Good Change: Signs of a growing community
If you are reading this in an aggregator, would you please do me a favor and click in today?
When I posted our 2nd Annual Love Affair with Books three days ago, I combined it with some changes on the blog, and you need to click in to see them in the left and right columns.
They are testament to the exciting evolution of our Ho‘ohana Community as an online presence, and further, they are designed to be resources for you when you read Talking Story.
Here’s what to look for:
Ho‘ohana Community Voices
The old HOC blogroll has been renamed Ho‘ohana Community Voices, and these are the first two links there:
...About the Ho‘ohana Community
I have intentionally placed it where the top of the page you land on navigates back << to the Mission of SLC, and forward >> to a new archive page serving as an index to all our past Ho‘ohana Community Forums (there have been seven forums so far.)
...Our recent forum: A Love Affair with Books
This new link will be updated with the blogroll with each new forum, and thus, directly under it, it says, The links below are our mahalo to the bloggers who so generously contributed to our recent forum. Do visit them!
Ho‘ohana Community Resources
There is another, brand new listing under Ho‘ohana Community Voices, and it is called Ho‘ohana Community Resources. These are links to community member sites which would not be covered by my forums, and we need to keep them readily accessible, for I believe you value them as I do.
The first link listed there is a new TS feature:
The article I did this past Thursday called Have you noticed? generated a lot of community energy, and many have asked that I do that more often. Traffic spiked like crazy that day and continued through the weekend (as of this writing, that post has gotten more visitors than our Love Affair with Books), but what I was excited about was that energy: our community ho‘ohana-watts.
It took alot of time to put that post together, and much as I’d love to, realistically I can’t do that too often. So I started thinking that I needed another link in residence on the TS home page which could serve the same purpose between the community link fests I can do. Thus the new Ho‘ohana Community Bulletin Board as the first link under the new Ho‘ohana Community Resources column.
If you want to be notified whenever there is an update to this new HC Bulletin Board, pick up the feed for www.sayleadershipcoaching.com for that is where the page is housed:
Click in and see what is already there. You can contribute to the Ho‘ohana Community Bulletin Board too, and the how-to is at the end of that page.
Got some other long-overdue blog maintenance done too. “User-friendly” can mean way-too-wordy, and now that we are seeing the word BLOG pasted on a lot of magazine covers I figured I could clean up a lot of explanation-turned-clutter. I hope you agree.
On a somewhat related note, I liked what John Jantsch said when he wrote, Thank God The Blog Craze Is Almost Over (via Wayne). My commentary on that is here if you’re interested.
Come on now, and tell me the truth; wasn’t that a lot more entertaining and colorful than what you normally see in that aggregator of yours? Click in more often, you know you are always welcomed here.
Postscript: All of this, and a nudge from our SEO master Wayne (mahalo Wayne!) also lit a fire under my okole (that’s gluteus maximus in Hawaiian...) to clean up the navigation links on www.sayleadershipcoaching.com too. All 3 of the new community links can be accessed there, in the left column, under the HNewsletter subscription link. They look like this:
>>Ho‘ohana™ our Newsletter
Join the community!
>> The Ho‘ohana Community
>> HC Bulletin Board
>> HC Learning Forums
Aloha Rosa,
BEAUTIFUL work you've done on the blog. WOW! Everything is so clean and crisp and even easier to find. Well done!
Now I have to work on cleaning up my links too. Thanks for upping the ante with a wonderfully done update.
Posted by: Phil Gerbyshak | February 27, 2006 at 06:30 PM
Hi Rosa. Cleaning up the page, and making the navigation more user friendly is even more important than SEO. A blog that is pleasant to read, esasy to move around to find posts of interest, and a joy to visit, is the best blog "optimization".
Posted by: Wayne Hurlbert | March 24, 2006 at 01:01 PM