Recently in Blogs Category

Stefan has covered his fourth event since the beginning of September, but were you able to guess #wheresstefan? Correct guesses win a Stefan t-shirt, so follow our elusive friend on Twitter.  

See some great images of retro aircraft from AirSpace user Ace79 who went to the Vintage Aircraft Weekend at Paine Field Everett, WA, recently.

And why not add your views to the discussion on the accuracy of Thomson's inflight safety video. One user comments about the airline's marketing video: "You should only be seeing it on the flight after you've already bought your ticket and got on the aircraft - advertising in retrospect?"

See a vlog post on Mary Kirby's Runway Girl blog about the latest in inflight entertainment on a recent visit to Florida to see JetBlue subsidiary LiveTV.

A US Marine Corps pilot suggests in an issue of Joint Forces Quarterly that the age of stealth domination in airpower is over according to the DEW Line blog.

The pilot says the US military and industry needs to launch a crash technology programme. "If anything, the technology could be leveraged to understand the techniques potential adversaries could use to shoot down our stealth aircraft".

• Week on the Web is also available as an audio podcast on AirSpace and iTunes. 

User blogs

Did you know that becoming a member of AirSpace automatically entitles you to start your own blog?

Part of the package of an AirSpace membership (as well as having your own photo gallery, forum membership and profile space) is getting your own blogging platform for you to do whatever wish, and that includes customising the look and feel.

One of our AirSpace members, John Dyer, showcases this with his new blog European Airliner Scene.

John's combined a custom header graphic together with an "out-of-the-box" blog template to make his blog look professional and stylish. He now regularly logs European airliner movements on AirSpace.

Blog functionality

A lot of the blog functionality comes as standard with an AirSpace blog and is the usual blog fare - tags, categories, comments, ratings, extended posts, quotes, wysiwyg text editors, etc ... .

The generating an audience bit is down to you. Write some good stuff, link to other cool web content, cover a unique angle, or get into the micro detail of a subject.

There are numerous ways to do it, but what I can say is that if your blog is working and you're doing a solid job then we'll notice and give you a helping hand by featuring it on the home page of Flightglobal (which gets up to 80,000 views everyday) and the Blogs Channel of the site (which is soon to undergo some redesign).

If you're interested in starting your own blog on AirSpace, customizing it, and getting advice on blogging best practice then contact Maverick on AirSpace who'll be happy to help you out.

Here's an amusing episode involving those shrinking violets over at Ryanair.

Now Ryanair aren't shy of using the PR machine to help boost awareness of their business activity. In fact the Flight office collectively groans when the constant Ryanair email press release barrage delivers a message like this for the fourth time in one day:

"Ryanair announce that nothing has happened today but here's a picture of a girl not wearing much and a controversial quote from that 'loveable rogue' Michael O'Leary".

So it surprises me to witness such a violent reaction against "idiot bloggers", and blogging in general, when it's the blogosphere that helps publicise such activity as the Ryanair charity calendar.

Double standards that have obviously hit a nerve and galvanised the ever-militant anti anti-blog brigade into action.

Far be it for me to steal anyone's thunder but the fact that Jon Ostrower aka FlightBlogger scooped the world's media in Barack Obama's Vice Presidnetial pick seems to have gone relatively unappreciated.

According to Jon, his tip on the flight was picked up by a well known US political blogger and then CNN and FOX mentioned the flight (but not FlightBlogger) on air.

Unfortunately the blogger in question failed link to FlightBlogger directly (bad form!), but a FB twitter caused a 2000 page view jump in traffic in about an hour on Friday afternoon well BEFORE the VP news broke.

As Jon says - planes and politics go nicely together.

Back soon ...

I'm glad to report that all of the Flight blogs have now made it onto our new look stylesheets.

The last of them were completed yesterday with this blog, the Flight Blog (which used to be called Flight Intnerational) and Airline Business all getting the same treatment.

On this blog I'll shortly be getting stuck into to making the most of the new widget panels (the columns on the left and right) to better highlight key Flightglobal features and content.

Meanwhile as the redesign bandwagon rolls on keep and eye out for an overhaul of the Archives, Jobs and Shop which are all imminent.

Ahh - the double-edged sword that is user feedback.

Had a couple of mentions about my Editor's Blog photo. One gentleman, who shall remain nameless, said very diplomatically that "it didn't do me justice". How sweet ...

So, always keen to listen to the users, I've replaced it with another one which is hopefully less offensive.

I'm calling the pose "Indigo Charm" which fans of Derek Zoolander might appreciate ...

FlightBlogger is the latest Flight Blog to get the redesign treatment along with our Universal Header and Footer.

And it's heartening to see it so well received.

Within 5 minutes of deploying the new look comments were being left in praise of the new design.

We're more than a little pleased to have a new addition to our blog portfolio.

The eponymous blog is Learmount and its writer is Operations and Safety Editor David Learmount. David's extremely well known and respected in the industry and will be using his vast experience to help explore the key issues from his particular sector in aviation.

It's actually been a little while now since we've launched a new blog - prior to Learmount it was LeftField back in Feb.

The reason for this is not because David has been holding out of the rack for a record amount of time, quite the opposite. Rather it's that Learmount is the first blog to go live with our new look template.

Even more importantly it's the very first page to go live with our long (long long) awaited redesign.

And with a modern approach towards redesign we're rolling it out to the various parts of the site in stages, as and when we're ready to do so.

First will be the blogs, then the news channels and home page, plus a new shop, next comes jobs, then AirSpace and then to infinity and beyond ...

Probably the most significant element of the redesign at this stage is our "universal header".

This is the very top level of site navigation and functions (logo, search and login) and will be a universal feature across every part of Flightglobal.

We've also deployed the lesser cousins, the "universal footer" which contains navigation to the usual suspects such as T&C and Contact Us, as well as links to other Flight Services and subscriptions.

The universal elements have become a recent necessity, the urgency increasing through the explosive growth of the website over the last 12 months or so. Our rapid expansion added many different platforms, systems and interfaces to the website, such as blogs, AirSpace forums and our jobs service. Most of these varied significantly in look and feel and so contributed to "website disorientation", where visitors either get lost through inconsistent navigation or are simply ignorant of content's existence.

Hopefully this is first step to correcting that and also the first big step to delivering our mouth-watering redesign.

As ever, I welcome your feedback ... (email me or comments below)

After a lot of pain all our blogs have now moved over to the upgraded version of Movable Type (4.1).

Our Head of Blogging at Reed Business Information (Flight's publishing house) has documented the exhausting process here for any of you really interested in the details.

However the up-shot for most of us is that our bloggers will benefit from a better suite of tools (such as an iPhone interface and improved WYSIWYG formatting tools), and hopefully produce better looking blog posts as a result.

In addition, the new platform frees us up to tackle the rusty blog templates and embark upon a much-needed redesign program for all our blogs.