The South Bruce Peninsular is all about us, it's our story, told by us, told the way we see it. SBP is a community journal collecting the collective thoughts and memories of our world, binding together the stories of our members, kept them here for everyone to read. Forget history, this is our story.

It's like a neighbourhood scrap book.

It all starts with your membership. Membership in the SBP is open to everyone, and all it costs is some time to fill out the form. All members are welcome to participate in the forums, events and comments, everyone gets their own weblog journal and photo album. You don't need to be Stephen Leacock, you don't need to be Erma Bombeck. You just need to be yourself and there are lots of ways everyone can contribute:

• Events -- all members are invited to contribute their own events to the SBP calendar, or to add the events for their neighbours who might be shy about this computer stuff. Why put your event here? In the right-side column you will find a list of upcoming events, and all items in our calendar will show in that box when they get close enough to make the list. In the future we hope to add a method for people to download our calendar into their PDAs just in case someone wants to carry their SBP in their back pocket (don't ask me why, but they do and it's probably a very good idea).
• Forums -- this is where we can build our own little knowledgebase about what's what in SBP. Forums start with a posting about an issue, a question or a topic, and other members can post their own comments, or comment on each other's comments. All posts hang around for a long time, organized by the topic area for that forum, so, for example, all the issues and answers on How to use this website are collected under the Frequently Asked Questions topic.

• Photos -- members can also keep their own personal photo album of SBP memories to share -- remember, everything posted to the SBP goes into the scrap book, and it will still be here next year, and the year after, and the year after that (make sure that's the haircut you want people to remember!). You can post any images, up to 1MB worth, but all images must be 640×480 or smaller (sorry -- you're on your own for how to reduce your 3-megapixel camera shots). All images are public, so you know the rules.
• Blogs -- web logs or 'blogs' as we call them for short, are the lifeblood of community journals, the diaries and sunshine sketches that make up the days of our lives. This is the really important part of the SBP website because this is where our history is told in first-person singular, told as it happens, told by us. Your weblog is your space to tell us anything you'd tell any neighbour. Starting a business? Tell us why and how and how it unfolds. Found a cool website your neighbours might find interesting? Drop in a note with a link. Planning an event? Keep us updated, just as if we were all your back-fence neighbour, pour us a cuppa and do tell. Post poems, ideas, stories, fact or fiction, post your birdwatching or stargazing or beachgazing, write about local events you attend, places you go, the people you meet. It's your journal, so it's your call.

And that's just the tip of it. There's more to come as we play with this big sandbox of a website, try things out, grow and explore and develop the South Bruce Peninsular to make it our community journal, but it can only be what we make it, it depends on all of us to make it happen. Some members requested a recipe forum and the barbeque cuisine has already started to acccumulate. Cabin-fever lead to trying a live chatroom and the chat is often busy with the night owls. The Peninsular is what we make of it, unofficial, no editorial board other than ourselves, no sponsors to pander to or offend, nothing we have to sell. It's just us, it's our sandbox, it's our stories just the way we are, and this is all it is, and all it needs is you.

Wanna play?