Action for Animals Austin

I am pleased to say that the site has been working well and more people are joining every day.  I have made a few minor updates since I last posted about this:

• The Events list is displayed a little more nicely (showing events in the order they are coming up, and not showing events that have  already happened).
• You can now send private messages.  Just put your mouse over your name in the upper-right corner, and click on Inbox in the menu that drops down.  You can now send messages to one person at a time, but I have an update ready to roll out soon that will enable you to send to multiple recipients at the same time.

From the feedback I have gathered so far, one question seems to come up frequently: "what stuff should I post as a blog entry and what stuff should I post to the forums?"

There really is no written-in-stone rule about this, but here are some guidelines that I think will help.

Blog

When you post to your blog, your entry appears on the front page of the web site.  This means that your blog posts are the most visible part of the web site -- it's the first thing a new visitor sees when they come to our site.  It makes sense to post stuff here that you expect to be of interest to everybody.  Some examples:

• Announcements about upcoming events with all the details
• Information about a story in the news you want to share with everybody
• A review of a book you just read
• An article you wrote sharing your thoughts about an animal-related topic

The blog posts include many tools to share your post (using the E-mail to friends and ShareThis links, for example) so it makes sense to post stuff here that you want people to read and then spread everywhere they can.

Posts don't have to be long -- sometimes a couple sentences is enough.  However, I try to take a little time to make my blog posts look as nice as I can (checking spelling, etc.) knowing that this is the 'public face' of our web site.

Forum

The forums are a place for free discussion.  This is the place for planning, discussing, asking questions, etc.  Often a forum topic will be started to discuss organizing our participation in an event that we learned about because somebody posted it as a blog.

While (at the moment) everybody can see the forums, they are not right on the front page of the web site.  Therefore, this stuff won't be seen as much by casual web-surfers browsing our site.  You can post to the forums without worrying so much about nicely formatting your text like it is an article for public viewing.  It's a little more free-wheeling.

Some examples of things that make sense to post on the forum:

• You have a question about how to do something on the web site.
• You heard about an upcoming event, but don't know any of the details and want to see if anybody can fill you in.
• An event is posted on our calendar, but you need to start a discussion with the rest of the group to assign responsibilities, decide schedules, etc.
• You have a birthday coming up and want suggestions from the group on the best vegan restaurants for a special dinner.

I hope this helps!  Keeping posting away, and tell your friends so we can keep growing!

• Community Site