partial to a glass of champagne.

Disco Stu
Stu is Flightglobal’s Community Editor. He’s primarily responsible for looking after AirSpace and all of the Flight Blogs. He also gets involved with the Flightglobal’s presence outside of our own site. For example, our Facebook Group – which everyone’s welcome to join.

Kelley
Kelley is our Webmaster (or Webmistress if you know her really well …) and is the longest serving member of the team. She’s responsible for publishing all the news and features and ensuring they all look good and have lots of good links in. Kelley also holds a Private Pilot’s License.

Paul
Paul is our newest team member but extremely experienced on the aviation side. He’s our Images Coordinator and looks after the Flight images (including Cutaways) on AirSpace as well as editing the Images of the Day blog.

A beautiful bunch I’m sure you’ll all agree.

An integral part of the evolving Flightglobal is the introduction of widgets into the make up of our pages.

Widgets have their origins in blogs and other Web 2.0 services, but the use of them is becoming more widespread as sites recognise their potential and re-architecture to best accommodation their presence.

We’ve been making limited use of widgets for some time on our blogs – for example, the Woracle has a bunch of widgets in the right-hand column doing various things such as:

1) Navigation by date
2) A list of other relevant blogs (Blogroll),and
3) A graphical depiction of free-form tags (Tag Cloud)

We also make use of a Highest Rated Article widget displayed against Flightglobal articles.

However, we’re ramping up our use of widgets all over the site as they have some real benefits from an editor’s perspective.

1) They help keep pages really dynamic, updating in real time
2) They allow targeted content to be pulled together to form pages of rich, diverse content
3) They allow us to pull available third-party into Flightglobal pages, improving the user experience and the breadth of coverage

You can see a few examples of widgets starting to be used throughout the main area of the website. For example: on the Defence section home page we’ve got widgets on:

• Latest news
• Question of the week
• Related jobs
• Related blogs
• Latest posts from the DEW Line
• Eurofighter news
• Latest military discussion on AirSpace

We’ve plan to role this practice out to other section home pages very soon.

Additionally, Flightglobal is developing external-facing widgets.

By this I mean widgets for use by external parties on their sites.

This page showcases the kind of widget that other sites could use and tells you who to contact if you’re interested in having one on your site.