You might be noticing a few new features on your blogs in the next day or two. For instance, when people leave a comment they must now enter two security words. This will help to stop spammers and keep a lot of the “junk” off of the blogs.
The blogs will be down for maintenance on Friday December 28th through no later than Noon on December 29th to help make some of these new security upgrades.
Please let me know if you have questions!
REGIONAL COLLABORATIONS & COMMUNITY FOUNDATIONS
Mon. Jan. 28, 2008
Mitchell Technical Institute, 6:30 pm
Free Supper
7:00 pm - Forming Regional Partnerships - Stories from Horizons I Participants from Timber Lake, Isabel and Dupree
7:45 pm - Discussion & Networking
8:15 pm BREAK and time to network
8:30 pm - Forming A Community Foundation Noel Hamiel, SD Community Foundation talks about the advantages to forming and maintaining a local community foundation
9:15 pm - Closing Any Horizons or non-Horizons community members are invited to attend. Spread the word and bring a carload! If you have Q’s, call or email Kari: 688-4946 or fruechte.kari@ces.sdstate.edu
Please RSVP for supper by January 25, 2008.
Scotland’s Horizons project was featured in the Yankton Press & Dakotan this past week. The story including some great quotes from several community members, (Chad & Erin O., Peggy S. Senator Frank Kloucek, Lorrie S.) and SDSU’s Kari Fruechte and Dave Olson. Read the story here:
The Northwest Area Foundation also took notice–each week the delivery organizations of the 8 states involved in the Horizons project get information via a website called CommunityZero. Scotland’s story was highlighted this week from NWAF.
Area towns entering ‘blogosphere’
By Kristin Marthaler, Staff Writer
Published: Friday, December 14, 2007 12:45 PM CST
SISSETON — In an effort to keep the state’s smaller communities linked together and growing, the Horizons program has made a website dedicated to small town happenings through a blog.
Horizons is a program dedicated to bettering a community by teaching and giving it the tools it needs to succeed. One of the suggested options for smaller communities was a blog. A way to stay connected, share information and encourage those who succeed in the community. (more…)
Philip has been named this week’s Blog of the Week for including input from youth in their community. A while back they included input from some 2nd Graders and this week they have been adding Points of View from community teens. Getting input from lots of community groups will help you formulate your action plans. So whether it is teenagers, singles and families or senior citizens, the only way community change can happen is if people feel they have a voice in helping to achieve those objectives. So great job Philip for sharing these POV’s on the blog.
Did Horizons Project Director, Kari ask Santa for something special for Christmas this year? I wonder what’s on her Christmas list? Thanks to Presho for capturing this ever so wonderful photo of Kari!
Finding it hard to keep up with all the South Dakota Horizons bloggers?
Read more about Using Blog Readers to make your blogging experience easier and less time consuming. I use Google, it’s free and it is user friendly. But there are a lot of services out there just search for “feed readers” or “RSS readers” to find one that you like the best.
Armour earns this week’s Blog of the week title. Armour was the first community to have their COMPLETED! strategic plan posted on the blogs! Very impressive, and a great resource for other communities to see how another Horizons community has done theirs.
I also like their header–using three great photos to create a collage, creative! Great job in highlighting local events, adding new user-friendly features to the blog and writing about events that affect poverty, leadership and community. Great job Armour!
The Horizons I communities learned to blog at a training in Timber Lake on Wednesday, December 5th. Dondra, Megan, Sr. Pegge and Sr. Darlene worked hard to learn a lot of stuff in a short amount of time. We used the new laptop labs from the Cooperative Extension Service and hooked up to the internet using the FREE! city-wide wireless broadband network. It worked pretty well, just a little slow at times, but it is a great asset in a small town.
We took a virtual tour of the Horizons II communities through the blogs, I showed them the great work already started all across the state. The newly trained bloggers may need some help getting started, so if our Horizons II communities can give them a hand that would be great! You can access their blogs on the sidebar on the South Dakota page.
Have you been reading the blogs? There have been a lot of really clever ideas shared on the blogs already.
Elementary School kids learn the importance of giving in community, learn about this simple lesson in civic engagment at Whitewood Elementary Giving Chain.
What great ideas are just waiting to be discovered in your community?
Sometimes the simple ideas have the greatest impact. Keep sharing these great ideas, they serve as great inspiration for other communities!
Newell came up with a way to track the number of visits to their blogs. Check out the information from “Super Blogger” Heather in Newell at the following link: Handy New Options.
Northwest Area Foundation is working on a plan to track the blog usage, but Newell is just a step ahead of them. Use the solution from Newell if you want to, and I may have more information from NWAF in the future about more sophisticated methods of tracking total blog usage in your communities.
Did you know that the order of the blog posts can be controlled by the date? When editing a blog entry, change the POST TIMESTAMP on the right sidebar, making sure to tick the `Edit timestamp’ checkbox. Use this option when you want to make sure a post “stays on top” rather than getting lost in a sea of posts. A better option might be to create a Page rather than a post for things you want to remain in easy view of your readers.
A post can be dated into the future the same way. For instance if you are going on vacation and won’t be around to blog, but you want a time sensitive message to go live on a certain day you can set the Time Stamp to a future date and time. Make sure the `system date’ is correct for the time zone the blog is in, ie, number of hours from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) formerly GMT. Here in the Central Time zone, we’re currently at -6 UTC. For those of you in the Mountain Time zone it would be -7 UTC. (I think the blogs have a -5 default). Each blog can be changed via the Dashboard>Options>General page.
For an administrator in a community, if you want to receive an e-mail telling you that a comment is awaiting moderation, you need to add your e-mail address. This will alert you each time a new comment is posted. You will recieve an e-mail from which you can choose to approve it, delete it or mark it as spam by following a link in the e-mail. Some people don’t want all these e-mails to come to their inbox, others want to know right away when a comment has been made. Right now, those e-mails go to a NWAF e-mail address, if you want to change that, here’s what you do:
As far as I can tell, only one person’s e-mail address can be used to receive the notices, but any administrator can manage the comments within the Dashboard.
Happy Blogging!
Tyndall’s new youth center was a recent story in the Yankton Press & Dakotan. Read the story here:
Tyndall Center is Center of Attention
There were lots of great quotes from Horizons participants, it is a great example of how a project can go from a great idea to an actual operating youth center.
The Northwest Area Foundation also took notice–each week the delivery organizations of the 8 states involved in the Horizons project get information via a website called CommunityZero. Tyndall’s story was highlighted this week from NWAF.
Great job Tyndall!
