Someone in Louisville Loves This Blog...and Told the World!

by Fran Jurga | 16 March 2009 | The Jurga Report
Writing this blog reminds me of being on stage in a play. The lights are so bright, you can't see beyond the stage apron. Is there a full house...or will your words just echo around an empty hall? When I hit the "Publish" button for today's post, will there be the hoped-for wave of laughter, maybe a smattering of polite applause...or an uncomfortable silence, with a cough or two?

Blogging has taught me to take a lot of risks. I have to open my email account to anyone who posts a comment. I have to read and then delete the obscene, abusive or overtly commercial messages left by drive-by comment thugs. I scrutinize statistics of unique visits, page views, referring sites and landing pages.

But I don't have a clue who you. the readers, are or, some days, if you are.

Imagine my surprise when I found out that The Jurga Report was recently the subject of a very favorable and flattering article in one of my favorite daily newspapers, The Louisville Courier-Journal. Reporter Diane Heilenman, it turns out, is a regular reader of this blog and she wasn't afraid to tell the world. Then Google News picked up the story...and for a few days, the blog picked up steam and a few rows of new readers from the Louisville area.

Thank you, Diane, for tuning in to this blog and for sharing your enthusiasm with the world. I am still shocked at your kind words and the paper's nice graphic presentation of the article about the blog.

The newspapers lately are filled with stories about web predators, identity thieves, viruses, and rip-off schemes. Every time you download a file, do you wonder who--or what--might be hitchhiking a ride into your hard drive? Do you screen your email through filters and guard your "white list" like its a key to your inner sanctum? It just might be, if you believe what you read in the newspaper.

I'd like to encourage everyone who reads this blog to stay safe on the web, but also to take some chances. Find new web sites and blogs and forums that are out there waiting for you, beyond the Yahoos and the Googles and breed/sport horse sites of this world. Explore the world, not just the USA, and re-discover how much fun the web used to be, before we all became paranoid and security-crazed.

You can be safe and surf at the same time, so head out there today and have a good time. Just don't lose the bookmark or RSS feed of The Jurga Report. I'll still be here when you get back, with some interesting news. You can count on that.

Thanks for reading The Jurga Report, whoever you all are!

Blog Happy in the Horse World: What Are Your Favorites?

Sunday Morning Olympics
Originally uploaded by xbluegoox

One of the best things about writing this blog is that I feel it is my professional duty to read other blogs. It's a guilty pleasure that I might not be able to enjoy without a compulsion to feel part of the wider blogger community. Blogs are available in infinite quantity and on every imaginable subject, including the special event and celebrity bloggers here on Equisearch.com, and my fellow editor Juli Thorson of Horse and Rider magazine.

I've mentioned here before how I derive vicarious pleasure from the trashing of irresponsible horse owners and breeders on the outspoken but oh-so-true Fugly Horse of the Day blog by a tearing-her-hair-out horse welfare advocate whose last name and exact whereabouts we don't know...and who constantly pushes the envelope, in every direction. (It needs to be pushed, in my opinion.) When she posted recently on the politics of hoofcare, I counted something like 200 comments within two hours of the post's publication. I wish she was making up the abuses that she records--people "moving" horses by tying them to SUV bumpers, "trainers" riding 18-month-old colts, and shudda-been-gelded-long-ago backyard stallions "accidentally" breeding their own fillies.

Along the same lines, this blog and my lameness-news-only Hoof Blog are part of the fledgling Thoroughbred Bloggers Alliance, a quickly-growing (in both reputation and size) network of professional and budding commentators from the racing world. TBA is unique in the horse world, as it is the only organized group I've discovered, plus the clever founder, Patrick Patten, figured out how to make a group RSS feed, so viewers can scan the headlines of all the blogs in one place, and then choose which stories to read. The TBA home page recently hosted a photography contest that drew hundreds of people who were disappointed with the 2008 Eclipse Award winning photo; the TBA provided the alternative: a grid of fantastic images of racetrack moments by sage pros and budding talent who just may be tomorrow's pros. TBA home page visitors could vote once and only once for the favorite photo of the year, and they did!

The blogging world for equestrians is sometimes a strange place, with lots of extremes. Endurance riding, out of all the horse sports, seems to have embraced blogging. Among my favorites is the Barb Wire, a wonderfully visual blog written by an endurance rider known only as "Tamara" at In the Night Farm.

I couldn't have survived the Olympics without the blog of Will Connell, chef d'equipe of the British teams, who held nothing back, and that of Dutch dressage diva Anky van Grunsven, who probably had someone writing it on her behalf, but it was superb, nonetheless.

If I had a wish list, on it you'd find a wish that Madonna would launch a blog chronicling her pursuit of riding. (Madonna is reportedly in Wellington, Florida with her British trainer, Daisy Trayford, for a few weeks.)

For western performance news, I regularly check Sally Harrison's cutting horse blog. As so many people are commenting lately, there are dedicated enthusiasts who blog, there are writers who blog, and there are experts who blog. When you can find a blog written by someone with good writing skills and who is an expert in his or her field, it's a real find. Sally's blog surely fills that bill.

