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Purpose

This blog is intended to be a replacement for the Branch Bulletin.

Try using RSS to keep up to date with new posts!

Welcome to the DC’s Blog

Long standing members, past members and friends will well remember the monthly Branch Bulletin’s which were very ably written by the late Toni Russell.  Even after I took over as DC in February 2010 Toni continued to ghost write the Bulletin for me and did so right up to her untimely death in December that year.

You will have noticed that no Bulletin has been forthcoming since.  It has always been my intention to put one together and I have been diligently saving ‘copy’ for inclusion.  I will admit that the job of sitting down and putting it all together has never reached the top of the ‘to do’ list and my guilt has increased with each passing month.  It then dawned on me that a better approach may be to replace the Bulletin with a ‘blog’.  The sorts of reports and announcements seem to me ideally suited to the medium and there are other advantages.   Toni always wrote the Bulletin in Microsoft Word and I these were originally printed off in hard copy and mailed out to members. Over time we migrated to e-mail distribution and I started converting them to PDF format.   I also diligently transposed each Bulletin so it could be seen on the branch website. This is all quite a lot of work (especially ‘translating’ complex Word formatting to display legibly in a web page) so it struck me that a blog would be more efficient.

In short I hope the blog will demonstrate the following benefits:

  • news published more quickly ‘as it happens’ – no longer saving it for the ‘next edition';
  • each post will have a category (eg. competition report, announcement, achievement) and the blog software automatically groups the posts together;
  • each post will be time stamped and all posts will be automatically indexed by date;
  • no need to reformat and republish on-line;
  • hopefully reduce the amount of indiscriminate e-mail ‘spam’ that we produce;
  • readers can ‘subscribe’ to the blog using their web browser so they can easily tell when new posts appear.

Of course nothing is truly straightforward!   The Pony Club website uses the same software that I am using for this blog but seemingly can’t support the style of use I intend to use.   If I can migrate using the official web server then I will.  However, many of you already use my own web server (theFourFootWay.org) to access the photographic collections.

At this point this new service is an experiment and if there are substantive problems I can have another think!   I will clearly have to start with a backlog of ‘old’ news!   For the few who are not ‘online’ I am sure we can manage to print off the content periodically and mail it out by traditional methods.

Mike