Christmas Party

Thanks to Sonja and Jim McFarland and Jean and Connor Keller; Meg Davenport and Amy and Rob Crofoot; and Bo and David McCall for hosting the Forest Hills Christmas party. It was Julie and my first neighborhood Christmas party and we enjoyed seeing the neighbors we met and the ones we hadn't. The food and hospitality was great and we look forward to next year.

Sad News

Trish, a neighbor here on Colonial Dr. passed away last night. As many of you know, she was living as a paraplegic for sometime, due to an accident on Market St.
Judy, her mom, is the neighbor that FH's adopted a few years back to help with home repairs.
Our neighborly thoughts and prayers go out to their family, especially at this time.

Hi folks, welcome to the blog

I see Miles sent out a missive from Bradley introducing many of you to this blog. Welcome. And please please please take up the offer of becoming an author. We created this thing (and by "we" I mean my lovely wife) so the neighborhood could use it to share information. Any kind of information -- yard sales, school news, neighborhood watch, safety concerns, local meetings, etc. And to make it accessible to everyone, not just folks who knew about Miles' list and gave him their email address.

That's where our responsibility starts and ends. The rest is up to you. And as Bradley noted in his letter (which I'll excerpt below), writing a blog post is as easy as writing an email, only you also get to add pictures and video, if you like. Just remember not to reveal too much information (you probably don't want to post your phone number here or the names/ages of your kids, for example). Other than that, it's pretty much fair game.

Here's Brad's email, as a reference:

Anyone who lives in Forest Hills can be an author at the blog and it's very easy. Send an email requesting an author account and you will get one. Even if you aren't yet set up as an author, you can post comments. (At the end of posts, click on the word comment). If you need help figuring out that first blog post, email me at bcoxe (at) ec.rr.com or Dan at dan (at) tynanwood.com. [Remember to substitite an @ symbol for (at) in that address.] After that posting to the blog will be a simple as sending an email to Miles.

And you don't have to check the blog to read announcements. Just subscribe to the blog and the posts will come right to your email. Enter your email adress on the box on there on the left or click on the feed button if you like to use a feed reader.

Now, there are a few differences between this blog and the email chain. First, understand that this blog is not private. You need permission to post, but there is no permission required to view it. I think this is a positive thing as it allows people who are thinking about moving here to check it out, and new neighbors who are just googling their new neighborhood to find it. The more people who use or view the blog, the better it is. If you exercise a little common sense, there shouldn't be much of a security risk. If I or anybody else sees something that you probably shouldn't post, we'll let you know. I can't think of any of Mile's emails that would have concerned me had they gone public. Again though, you will control how much or how little identifying information you want to post.

Second, your blog post or comments will go "live" as soon as you post it. Nobody will edit it or check it beforehand. Usually everybody stays on their best behavior, but while the topics or posts may start in Forest Hills, the discussion may range outside. For example, one post lately was an ad for a fundraiser for Obama-Biden held in Forest Hills. Now somebody may make a comment to that supporting McCain and then all of a sudden we have a political debate for a national office, just like you might have over the back fence with your neighbor.

Blogs are supposed to be a conversation. when the conversation turns ugly, it's usually self correcting. if someone gets abusive, they can be banned. The biggest problem with blogs is bots that fill comments fields with spam; you get around that by having people register before they can post, and by moderating comments. That's also how you catch people who are abusive. it's a system that works very well for 99.9% of the online world.

One final gentle suggestion: Though you can comment anonymously (at least for the moment), I think it would keep things more civil if people identified themselves in some fashion when they comment on a post. It's very easy to post negative things about people when you can do it anonymously; much harder when you have to actually account for what you say.

Cheers.

dt