Writers Needed, II

In my earlier piece about soliciting writers for the new Back Porch site, which I hope and envision can be a basis for a future Greensboro or Guilford County based Wikipedia of sorts (now you have to admit, that would be cool), I left out music and move and book reviews in my list. And it would be especially cool to highlight such works by local writers and artists and poets, don’t you think? I also left our Greensboro architecture as a category, but that would make for a great category as well. I also didn’t mention bike riding – best mountain bike trails, road bike routes, etc. Shoot, I probably haven’t thought of the half of it.

Did I mention photos? Seriously, if any of you out there have digitized photos ((whether from a digital camera or scanned from a print), or even if you have appropriate prints I could scan, we are looking for good shots of life in Greensboro and Guilford County, (people, plants, and critters), as well as cool shots of buildings or landscapes. I’d love to include them. You can e-mail them or drop them by. If need be I can convert them to jpeg and to the right file size.

Ok, here is the deal. I can piss and moan about the problems here with our leadership and local politics ‘til the cows come home. I can jump in and try to help fix things politically, but I don’t think I’d be very good at that. This project is a positive thing I really want to do for our community, something good I can contribute. But I don’t know enough about enough things to do it myself. If you help me, I’ll help you back with links to your sites and bios and the like.

Fore those that missed the first installment of this appeal, here it is:

A while back I threw out the idea of developing a local Wikepedia. A few people thought it was a cool idea, but there was not quite enough interest to get traction. I’m still interested.

In the mean time, we are in the process of moving our Back Porch site to a different platform, using the open source web based software called Web Site Baker.

Starting this week and over the next week I will moving all the good content from the old Back Porch site over to the new one – it’s a document by document process, but it’s worth it.

As far as some future local Wikepedia project, this could form the foundation of it. I want this site to be a help and resource for people moving to Greensboro, for school children, for people who just want to know more about where they live.

So…if you like to write, and would like to put up some articles, you retain copyright, and links back to your web sites, etc. We are looking for writings about local history, geography, culture, arts, music festivals, plants and animals, places to hike and canoe near Guilford County, restaurant reviews, fun facts, tall tales, gardening, gardening calendars and stories, biographies of ordinary and famous and infamous individuals from here, etc. I am sure there are many categories I have not included in this list.

And another thing – pictures. Wow, could we ever use pictures of Greensboro and Guilford County. We would give all due credit again, and as much as possible provide links back to your sites.

If you’d like to see a first draft of what the new site will look like you can have a peek at http://bp.covenantfellowshipgreensboro.org/. This is just developmental. The URL will be simply backporch.org once we move to the new server. This is a developmental URL only.

Any writers out there interested?

Joel