The New OL!

What your eyes are feasting upon at the moment is the baby-butt-slapping-new Outdoor Life website. It's been a long time coming and we're excited for you to take it for a cruise and to help it grow and mature by contributing your personality and expertise.

While we're proud of our creation, it's just the beginning. We have many exciting features planned for the future, and with your help we're aiming to build the best outdoors site on the web. So please, let us know what you think and because it is brand new, please report bugs or other problems you encounter.

To that end, here are some of the most important and exciting aspects of OL.com that you can get started checking out:

Create Your Profile: Let the world know who are (or at least who you are in cyberspace) and what you like (or don't like) to do. Create your own profile now and when you log-in on return visits you can fully participate on OL.com. By creating a profile you can comment in message boards, vote on stories and photos and answer user questions found throughout the site.

Your profile page also houses all your uploaded photos, shows your likes and dislikes and tracks your participation on OL.com by displaying your star-and-point ranking and the number of contributions you've made to various areas of the site.

Upload Your Own Photos: Gone with the old site are the days when you'd submit a photo and then wonder when it would show up on the site. Now you can upload your own photos and the story behind them, tell friends and family where they can found: on the Bragging Board under User Photos, through our Photo Search Engine or on your profile page. We've also included a Google Map aspect that allows you to pinpoint where your successful adventure took place. For you secretive types you can pinpoint a general area or even designate that the map not be made public.

Videos: Check out the right rail and you'll notice a video player. Gone are the hacks and restrictions of the old site. With our new player you can watch higher-quality videos and thanks to our deep tagging system, related videos will automatically bubble to the top--giving you more of the content you really want to watch. We're working diligently to build out our video library page and soon we hope to have the ability to allow you to upload your own videos and share them with friends, family and the entire OL.com community!

Answers: Got a question about hunting, fishing, guns, gear, survival or anything else related to the outdoors? Get an answer by asking the experts--OL editors and OL users--for their input. Simply type your question, select the category it belongs in and the power of the OL universe is unleashed!

Message Boards: We're hoping our new Message Board will be a place for OL users to congregate and discuss the news and trends in the outdoors, as well as share tips, make announcements and get to know one another. Consider it your local bait shop, watering hole and rumor mill all rolled into one.

Of course, there is much more to the new OutdoorLife.com website, which we'll highlight in-depth in the coming weeks, but that's your crash course on what you're about to wade into…have fun!

The Outdoor Life Staff