The Geocachers' Creed

When placing or seeking geocaches, I will: Not endanger myself or others (examples) Observe all laws & rules of the area (examples) Respect property rights and seek permission where appropriate (examples) Avoid causing disruptions or public alarm (examples) Minimize my and others' impact on the environment (examples) Be considerate of others (examples) Protect the integrity of the game pieces (examples)

Help Raise Awareness of the Geocachers' Creed!  Free downloads (brochure,  signature cards, etc.) are available on the Resources page.

The Geocachers' Creed is a voluntary set of guidelines that describes how geocachers in general act.  It is not affiliated with any organization or listing site.  See How the Creed was Developed

The Geocachers' Creed is designed to help orient new players to the ethos of the geocaching community and to guide experienced players in questionable situations, so that everyone can enjoy geocaching!

---

Above the grey line, is an excerpt from the Geocachers' Creed website, the entire contents of which can be viewed at www.geocreed.info. The "examples" and other links do work, but they take you to the actual geocreed.info site, opened in a new window. Please do read the bulleted examples for each of the seven "tenets", as they're called; they are very important (although not part of the Creed itself), just too long to reproduce here in this post.

Memorial Day (and GW) weekend in the USA

Memorial Day weekend is coming up in The USA, where OpenCaching North America is based. Since we have many readers (and even users) from outside the USA, our "Memorial Day" is celebrated the last Monday in May of each year, and is for honoring the Men and Women who died while in the service of our armed forces. Please, if you're an American take some time to remember and honor these Men and Women in some way of your own choosing during the long holiday weekend. You can read about the long history of our Memorial Day (once known as Decoration day) in this Wikipedia article.

There is no denying that Memorial Day weekend has, over the years, increasingly become known as the traditional start of the Summer vacation season here. And for the relatively new hobby of Geocaching, it has become one of two weekends designated for the holding of the American phenomenon known as GeoWoodstock, an annual Geocaching (Mega) event. It can also be held the nearest weekend to our July 4th Holiday, known as Independence day. The choice of which weekend is up to the organizers of the event. The Florida Geocaching Association, host of this years event, has chosen Memorial Day weekend, as have the majority of the hosting organizations over the years.

The Public Domain Geocaching Logo (and a blog redesign)

This is the first in a two part series on "things in the public domain hammered out by the community in Geocaching forums." No, really it is. Any guesses on what the next topic will be? Anyways, the proper name for the symbol above is the Leatherman Variant of the Public Domain Geocaching Logo. That name sounds a little long, and a little complex, but it's easily explained. Public domain means people are free to copy and alter the logo as they wish, Leatherman is the Geocaching.com username of the Geocacher who designed it, and it's a "variant" as it was one of several designs submitted. Submitted to whom, you ask? To a forum thread in the Groundspeak forums in October, 2002, that's who. This thread appears to have been started because a lone Geocacher and a whole Statewide Geocaching organization were using the official trademarked Geocaching.com logo to put on their signature items, and were making alterations to that logo. Groundspeak decided that legally, they could not allow these alterations.

CacheFace.com: a dedicated social network for Geocachers

Above is a screen shot from a profile page on CacheFace.com (click to enlarge). It also happens to be the profile of Paul Suggitt (Pilot Suggs), the creator and owner of the website, who has graciously agreed to be interviewed by this blog! CacheFace is, as stated in the post title, a dedicated social network for Geocachers, launched in 2012. You can read an excellent overview of all it's features on the about-CacheFace page on their website. There are more screen shots of the site at the bottom of this blog post.

OCNA BLOG: (Every one's first question) Where are you from, how did you first hear of Geocaching, and when did you start?
PAUL: I am from the North East coast of the UK, a town called Hartlepool and I got into Caching late in 2010 after my best friend Ian White (Ian D+P) mentioned it. After my first cache find, i was hooked..I now have 1,477 cache finds under my belt and also have a number of caches out in my home town and the English Lake District.

OCNA BLOG: Can you describe all the major features of it? Is the “Face” an intentional play on Facebook?
PAUL: I developed CacheFace to give something back to the global geocaching community, a community I found from the geocaching meets that was very friendly and extremely passionate and I have given this back by way of using my programing skills to develop a global hangout where every cacher can connect and share, no matter where they are.

CacheFace is a dedicated social network for cachers to connect with each other. One thing for sure is it's not trying to compete with Facebook. The idea behind CacheFace is to bring the fragmented caching groups that exist on various social networks and forums around the world and allow all these cachers to come together in 1 place and hang out, make new friends, share tips and ideas, create global groups for their interests (travel bugs, caching containers, etc), something that wouldn't normally happen as people wouldn't normally venture out of their local group hangout. That's now changed.. CacheFace has created a new type of caching...social caching.

The name CacheFace is actually from a slogan I created from seeing some photo's of myself and my pals caching and we all had a "caching face," be it happy, tired, exhausted or silly, so when I was developing the site it felt appropriate to use CacheFace...i.e, connect with each other and show everyone your cache face.

RSS Feeds, Geocaching in the News, a failed experiment, and a new experiment (be a BETA tester!)

Above is a (rather large and nicely done) RSS Feed icon. Might as well go with the Wikipedia definition, as follows: 

"RSS Rich Site Summary (originally RDF Site Summary, often dubbed Really Simple Syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship."

Here is an excellent article from Google support, titled Feed 101, should you need to read up more on what RSS feeds are, and how they work (in layman's terms). Now this blog post could be about just about any subject. But in Geocaching, we do in fact have new web content just about every day of what is bolded in the quote above: blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video.

EDIT: This has become the most viewed post on our blog over time. Hopefully the short overview and links above are helpful to all you search engine visitors!!