As you have probably noticed, life on this web site has slowed somewhat the last few months. Those of you who know me personally are probably aware that we're dealing with serious family health issues at Cruiskeen Lawn, and that has made it difficult to get a lot of work done, much less make long-range plans.

You may have noted that postings have been slow recently. I am off in Chicago at the LION Publisher Summit at Columbia College. This is always a great experience for learning the latest in technology, strategy, and everything else about publishing local independent news.

You may or may not have found yourself sitting on the porch on a beautiful summery/fallsy day like today, and asked yourself "How can I help out that nice Wis.Community site?" Well, maybe not, but the fact of the matter is that I'm going to tell you anyway. 

It's been there for a while, but I thought I would point out the Chippewa Valley Tweetstorm on the front page at https://www.wis.community. It brings together the tweets of lots of people in the Chippewa Valley and across Wisconsin.  Go take a look!

In preparation for tonight's Planning Meeting, I've put together a slideshow about some of the goals for this site, where we've been and where I hope we are going. I'm putting up a copy of the slide show to give you some idea of what the first half of tonight's meeting will be like and  what the current plans are.  We're hoping that members of the community will show up tonight and give us their ideas. We will be meeting at 6:30 at Lazy Monk Brewery in Eau Claire.

We're working on incorporating a few more collaborative tools into the site. One has appeared on the front page this afternoon.  There is a "what we're reading" section on the front page. This is a test at setting up ways for people to contribute more content.  We will be inviting some of our editors and contributors to mark articles on the web that they have found interesting, and to contribute them into our team collection of interesting stories.  

We are sponsoring our first Wis.Community community film showing. We hope to do more of these in the coming months - films that enlighten and entertain, and that will not show in local theaters otherwise.

LOOK & SEE is a cinematic portrait of farmer and writer Wendell Berry. Through his eyes, we see both the changing landscapes of rural America in the era of industrial agriculture and the redemptive beauty in taking the unworn path.

We just dropped in some weather widgets on the site - you'll see one on the right hand side of the front page. These are IP-enabled weather widgets, so they will show you the weather in whatever location the internet gods decide you are in when looking at the site.  If the gods are wrong, just tell it where you want it to look.  If you click on the little Willy Weather logo on the bottom you'll be taken to a full-page weather forecast with radar, etc. 

For those of you who use the Meetup app to schedule events, we're working on importing events from Meetup. This is working fairly well, and we just imported the first batch. Basically this is based on Meetup's rules for what is an "active" Meetup event, which means that the meetup needs to have members and at least 3 people signed up to go to the event.