We have been struggling for months to get a printed newsletter published and that will shortly be dealt with, but it has pointed us to the fact that because the forum is run entirely by volunteers, when a time consuming task like producing a newsletter needs attention - most of us are just too busy with our lives and work to commit that amount of time.
Now a Blog on the other hand solves those problems.
1. There are no production issues because Blogger - the Google service the provides this Blog- does all the publishing stuff for us.
2. We can add contributors to the blog so that the job of writing articles is shared out around the forum members.
3. We can add pictures and video and stuff that it would be too expensive or impossible to do with a printed newsletter.
4. We can link to interesting stuff on the internet that you can go straight to - that way we can write a short article and anyone intersted can go read the more details stuff.
5. If you want to make a comment on any of the articles of posts - you can click on comments and add to the blog so that everyone can see what you have to say.
6. If we want to produce a printed newsletter - we can simply grab some of the stuff from the blog and put it together much more quickly than chasing around for articles.
The downside is that people still don't know what a Blog is. Well - it's a simple newsletter - like a newspaper column. Every article is a short musing from the author on some topic of interest to the readers, and there can be one or more authors on the blog. Each time a new article is written it pushes the older ones down the page - until they end up in the archives. The past articles are always there, you just have to look for them. The latest articles are always at the top.
So here it is - the Hull LGBT Forum Blog - took me ten minutes to set it up and write this article and invite a handful of people to help as contributing authors. Please feel free to comment away - and if you would like to join our panel of contributing authors please write to me at- rikki at lgbtforum dot co dot uk - I have written that out like that to prevent the spammers from grabbing the email address.
If you are not yet a member of the Forum - Join the LGBT Forum Yahoo Group and sign up - you can always leave whenever you choose and we totally respect your privacy. If you or your organisation would like to work with the LGBT Forum and want to be kept informed of what we are doing - please sign up to the LGBT Forum Supporters Group.
Huggs
Rikki
