Good morning:
You might have noticed by now that I schedule our weekday posts to come out around 7 a.m. I’ll usually try to deploy our Saturday posts by 9:30 a.m. Silent Sundays I create Saturday night, scheduling that post to release for Sunday morning around 7. We sometimes have additional posts or short messages released during the day, but this is the schedule we’re going to try to stick to so you’ll know when new material or updates might be available.
This pattern allows our contributors to understand when content should be ready and our community to know when their new essays will be available for viewing. Readership is also higher in the morning and in the evening, which follows a standard work-day pattern in our country.
We have some good developments in the planning and preparation stages. I’ll let you in on a few of the secrets:
We may be guest-hosting a consistent weekly feed from Finding Manhood for our “Man Cave” section very soon.
We’re working on the development of a female answer to the “Man Cave.” Potential names are: The XX Factor, Woman2Woman, or Girl Talk. Please comment and let us know if you feel strongly pro or against one of those titles.
A friend recently returned from a very special trip to Africa and we’re working on busting up his journal and his wife’s photos for a new series in our Travel section. There are 2,000 photos and about 10 pages to the journal…so it will take a bit to turn it into readable, bite-sized pieces. What special people they encountered!
We will be adding another contributor to our group soon. He will be covering topics such as outdoor life, raising four children, hunting, home-schooling and the perspective of becoming a triathlete and/or runner again at middle age.
We also added our Faith Wednesdays author, Alfred Lamar Jackson, to our group and his first release was this week. Welcome Lamar!
Josh Bottomly, author of the piece we released a couple of weeks ago (A White-Skinned Father and Black-Skinned Son), is preparing an excerpt from a book he and his wife authored to be released soon. That may come out next week as well.
Finally, we’ll be providing you with a profile of more every-day Oklahoma people or businesses. Potentially this week or next is a very unique gentleman who’s humility and intellectual acumen are simply amazing. We’re also working on a piece about St. Francis of the Woods Eastern Orthadox retreat center and farm in Coyle, OK.
I am becoming endeared to Julie, Rob, Mark and Joey and am already remembering why I loved Lamar. I hope you are beginning to get to know them through their work as well.
Next Friday we’re meeting with a website developer to help our project become more community friendly. We would love to have your feedback more frequently and be able to feature our articles for a bit longer. Our current format buries them rather quickly.
Well, that’s about it in Red Dirt Chronicle land. Which is your land too. I’ll end this note to you by mentioning a few things on my heart right now: Our dear comrades who had their lives changed forever in NYC on this date nine years ago, our dear armed service men and women who have toiled and sacrificed in Afghanistan, and later Iraq, for too many years now, and our friends in Oklahoma who are reminded of our own experience with massive bombing tragedies by dates like today. Peace, blessings and good hope to all of you.
Sincerely,
Red Dirt Kelly – and the RDC Team
P.S. Please remember to “Like” our Facebook page. We’re currently at 199 friends and our 200th “Like” recieves a hand-embroidered Tag Rag. Check out that page for other silliness, and enjoy!