Some blogs have very specific missions: the Racehorse Memorial Wall blog records the deaths of Thoroughbreds at racetracks. On the artistic side of things, I love to check the Hay in Art blog, which is a work of art in itself and posts photos and paintings of (you guessed it!) hay, primarily in landscape paintings.

There are hundreds more blogs, and there are hundreds of subjects in the horse world that need bloggers. There are also many uses for blogs; you can create a blog post on a cell phone and it shows up on a blog, which would be great for disasters and evacuations. Vet clinics could make great use of blogs to keep in touch with customers and post information about disease outbreaks, products the clinic sells, or reminders about shots or safety as the seasons change.

Blogs only work if people read them, and setting yourself up with a good RSS reading system is key. I use the Google Reader interface, so that I can read all my blog headlines in one place, but for years I simply had an iGoogle home page, which I think requires the FireFox browser (which is superb, anyway). The iGoogle system is a personalized home page on which you can post all sorts of widgets for the weather, stocks, news headlines, international time clocks, and lots and lots of RSS feeds of blog headlines and sites like Equisearch that have the little RSS feed symbol in the browser window.

Along the same lines, Facebook is growing rapidly in the horse category, and you can read many of your favorite sites and blogs on your Facebook home page.

I'm looking forward to the next wave of tech to see what the clever web programmers can do faster, better, and more intuitively. But first, I need to check my blogs....

What Do Madeleine Pickens and Fran Jurga Have in Common?

Think about it....

Blond hair? (No, that was a salon mistake last summer.)

Billionaire husband? (No...but I keep hoping.)

Born in Iraq? (No...I'm a New Englander, through and through.)

What's left?

Answer: We both have blogs!

Wild horse benefactor Madeleine Pickens has had so many inquiries and responses and requests for more information since news of her plan to rescue the wild horses in holding pens out west, that she created a blog, not too different from this one.

You can leave her comments, read updates, and follow her press path through the process of creating what may turn out to be the planet's largest single-species wildlife sanctuary.

Click here to visit Madeleine's new blog. You can click on the RSS or Atom link in the address bar to subscribe to her feed.

And then click here to listen to a recent radio interview with Madeleine that has more information about her plans.

Photo of Madeleine Pickens from her new blog.

Welcome to Max! Read her blog, too!

Max Corcoran is the woman charged with the extraordinary task of managing the horses of the O'Connor Eventing Team. She's shown here with Karen O'Connor and the late great eventing pony Theodore O'Connor after their gold-medal performance at the 2007 Pan Am Games in Brazil. EquiSearch.com is lucky to have Max blogging her way through the Olympic team trials as Karen competes for a place on the team this weekend in England. (Photo from O'Connor Team web site)

The blog stable here at EquiSearch.com has just added a new wing...and some great opportunities for readers to get the inside story on the top level of eventing in this Olympic summer. Max Corcoran, groom for Karen O'Connor and Team O'Connor Eventing, now has a blog right next to the The Jurga Report on EquiSearch.com!

This week Max is in England at the Barbury*** Horse Trials with Karen O'Connor, Gina Miles, Amy Tryon and Clark Montgomery; Barbury is one of two required outings for the USA short-listed riders for the upcoming Hong Kong equestrian Olympics.

The direct link to Max's blog is
http://special.equisearch.com/blog/maxcorcoran/

The Atom feed address for the blog is
http://special.equisearch.com/blog/maxcorcoran/atom.xml

As with this blog, you can subscribe to the RSS/Atom feed and read Max's blog (and mine) on your favorite aggregator or right on your Google home page if you use the Foxfire browser, as I do.

What am I talking about? If you are using Foxfire as your browser, you will see that sometimes an orange icon (or sometimes a little blue RSS icon) appears on the right side of the address window on the browser. If you click on that orange symbol, a window will open, asking you if you would like to subscribe to the feed for that page or blog.

If you click on the affirmative, headlines and the first few paragraphs of posts from that blog will appear on your Google home page or whatever news reader you use

Yahoo.com has a similar function that will work regardless of the browser (I think). You have to opt for a personalized Yahoo.com index page, (http://cm.my.yahoo.com/) and then click on "add content". Then click on the icon to add rss feeds, and type in the web address of your favorite blog. (It should work.) That's the last time you will ever have to go to the actual web page.

Newsgator and other pages have similar functions but the Foxfire/Google option is so simple that I have stuck with that. I think the Safari browser has a good system as well, and it's fast! The advantage of these feeds is that all the blog headlines will be on one page and you can scan them quickly and efficiently. The only thing you can't see (in my experience) would be videos that are posted on another site, such as YouTube.

The old-fashioned way would be to make Max's blog (and this one!) a "favorite" or a "bookmark" and check back soon and often!

Enjoy the blogs! EquiSearch.com has an outstanding group of bloggers spread out all over the horse world! Bloggers like Max Corcoran don't just report the news--they make it!