Urban Vancouver

Beyond Robson Launches

By Richard Eriksson on August 29, 2005 - 11:01am

I saw the announcement last night on a Flickr message board: Beyond Robson, a weblog about Vancouver, has officially launched today. As with Roland, who wrote about and linked to the original announcement, I welcome the weblog and its bloggers to the Vancouver blogging scene. Taking a look at their about page, it looks like most of the bloggers are new to blogging, which is great if you ask me. There's nothing quite like diving right in, and having a fairly specific topic (new and reviews about a city). Some more thoughts follow.

On a technical level, the URLs are clean, and there are RSS feeds for each category and even per-author (see the about page). The URLs are fairly clean: I'm not a fan of underscores in URLs, but at least they give you an indication of what the articles are about. It's running Movable Type, which limits effectively limits the content type to a weblog format, but there are lots of ways to skin the MT cat, and they've already customized the templates and site structure from its default, and with a domain like beyondrobson.com, they can be whatever kind of site they want to be and still retain credibility. Unlike, say, sites with the word "webloggers" in them.

Which brings me to their sidebar links: they have a pretty small amount of Vancouver-based bloggers listed, though that will surely change. The now defunct and aforementioned Vancouver Webloggers site has an outdated list of links from which they are more than welcome to pilfer. (Disclosure: I was the principal administrator of the site.)

The names of the contributors to the weblog are fairly unique, and spending only a half an hour on research, I was able to come up with an interview with Lee Burridge by Ariadna Peretz, an article about Granada, Nicaragua by Degan Beley which links to a short bio, an article on junks by Leanne Prain, Rowan Lipkovits' LiveJournal, a profile of Sean Orr in The Georgia Straight as well as his Flickr photostream. I gave up on the others, but if they are inexperienced bloggers—not all of them are—then they are all experienced writers, so I'm not too worried about a lack of quality control.

The site was evidently designed by Toronto-based Tanja-Tiziana Burdi which makes me wonder if (or why) they couldn't find any Vancouver-based talent, and there is a considerable amount. As Roland mentioned in his article, the domain was registered by a Torontonian as well. That said, it won't matter if the writing is written by locals, since I'll be reading the RSS feed anyway.

I look forward to what they have to write about this city, and like Roland I want to see more weblogs and other types of dynamically-updated sites about Vancouver with RSS feeds. There seems to be no Vancouver Metroblogging site or a "Vancouverist" (though vancouverist.com is taken), but there are more voices in this city about this city than just Urban Vancouver and Beyond Robson, so it's probably just a matter of time before someone thinks that writing almost exclusively about the city in which they live is a good idea, and it is, because this cities and other like it still have stories and secrets to share.