Our longest tenured admin, DudleyGrunt AKA Dave, was on The Geocaching Podcast on Wednesday, November 12, 2014. He went under the geocaching microscope on episode 377 in his bid to possibly become their fourth host. What interesting and fun facts will be find out about this very influential geocaching entity? There was plenty of talk about OCNA and alternative geocaching sites. Watch the video version of the podcast above. And be sure to check out The Geocaching Podcast every week, which airs live on Wednesdays at 9:30 PM Eastern Time, as well as host Andy “HeadHardHat” Smith’s other weekly show, The Geocaching Reboot Podcast, which is recorded live on Thursdays at 8:30 PM Eastern Time with his co-host Amy HeadHardHatress.
Category: Opencaching.us
OCNA works with Patuxent Research Refuge to allow virtual caching
OCNA’s longest tenured Admin, Dave Self AKA DudleyGrunt (hereafter referred to as Dave), recently worked with Amy Shoop, an interpretive Ranger at the Patuxent Research Refuge in Maryland, which is administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, to allow virtual Geocaching on the refuge. These are the first ever Geocaches at Patuxent, as best we can tell, including Earthcaches. We at OCNA are very excited with being given this opportunity! Dave was allowed to create 6 virtual caches (which are listed exclusively on our website) in one of the 3 sections of the Refuge.
Children, SPAM and a nonexistent Community Center
Update, March, 2015: The W.B. Goodwin Community Center removed itself from the internet about 3 months after this blog post, and about 5 1/2 months after a similar blog post on the topic by fellow blogger Ryan Ozawa. However, webmasters still need to be on the lookout for “spam for the children” scams; another example of which is detailed in this post.
The W.B. Goodwin Community Center does not exist. Their website, a screen shot of which is shown here, is a front for a seedy internet link building scamming/spamming operation. They contacted us via our website contact email address in August, and duped us into posting a link on our links page to an unnamed Geocaching information page on a .co.uk domain. Then just yesterday, we received a request to post another Geocaching related link hosted on the same domain, and we knew something was amiss. This post obviously has little to do with Geocaching, but we’re hoping it will be indexed highly by search engines, and other webmasters will see it when they search for more information on this “W.B. Goodwin Community Center”. It’s a pretty interesting story though, so why not read on?
OCNA Blogger does Washknight’s interrogations
The OpenCaching North America Geocaching blog is the blog for an alternative Geocaching website of course, but it’s no secret that other than guest content, it has always had one Author, known on most Geocaching websites as Mr.Yuck, pictured here with stylish army coat, sweatpants and backpack. We’d tell you more about him, and let you see his face, but all you have to do is read on, as this weeks post is him doing the Washknight interrogation. What exactly is that? Washknight is a Geocaching blogger from the UK, who in late September sent out 20 questions to a few fellow Geocaching bloggers to “interrogate” them. This then went sort of viral world wide, at least by the standards of the small Geocaching blogging community, and has become sort of a challenge. As of the date of this post, 18 other bloggers have taken the challenge, with a few more working on it. We ourselves first heard about it via Dabaere’s Only Googlebot reads this blog, and decided to give it a try.
Back to regular Blogging
We never made an official announcement, but since mid-July, all the posts to this blog, save one, have been about or related to our August 2014 Diversified Cacher Contest! Not including the guest content of HikerJamz and The Geocaching Doc, of course. Fear not, we are getting back to regular blogging this week, with an interview with the creators of a Kickstarter campaign for a Geocaching related product, with the post probably coinciding with the day of the campaign’s launch. After that, we will be bringing you an interview with an official from a National Wildlife Service Refuge who has worked with OpenCaching North America to allow virtual caching on that refuge.
So check back soon! Or follow us on our social media outlets, where we announce all new blog posts. You can also follow this blog via email by entering your email address in the field on the sidebar, and hitting “subscribe”. We admit we may not adhere to a “once a week” schedule for non guest post content as aggressively as we did before the hiatus, but we are very anxious to get back into regular blogging.
OCNA Admins and friends of OCNA – ALS Ice Bucket Challenge
OCNA Admin Mr.Yuck received the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge from guest blogger HikerJamz about 9:00 PM on Saturday night, September 20th, and did the challenge within 24 hours outside the event cache Happy Trails, BarbershopDru in Tonawanda, New York. He declined (i.e. forgot) to challenge anyone else.
OCNA Admin DudleyGrunt’s Father Ben was diagnosed with ALS in late October, 2013. Please visit DG’s fundraising page at tinyurl.com/bens-buddies to see DG doing the Ice Bucket Challenge, and please consider donating.
