Evening Update: Paddock Vac sponsors dressage rider Betsy Steiner. A few weeks ago, AH sent me a funny link to Pasture Vac, but I forgot to do something with it for the site until now. Pasture Vac is a vacuum for horse crap, and ranks right up there with the vibrating Shake’n Fork as perhaps the laziest product in the horse world. Why go through the trouble of scooping poop into a wheelbarrow when you can buy a $4,000 machine to vacuum poo from the luxury of the sitting position (tractor not included). Visit pasturevacuums.com for more information, including the fun fact “A horse weighing 1000 lbs. produces an average of 9 tons of manure every year.“
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Another Fork photo: Buck and Bobby leaving after a clean round, Allison and Arthur entering
It’s a pretty slow news day in eventing, as everyone is still recovering from The Fork, but here are a few stories for your reading pleasure:
Amanda Atkins won the first T3DE of 2010.
EN guest writer Lindsay Pierce’s coach, Lucy Wiegersma lost a horse at Burnham Market.
The USEF Training Three-Day dressage tests are now available.
The Horse and Hound talks about the new FEI doping regulations.
TC has an amusing article about the Google search terms people use to get to their site (explicit language warning). Google is awesome, and has been very kind in their rankings of EN considering we are so young, but we also get some traffic from pretty amusing searches. One of my all time favorites is someone in Sri Lanka who arrived from Google after searching “live sults” after our Kelly Sult live blog.
Best of the Blogs: Steph Rhodes-Bosch from The Fork, Alex Hua Tian prepares for Badders, Sara Stretton is still recovering, JB is back in PA
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And now for something completely different: I’m getting a little frustrated with several (4ish) other sites finding news and content on EN and putting that content right onto their sites without reference to Eventing Nation. Our policy on Eventing Nation is to always link to the original story and give credit to anyone who we found the story through if we didn’t find it at the original source. I’m glad we are so fast at finding news, and of course I’m more than happy for other sites to share that news, but when someone clearly finds something through us and then uses it without referencing us, it bothers me.
Our analytics program shows the company names of commercial IP addresses, and it’s fairly common to see site X visit EN, and then 10 minutes later a video or a news story we just posted shows up on their site without any reference to EN. This kind of thing is completely legal, but violates common courtesy and I think it’s against the camaraderie and principles of working together fundamental to eventing. I’m not annoyed enough to time-stamp screenshot the analytics page when they visit, and then their site when they post it, and then post it, but that’s entirely possible. Of course, we have gotten tremendous support, especially early on, from sites linking to us, and we protect our friends at EN. Go eventing together.
