Team Sharkbait

This is a post by Jorg Jansen.

In the coming week we’re going to move  the Team Sharkbait website to our new Shark network server. While Shark Freediving was always about the world news about freediving, bringing news about records and competitions, this website was always about something else.

Team Sharkbait is about the personal freediving stories behind the people who are in Team Sharkbait. In the past we decided to break this up in a separate website, but  technology and social networking has evolved in such a way that it’s now possible to create communities that combine the best of everything.

With our new Shark network environment we will still bring the global freediving news through our frontpage but now the freedivers themselves can bring the personal stories as well. So the first personal stories we place at the Shark network is that of Team Sharkbait.

As it is a big move, you can expect a little downtime in the next week. We will keep both blogs in sync until January 1st. From then on everything will be up to date again directly from the shark network and the old sharkbait.shark-freediving.com domain.

As you may have noticed this website and Shark Freediving have been offline for some hours. This was due to the fact that we changed from our server in the USA to a new one in the Netherlands. This should speed up the website for our Dutch and European readers a lot, where the most of our readers come from. At the same time the speed overseas shouldn’t really drop down due to some technical arrangements with the server. Let us know if you notice a speed increase or decrease. At the same time if you find some other faults or errors, leave a comment as well.

Due to all the work that went into this work, the start of the free freediving lessons have also moved some days ahead. The first few lessons were ready, but instead of simply putting one big piece of text online, we want to present it properly to you, in a way that will benefit you most. We promise it will be something special! Just wait for a few more days.

Although this is an ongoing process, which in my case will never seize to exist (because I love it), the web-design for the website has changed. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to integrate everything back into one place again, which WordPress is actually capable of. The only thing that still needs work is the forum, but that can stay this way for now, until I find time to redesign and integrate it.

I deliberately used the ‘Read more’ for this article, so it doesn’t use up the website more than needed. I would really like to invite the people who read our content through RSS or mail to take a look at the website to see if they can find all information.

Read more…

Happy New year to all loyal readers and visitors!

2008-Summary
This year had it’s up and downs and showed me a new side of my way of the freediving.

I started out with the coupe des dauphins, I did solid performances on the dynamics (DYN & DNF), but had my troubles with the static. Overall it left me with a good feeling, new friends and tips & tricks.

After that I went into training with the monofin and getting into the technique of this new way of finning. My technique did improve, but isn’t by far what I want it to be. I put down the monofin for now, but will surely get into freediving with it again this year.

I switched my focus to preparing for my first ever depth competition at the Bizzy Blue Hole competition in Dahab (EGYPT), which was a really great experience.

Although I never improved my depth performances since the Umberto course I was very confident on improving my depth skills and performances. I’m very pleased with the results I booked and I can only say that I learned a whole lot about depth freediving and got to know new people and found new friends in them.

After my depth experience, I had subscribed to the CNF course with William Trubridge with the great guys from Apnea Team Amsterdam. William truely has a lot experience in this part of freediving. It has been very helpful and I gained a lot by attending his course.

The last part of the year really came down to my mental ability, or the lack of it, to find my true self in what my goal is with freediving. I realized that it’s best for me to take a step back from competition freediving. I am to find my true purpose in freediving again: having fun and enjoying the freediving again, no personal bests for a while and back to the basics.

2009 – This year
Last year I’ve changed  the back-end of the site and had to change the theme/template for the website to show all new widgets. In 2009 I hope to find some more time to fine tune the template integration again.

Futhermore I hope to enlighten you, the readers and visitors, with more blogging and in depth articles about our journey into freediving. This year for me personally will focus more on the coaching, re-finding my drive and I hope to direct & mount a few more freediving movies.

Statistics
Since we started blogging, we’ve written 114 posts (incl. this one) and had 95 comments. In 2008 we wrote 55 posts and had 40 comments.

Site Usage this year:

• 5,544 Visits
• 3,839 Absolute Unique Visitors
• 14,345 Pageviews
• 2.59 Average Pageviews

In comparison to last year we had a little decrease of visits, but an increase in absolute unique visitors, which indicates a wider range of readers. And the drop in visits is due to increase in RSS-feed subscribers, so these results have to be combined with the loyal readers who stay updated through the RSS feeds. We had an increase from 20 readers to 30 readers this year, which is good news.

Search Terms
Among the direct search terms, like Team Sharkbait, Sanne Buurma and Jorg Jansen, other search terms found their way to our site as well:

• monofin technique
• how to hold your breath longer
• pool cardio
• speedo breast stroke fins
• freediving tongelreep

Thanks
Thank you for reading the blog and our stories. Also a big extra thank you to the commentors, I really like the feedback and it lets me know people are around to read the content. So don’t be shy and drop a comment on what you think about all that we write.

I have been busy upgrading the back-end from this site since quite a while and I put in a few nice functionalities, which also came with the renew core of this site.

As I really couldn’t find more time in the past few weeks, I decided to go with a nice clean lay-out which is able to show the different features and functionalities. This should make it better to read and easier to navigate.

If you find any errors just let me know through the contact form.

I integrated our flash picture-gallery into our site, which makes browsing easier and you don’t have to leave the site for it. The same goes for our videos which I integrated through custom players from YouTube.

Ofcourse all of the sites are still located at their original locations, but now it’s integrated in the site it’s a little easier to find. Here’s an overview of the things I integrated and it’s original locations:

Picture Gallery Integrated
http://www.sharkbait.shark-freediving.com/media-pictures.html

Original Location
http://www.shark-eye.com/

Video Gallery Integrated
http://www.sharkbait.shark-freediving.com/media-video.html

Original Location
http://www.youtube.com/TeamSharkbait

Feeds into Sidebar

Other useful feeds I’ve integrated into the sidebar from the news-section, where stuff like; forum posts, youtube’s latest and Shark-freediving News have been columnized.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate and ask us here