When I signed in this morning and noticed that most of the office seemed to be logged into our IM system, I looked at the calendar and realized that it is Monday. Blogging day. I also realized that I have completely missed the last 2 Mondays, but that is not to say that the community hasn’t been trucking along–it’s just me that has been slacking off. I love that about the holidays–completely losing track of time. I don’t wear a watch when I’m away–partly because time doesn’t matter, but mostly because I hate tan lines. So this post comes to you from beautiful Northland–the top of the North Island of New Zealand, where I have spent every summer of my life at the beach.
One day soon I am going to be fired for all this showing off.
So anyway–2011 and the SitePoint Community. Last year for me was one of finding my feet. It was my first year as Community Manager, and I used it to feel my way around and to try and figure out what was working and what wasn’t. I worked on building up our Facebook presence and leveraging our Twitter following as a community tool as well as a marketing one. This year I want to move the community forward. We have some exciting ideas. I am a believer in change and without great risks you don’t achieve great things. It’s all about moving with the times.
But enough of the big talking. Let me tell you what’s going on in the community right now.
Our Great Holiday Photography Competition is nearing it’s conclusion and there are some amazing entries. You still have time to take some pictures of what the holidays mean to you in your part of the world. There are some great prizes up for grabs, so get snapping. You can read the entry guidelines or take a look at the current submissions here.
With our Community Awards wrapped up and the results announced, we are moving on to a new competition for the new year. The staff is nailing down the details now and we’ll be ready to announce it any day now. If HTML and CSS are your things, this one is for you.
Our Facebook community is continuing to flourish and the writing on the wall today is all about geeky Christmas gifts. It would seem that Kindles are the gift of the moment. If you got something interesting, head on over there and do some showing off.
I think that’s about it from me today. Next week I’ll be back on board and full of much more interesting and work related information.
Hot Topics This Week
What are your ‘must have’ fonts for web design? Jump on over to the Web Page Design forum and share them with us.
We’re all about photography in the forums at the moment, and the focus in the General Chat forum is on our January Photo Showcase. I want to see photos of the weather in your part of the world at this time of year.
While PHP is generally associated with semicolons, the talk in the PHP forum this week is about apostrophes and how to get them into a MySQL table.
And the last one up for the week comes from Advertising Sales and Affiliate Programs. Freelancers, how do you go about getting new clients?
So that’s me for the first post of the year. Over and out.
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Sarah HawkFormerly a developer in the corporate world, HAWK (known as Sarah by her mother) said goodbye to the code and succumbed to the lure of social media to become the Community Manager for the SitePoint network. Now Hawk is working with Discourse to build their product and community.
