Welcome New Bloggers to Blog for Iowa!
Today is something of a re-launch for Blog for Iowa, as we spread the word about Democracy for Iowa at the District Conventions and expect to have increased traffic and awareness of who we are and what we are doing.
A little background for newcomers. Just one month ago, Dr. Alta Price, MD, a pathologist from Bettendorf and a rabidly-active Dean supporter, snapped up the domain names democracyforiowa.com and .org upon the advice of our counterpart in Illinois. She then sent out an email to her fellow rabidly-active Dean supporters in Iowa, looking for a webmaster. I, having run my own flyer-rich grassroots website, 6 Reasons, during the Dean campaign, knew a little something about building a website and really enjoyed that sort of thing. So I answered Alta's Call to Duty, and Democracy for Iowa was born.
Alta and I had been at it for a week or so, when it suddenly dawned on us that creating an over-arching structure that would serve the grassroots in Iowa and yet not rule us was an enormous task. We needed a central location, a hub, as it were, where we could collect information while we tried to put some kind of structure in place.
Blog for Iowa was born on April 1 to serve that purpose. To quote our new DFIA outreach flyer: Blog for Iowa is the central information hub of Democracy for Iowa and is a rich source of progressive Iowa news, events, opinions, humor, announcements, and calls to action. Blog for Iowa is updated several times a day.
And speaking of humor, looks like it won't be long and Blog for Iowa will be featuring a regular column from our very own Dean-supporting humorist! Stay tuned for that!
Be sure to look at the sidebars of the Blog for Iowa site. The left sidebar features some of the niftiest tools I've ever seen. On the right sidebar, near the top, you will see a “filing system” for previous articles, called Topics. Click on the topic called Tools and you will get an explanation of what each tool is and how you can use it. (Scroll down past this entry to get to the previous entries.)
Also, we have flyers, sign up sheets, buttons, and other materials available for your use. Many of the flyers are customizable in Word doc format so you can add your local information. Look on the right sidebar under the heading Download Flyers Here. Below that, you will see examples of the special buttons that were made up for us – Blog for Iowa and DFIA Meet Up.
And if you haven't already heard, starting in May, DFIA Meet Ups will take place on the first Thursday after the first Wednesday of the month. In other words, due to church night conflicts throughout the state of Iowa, DFIA Meet Up will be the day AFTER the regular DFA Meet Up, which is the first Wednesday of the month. This change will not be reflected on the national DFA Meet Up site.
LINK TIP: When clicking on a link on Blog for Iowa, right click and then select Open in New Window. It works the fastest that way and then you don't have to keep reloading Blog for Iowa.
Be sure to tune in later today when I post my proudest moment thus far in Democracy for Iowa. I think you'll be proud of Iowa, too.
Linda Thieman, Storm Lake
Blogmaster/webmaster
Democracy for Iowa
Blog For Iowa 