Upstart of the Ara/Pinto Market Newsletter

Sandra Hugus wrote:

I used to enjoy putting out the snail mail version of the Ara/Pinto Market Newsletter (A/PMN). But it was way too costly to get printed and mailed. Eventually, I had to give it up.

I still love to hear from people, and will always enjoy editing their comments into articles. This summer, one of my goals was to create a web version that could operate in my more restricted time frame.

I am getting serious about reviving A/PMN. Do I have your permission to use your comments, as you always have neat things to say on various topics?

If so, I am trying to think how to translate the style of thing I did when I used comments in the old A/PMN. There, I ran ads for folks. Here I host web pages, at $5.00 per month per page, do html coding at $50.00 for first set-up and $5.00 per minor changes, edit video tapes into movies, and will shortly hopefully know a method for setting a player on that web page, so folks who want to can view them there.

I have set up a "permission" folder to store people's preferences in. Nobody who does not have an entry there will be quoted from directly.

In the old newsletter, I put folks' name, then their farm name (if any) and their state, listed by zip code abbreviation, or country when foreigners were involved.

Here, I am thinking, either 1) name, email address. 2) Name, farm name, email address. 3) Name, farm name, state, email address, depending on how much information about themselves the folks want to release.

I have been mulling over privacy issues and the horror stories I am sure you have all read about email stalkers.

On the flip side, OUR SCHOOL LIBRARIAN has just married a man she met in a chat room! How extraordinary! I agree that her former husband is rather unstable, and she is better off without him, but the speed with which this happened has left me breathless! So, the internet is not ALL scary. I've met her new husband, and he wins my vote of approval, (even though that is unimportant in the larger scale of things.)

So, I decided I would just let people decide how comfortable they were with it, and put in even "cb style" handles in place of names, if they preferred. (You'll know when I am REALLY good, as those options will appear as little radio buttons you can just click on.)

If you wish to be contacted, yet remain anomymous, Mary Hunter, Arran Collies, KS, had an excellent suggestion. Go out to some free web mail place like yahoo.com and sign up for a different email address to field the stuff from here (if any! I have no idea how often folks will bother to respond to people listed.) You can't link to her directly, even though she is neat folks to talk with; she hasn't gotten me her new email address yet...

So, for now, permission? And specify what form would you like your material to be listed under.

(It helps me out if you type it just the way you want it to appear, as I can then just copy and paste, which avoids the ever-present typos, which I am really prone toward! Please use one of the formats listed above.)

The little "last updated (date)" tag tells when the newest item in a column was posted. Those with titles and no tags mean, I have the neat material, but not the time to get the column up yet, or am waiting for permissions to return!

The new foals column on the on-line version of the A/PMN will be headed "Pegasus Report".

"Bustin' Our Buttons" will report show goings on.

I am switching "On Names" to "The Name Game".

"False Advertising". (Obvious what that is about, or IS it?)

If you ever send something that you DON'T want to see in print, simply mark it, and I will NOT use it. (I would not recommend putting that one in the message board, however...)

I do not guarantee to USE everything, nor to meet a certain time frame, but having a variety of comments from folks is what keeps them coming back. It is interesting.