Curated news - good, cool, funny or ours - about Spain

I was cleaning out my Pocket, Evernote, Springpad and local browser bookmarks today and found that I had collected quite a number of interesting articles about Spain over the past several months.

Some I shared on social media or used in my classes as authentic material but for the most part, they stayed hidden away in my online lists and notebooks.

Today, I’ve decided to liberate them and start curating all the good, cool and funny news coming out of Spain. Sometimes I’ll include some not so great news, like the article about Spain being accused of a doping cover up in cycling because it’s underreported and relevant to Lance Armstrong’s recent revelation.

So here it is… ¡Vaya Madrid! Newsbits

Ok, maybe it’s not the most inventive name but my punny writer-friend is currently on a long-haul flight halfway around the world and I am tired.

I’ll be on the lookout for your interesting tweets or posts to add there too!

- Anna the Publisher

A well designed downloadable guide to Madrid

This is one of the best free guides to Madrid that I’ve seen. The author is a local and has carefully chosen spots in the city that she goes to herself. Yes, there’s the regular hackneyed mention of a visit to some museum or another but the rest is actually quite good.

The guide is formatted with time schedules and Google Maps with the routes drawn out for you so you don’t even have to plan.

This is great if you have visitors coming and can’t really take them around the city yourself.

My favorite part of this guide is her “Some things you should know before you arrive” where she writes things like:

Madrid is not so much a place to see, but instead a place to feel. The most interesting parts are what you can’t picture. The energy, noise, movement, sensations…are difficult to save in your camera’s memory card.

Download the guide from iwannagothere.com.

I love their slogan too: This is travel, not tourism.

- Anna the Publisher

More ways to read

For all you users of Flipboard, Pulse, Currents, Taptu and other newsreader apps, we’ve just made it easier for you to subscribe to specific ¡Vaya Madrid! sections and writers.

Let’s say you only want to read our articles about food and really don’t care for the rest. An outrageous hypothesis but just play along. Well, now you can just subscribe to our Ñam section rather than getting updated whenever we add other super interesting what’s wrong with you articles on our site.

Under each section and writer archive page, you’ll see the orange RSS logo and link to get updates from just that section or writer. Grab that URL and copy it to your fave newsreader app and you’re all set.

You’re welcome.

- Anna the Publisher

‘Tis the season… for maintenance and updates

Most of our readers are out of town and so this is a great time to do some tweaking to our website.

We’re moving servers, for one thing, and are currently waiting for the new nameservers to propagate throughout the interwebs. The new server is now in Europe which makes more sense since nearly all of our readers are in Madrid (imagine that!).

We’re also going to use our Tumblr blog more often, and posts here will be more about our people, our goals and our progress. It’ll also be home to other ramblings about Madrid, life as a foreigner here, and other stuff that doesn’t quite fit on our main site.

Our Flickr account is going to be integrated into the site to display galleries of Madrid life. Despite their recent stepping in crap, Instagram is still going to be our photo community since it allows anyone to easily share photos with us and display them on our site. 

¡Vaya Madrid! is also growing. We started out a few months ago with just a handful of contributors — Tals, Lauren, Martha and Cathy — and have recently been joined by Mona, Dan, Brian, Kaley, Ryan, Daniel, Sergio and Lori. Expect to become more familiar with these guys with more personal profile pages on our site.

Lastly, we want more feedback from our readers so we’re going to start integrating Tumblr’s guest posting and asking features into our site. Go ahead, give it a whirl.

So that’s what’s happened and will happen. Thank you to all of our Twitter followers, Facebook uh… likers and no one on Google+. We’ll try not to disappoint you.

- Anna Bitanga, Publisher