Yes: Classifieds. Right here. Absolutely free. Sure, there are lots of classifieds out there, from global eBay to the local broadsheets, but none of them really fit what I needed ...

So I rolled my own, and here it is.

And it isn't just any ordinary free-for-all free-classifieds full of shady deals from shady characters posted from a-far. To start with, this one has one really big difference: it's just among 'friends'

A picture is worth a thousand words and nothing spiffs up the sight of your favourite website like a few well-chosen photos of our peninsular paradise. Got a shot you want to share with your neighbours and the world? Got a snap that's just too pertinent to the topic? You can post it here, and it's a bit of a tangle to get set up, but once you have it, it's a breeze to shoot and post

Ok, I'm walking in the park by the library, I go up to the message board, and there's a thing going on tomorrow that I'm sure nobody has heard a thing about ...

he whips open his cellular phone, taps in a quick message, clicks the send and zoom -- there it is, live and direct, posted on everyone's favourite community website!

It's really almost that simple, and gets simpler every day

if you have a membership on the South Bruce Peninsular, you have the priviledge of posting your news

and if your cellphone supports downloadable applications, you can post to the SBP right there, from where you are, right on the spot.

the Metaweblog API

Loosely translated, that just means there's a special webpage and specialized software that knows how to work with that page to take your story and slap it up on your SBP blog.

I use a free J2ME (Java Mobile) program called MIDLog by rawsocket. It supports most blog formats including the Blogger.com format used by Google's blog site, and the MovableType/Metaweblog method used here on the SBP. I enter my blog account details selecting the MovableType method and using a target location of http://sbp.teledyn.com/xmlrpc.php and I'm ready to roll -- all I need do after that is give my story a title and fill out a few lines of text, click the send and I'm published.

Mind you, it's not perfect.

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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
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These days everybody has a web-calendar; it's bad enough wondering which one to check (who's got the time? I just check the Peninsular site cloud and see who's updated) but very often it's not what's on ... but who's going?

That answer is the idea behind a new and free personal webservice at Upcoming.org

Upcoming.org is a collaborative event calendar, completely driven by people like you. Enter in the events you're attending, comment on events entered by others, and syndicate event listings to your own weblog.

You may have heard of MeetUps; this is similar, but more about meeting at some special event. Once you login, you match yourself to favourite locations or other add people to your buddy-list, and when events pop up (or if you add them) you tick off if you're going or thinking of going. Others can see in a flash who might be there

A big thank you goes out to Melissa Mockler for correcting some information I gave out in my previous posting. Also a warm welcome to the former editor of Owen Sound Tribune for joining this online community paper which truly belong to us.

As Melissa put it, "One of the keys to success for The Tribune was our many community columnists ..." The Paper was the people's voice. As a column writer for Wiarton, I had many opportunities to meet and talk to people. All of them played an important part in helping the community to grow and stay together. The sense of fullfilment which came from telling their stories cannot be described by words. This is exactly why I am now writing for SBP.

Do you still remember the Owen Sound Tribunes, which only lasted for about a year? For a while, the paper had columnists writing about happenings in different communities. Although that was 8 long years ago, people still remember me as a writer who showed an interest in the community and the people within it. Since Tribunes cancelled the community columns, I have been hoping for a day to arrive when I can once again celebrate with my readers the wonderful things our neighbours have done, and are doing. Given the time and opportunity to contrubute to The South Bruce Peninsular, I am going to pick up from where I left off almost a decade ago.

This website is our community journal, a place to announce our events, share our experiences, a place to tell our story about this place we call home. Everyone is invited to participate, all it costs is your time and effort, and all for the entry price of a free membership.

SBP members can add to this live journal by

• keeping a personal South Bruce Peninsula weblog journal
• posting stories about communities and local events
• share photographs of South Bruce Peninsula
• comment on local and regional news or on other SBP posts.
• contribute website URLs to our news monitors

It’s all about you

This is your story. The Peninsular is written by the people who live here, no one is paid, no one is told what to write, everyone is welcome. Our role is only to collect these stories, to organize them into a living archive that tells the true story of our area.

• Weblog Journal – your membership includes a weblog journal where you can post whatever comes to mind about living here. It can be tips on how to keep the cottage over the winter, craft ideas, recipes, criticism or praise for Town Council … whatever is on your mind and you want to share it, this is the place to do it.

   read more »

Writing for the Peninsular is open to anyone with an idea for a story, and your story can be a review, it can be news, thoughts, ideas, comments, poetry or prose, it's up to you. Our philosophy is that it will all sort itself out in the long run and we're mostly interested to see what happens when people tell their own stories.

But the technology, now that's a different issue. Authoring webpages frightens most people because they just don't want to get it wrong, and if you've ever tried to make a webpage, you know what can happen if you forget to close an emphasis tag or leave off the end of a table column. It's not a pretty sight.

welcome to Textile

Textile is Dean Allen's simple text-to-HTML converter, and by using Textile on all our stories, the Peninsular avoids the techie HTML issue entirely. Textile uses a common set of formatting rules that are natural and easy to remember, and best of all, harmless.

We know most of these codes already, we use them all the time in our email messages. For example, an underscore before or after a word is emphasis and two underscores before and after do the underlined.

• an asterix in the first column is a bullet point
• with the bullet text on the rest of the line

You can also do super and sub script, strikeout and inserts, teletype, citation and strong text.

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