• Activities
• Applauses and Cheers
• Backpacking
• Badge Requirements
• Bugle Calls
• Campfire
• Camping
• Camp Cooking/Dutch
  ovens/Food, etc.
• Camporee
• Canoeing
• Ceremonies
• Clipart/Graphics
• Crafts
• Cub Scouts
• Downloads
• Eagle Scout
• Equipment
• Fires
• First Aid
• Flags
• Games
• Hiking
• History
• Humour (Cdn.)/Humor (U.S.)
• Jungle Book
• Klondike Derby
• Knots
• Leaders
• Maps
• Miscellaneous
• Morse Code
• National Sites
• Pioneering
• Run Ons
• Scout Roundtable
• Scouting Wisdom
• Scoutmaster's Minutes
• Skits
• Songs
• Spiritual/Scout's Own
• Stories
• Survival
• Table Graces - Spoken
• Table Graces - Sung
• Troop Information (U.S.)
• Uniform
• Websites
• Woggles/Slides
• Winter Camping
• Woodworking
• Word Search
• Zipped Files

• Books and stuff
• Songs
• Camping Recipes
• Dutch Oven Recipes

• Activities
• Games

Scouting Units I have visited online:

• Australia
• Canada
• International
• United States

Thanks for stopping by.

I'm out of Scouting retirement. (But I'm still retired.) Boy Scout leader once again. I'm pretty sure that the Scouts don't quite know how to take me. I'm getting the impression that they all thought that that when I was a Scout all we had was bearskins and oil lamps for our campouts.

I've let the site slip for a couple of weeks because of Christmas and other things, but I'm now back to adding to it on a regular basis.

- - - - - - - - - - -

I've been checking the Wayback Machine for geocities sites (and other discontinued services for that matter). It's time-consuming. But I have recovered a large number of files that seem to have just simply disappeared over the years. A few websites that have disappeared also. If there was useful information that could be used in scouting programs, I'll copy the file and host it from here (unless it's clearly a copyright issue). I've taken the approach that you would want the information to be shared and would give permission to continue sharing it. If you don't approve of my approach, then email me and I'll remove the file.

I've also taken this approach to information that is no longer available from your website on those rare occasions that I find stuff dropped. New personnel may not be acceptable to the old ways, but I think everything has a use.

If you ran a site that is no longer available and still have the files from your website that I can host here, you can send them to me as an attachment. Send them to: the.retired.scouter@gmail.com

I'm still intentionally avoiding the 'big' scouting websites and/or the long established sites available, so there's not a lot of reference to them here.

Once I get this site cleaned up, I have eight fully packed document boxes with scouting 'stuff' in them and I'm going to start putting that stuff here. For some reason, I kept every piece of paper from every training course, seminar, well, you name it. Apparently, I'm not the only one that does this.

Additions:

Yes, I’ve actually visited the sites that I’m including here. Yes, I’ve actually browsed around the site. Yes, I’ve actually spent time reading stuff… history references always get my attention, as do favorite activities and stuff like that. I tend to avoid photo links and photos of individual camps/outings, unless they’re High Adventure/Once-every-ten-years Trip photos and then I’ll look through them. But I won’t look through all 713 photos from the trip that are on the website. I've also avoided the more linked to 'popular' sites.

My comments on the sites:

As a general statement, I don't comment much more than 'Information about the (enter section here)'. The fact that I have made the comment more-or-less indicates that the site is active, there is information on it about the (enter section here), and is worth visiting. I'll sometimes make a comment like it's a 'slim' site: not much information, or it's a 'contact sheet'. I'm not impressed with Javascript or 'professionally' done database-dependent sites, especially if your site is less than 100 pages. Yellow fonting on a white background is hard to read. Purple on black is also hard to read. But all of these options are your choice and although they're not mine, I'm not going to say that. Maybe. Sound drives me nuts. As does those javascript things that follow your cursor or butterflies. Ya, butterflies tops the list, for sure.

What is an 'Outdated site'?:

Have a calendar page and don't update it. Feature a hike on your landing page that you took in 2004. I can sort of generalize that if a unit has their own domain, then it’s a maintained site. If they’re using a free space site like Tripod or Homestead, (I once used 'Geocities', and I'm in the process of eliminating them) chances are pretty good that it’s not going to be maintained. There are exceptions, of course. The Tripod-type advertising is very, very distracting and lessens the impact of the information, at least in my opinion. And, yes, some of the advertising is not suitable for scouting sites.

Oh, and if you want your site in Google, my recommendation is to update your calendar constantly. Based on what I've seen Google give me in terms of replying to a response, it will most likely be your calendar page.

Keep it simple. Don't date your website changes; it's just another bit of information that you'll have to maintain, and nothing will rile your visitor more than seeing something like "Last changed: December 12, 2001". Everybody's site is "Under Construction", so don't state the obvious.

What's an 'Aged site'?:

Not quite “Outdated”. Maybe updated two/three months ago. The site looked like it was maintained on a regular basis and everyone packed it up to attend summer camp, so it hasn’t been updated for a small period of time.

What am I looking for?

When I go to your site, I'm looking for two main things:

• I'm new in town and I'm looking for a place for my son.
• I'm looking for something to inject into my current program to make things interesting.

And if you have/had a wonderful idea for a meeting, add it to your website. Scan your handwritten notes if you have to. If it's a great idea, your reader won't need a fancy copy.

How do I find the sites?

I started with a handful of 'seed' sites, and then simply recorded every offsite link for every site that I visited. I sort of figured that if the person running that particular website thought the offsite link was important enough to have it on his/her site then I should at least check it out. I'm still recording offsite links, but my file now has over 17,000 unvisited links. That should take me some time to get to all of them, or to at least check them out. If you'd like to send me the URL of your scouting-based site, use this link.

What's a Wayback Machine?

It's really the Internet Archive. It's a super resource for looking up sites that are no longer around. It's not perfect, and at times it's awkward to deal with, but if I've annotated a link as a 'Wayback Machine' link, I've actually accessed the link. Webmasters can also opt out of the Archive accessing your website, but if you don't do back-ups, then this is the only place to look to recover files. I'll probably not go to the Archive if I get a 404 error for, say, holy_smokes_what_a_boring_scout_troop.com. I'll probably go over to the Archive and look around if the URL is: excitingscouts.com/this_is_a_great_camp_activity.pdf . Last I heard, the Archive had something like four petabytes of web pages stored. That's four million gigabytes of information. Billions and billions of pages.

The Last Paragraph

Yes, I've retired from the week-to-week scouting, but I'm still involved in Scouting.