Announcement of New Weblog for HHPC

Welcome to the Hunterdon Hills Pony Club Weblog ("Blog" for short). This is an experiment in publishing HHPC news with minimal effort. The idea is to allow several administrators to post items which anyone in the club with Internet access can view.

One reason that we have not received a club newsletter in a while is that it's hard to produce a content-rich newsletter that does not become an excessively large file for e-mailing. There are some technical solutions that might work, but this presents another possible alternative.

Since this is a website accessible by anyone, there are security/privacy issues with using last names and/or pictures. I would appreciate your feedback on using this cost-free but "open" blog versus perhaps paying a small fee ($5-$10 per month) for "hosting" that includes password protection. Even if we use password protection, there is some residual risk because there are password-guessing programs that hackers use. In the meantime I have only put a few pictures (with permission), so you can see how they would look. I believe there is some risk in an e-mailed newletter as well, since e-mail is not completely secure either.

I think the format of the "blog", while not perfect, can serve many of the purposes of a newsletter and the ease of use and free price ar ehard to argue with. Even if we decide to pay for more secure hosting, "snail mailing" a newsletter would cost money too. In my opinion, it's important to report club news and e-mail doesn't quite replace a newsletter.

I propose that we play around with this until the October meeting and try to make a club decision then. You can post comments here, and send me "postings" - stories, results of PC events, pictures - with permission of all pictured! - by e-mail, my address should be in Janet's covering e-mail message. Pictures need to be sent in "jpeg" format. I look forward to your feedback! P.S. I can remove any posts with a keystroke, if anyone's unhappy with what I've done so far.