FollowingSea Yacht Tracking & Blog closing down. Alternatives?

[Looking4Neptune]

I will try setting up a WordPress site. Lots of options and, in theory, I could end up with a great site, just like I want it. But it will be a LOT of work. I was a programmer at one time and still do some as a hobby but I am finding it difficult, partly because there are so many options. Hundreds of mapping plugins! And many are free, which is great unless I end up with one that stops updating in the future, not keeping up with WordPress updates.

I will post back as I make progress.

[bergius]

Originally Posted by Looking4Neptune

I will try setting up a WordPress site. Lots of options and, in theory, I could end up with a great site, just like I want it. But it will be a LOT of work.

We’re both programmers, so we ended up setting up our site with Jekyll. This provides quite nice workflow where the content is stored in a git repository, and we write posts using the GitJournal app. Works reasonably well even when offshore, as the app runs fine offline, and will publish the “pending” entries next time it’s online.

Thanks to GitHub Actions, we even have stuff like boat position moving on a map automatically based on AIS data, as well as excerpts of our real (digital) logbook.

Quite involved setup, but has served us well. The more technically inclined can take a look at how it’s done at the repo: https://github.com/meri-imperiumi/log

Our boat is also trackable on No Foreign Land, which we find useful also as a harbour guide.

[Looking4Neptune]

Bergius - I like your setup and learned quite a bit looking through your GitHub. I'm probably still going to go with WordPress as I have quite a bit of work still to do on my new RPi system with active monitoring of NMEA streams for an instrument cluster and database of tracks, polar calculations etc. And my partner is not a programmer (she's a medical doctor) so it's all on me to get our old blog ported.

[sv_pelagia]

All the suggested alternatives seem so much clunkier (and, importantly, limited) compared to FOLLOWINGSEAS! (I've tried Noforeigland, SailTies, and Farkwar... they just do not compare to FollowingSeas.)



Be nice if somehow the functionality of FollowingSeas could be repeated.

[sailingharry]

There are of course many options and many opinions and many choices. And all are good, with their own set of flaws.
We have found travelmap.net to meet our set of compromises. The level that we use, around $50 a year, allows sufficient photos to meet our needs. There is a higher set that I think includes location tracking. With any chosen level, when your subscription expires your data goes static, but does not go away. This works very well for a sporadic cruiser like us.
Take a look at circe.travelmap.net

[svmobert]

I offered to take over management of FollowingSeas from the original developers, however they declined. Disappointing as many of my customers were using it.

Originally Posted by sv_pelagia

All the suggested alternatives seem so much clunkier (and, importantly, limited) compared to FOLLOWINGSEAS! (I've tried Noforeigland, SailTies, and Farkwar... they just do not compare to FollowingSeas.)



Be nice if somehow the functionality of FollowingSeas could be repeated.

[sv_pelagia]

Originally Posted by Sea-TechSystems

I offered to take over management of FollowingSeas from the original developers, however they declined. Disappointing as many of my customers were using it.

TOO BAD!



Thanks for trying!

[Looking4Neptune]

Sea-Tech Systems - Thanks for offering to take it over. Why did they decline? Too much work for them in the hand-over?

[EdenRose]

We were also using FollowingSea to embed a map on our website. And looking for something new and something a bit more automatic. We don't need logs or photos. I have seen people using an embedded map from Marine Traffic, but cannot find anything on their website that is current and shows how to set up the HTML coding etc. We do use Airmail on an SSB and can file position reports that method and will also look into Sailblogs.
We are looking for something easier than FollowingSea (we sent emails every day....when we remembered) but do not need full blown satellite tracking yet.

Here is the final email we got from FollowingSea with suggestions...anyone try any of those?

A quick follow up to our previous email with more detail about other services you can migrate to.
If you are still out there sailing and would like to keep track of your adventures and share them with friends and family – there are three services that have recently implemented import functionality from Following Sea to make migration easy.

* No Foreign Land – send a link to your Following Sea blog/track to support@noforeignland.com and they will help you with migration
* Skipper Blogs – sign up with following link to get first 6 months free https://www.skipperblogs.com/registe.../FOLLOWINGSEA6 , reach out to support@skipperblogs.com if you need any assistance with migration process
* Sail Ties – follow instructions on this page https://sailties.net/following-sea to migrate

Best wishes,
Following Sea team

[Tenedos]

Originally Posted by EdenRose

We were also using FollowingSea to embed a map on our website. And looking for something new and something a bit more automatic. We don't need logs or photos. I have seen people using an embedded map from Marine Traffic, but cannot find anything on their website that is current and shows how to set up the HTML coding etc. We do use Airmail on an SSB and can file position reports that method and will also look into Sailblogs.
We are looking for something easier than FollowingSea (we sent emails every day....when we remembered) but do not need full blown satellite tracking yet.

Check out Saillogger demo at https://saillogger.com/demo. It can completely automate tracking, monitoring and more (disclaimer: I am the developer of Saillogger).

Independent of what tracking solution you use though, you should be able to embed it to your web page with a simple iframe tag, here is how it would work with the above mentioned demo account:

<iframe src="https://saillogger.com/mvelysian/monitor" width="800" height="600" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

You can see this example at work on this page.

Conceptually, the same approach should work for other trackers too. Page owner needs to allow the page to be embedded but it should be the norm for these type of pages.

[sv_pelagia]

We've decided to use Zoleo's new tracking feature.