The all new HiddenbrookeOnline!

With the re-launch of HiddenbrookeOnline we have moved squarely and boldly into the 21^st Century! Our intention was to make HiddenbrookeOnline an easy to use community resource and a place where you can easily find everything you might need about Hiddenbrooke.

Everything that you might have been used to on the old web site is still here. We’ve reorganized the tabs to make navigation easier and we’ve put Neighbors right up front on the home page. For six and a half years, Neighbors was published and mailed six times a year. It was an expensive undertaking that used a lot of paper and created a growing financial risk to the Hiddenbrooke Community Association.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to recruit volunteers to do the work of getting it published and handling the advertising so we started looking for other ways to share information with the community in a way that was relevant, timely and efficient. We also started feeling guilty about all the paper and ink we were using in a time when the trend everywhere is to try to go more green.

We’re right here in the Bay Area, the cradle of the Internet, and that’s when it hit us – why not take the whole thing online?! Just as traditional media is increasingly moving online and it is becoming more difficult to produce printed news anymore, Hiddenbrooke is going with the march of history and moving our information resources to a more interactive medium.

In rebuilding our web site and moving Neighbors online, we’re able to make it more graphic and more interactive. Many of the Neighbors stories will have a section for comments at the end so that registered users will be able to offer their own comments and insights or suggestions. We can insert color photos to the text and link to other online resources when that makes sense. You just can’t do that with a printed newsletter.

And by moving Neighbors online we can provide information that is more timely and relevant to the community. Rather than print an article in a newsletter about something that is going to happen in six weeks, we can tell you about something that is going to happen next weekend!

At the bottom left on the home page we have the link to our HB News group – our Yahoo! Groups community bulletin board. If you’re a registered user of that news group, clicking on the link on our home page will take you straight there to the news group.

The new HiddenbrookeOnline also as some cool features that are intended to connect us more to our community. My personal favorite is the real time data from the Hiddenbrooke weather station. That's right, we have a weather station right here in Hiddenbrooke that feeds data to the National Weather Service. Want to know what the temperature is, the humidity, wind speed or direction? Well, Rick Joslin has installed a very sophisticated weather station at his home and we have the real-time feed right here on our home page!

We have set up a Flickr photo sharing site and we’re pulling those photos in so that we can all share images of our Hiddenbrooke. If you are interested in posting photos on Flickr that will appear on our home page, send me an email with the pictures and we’ll get them posted for you. We need to keep adding pictures so if you have a photo of yourself or friends, livin’ the vida loca here in Hiddenbrooke, we want you to share it with us!

We also have a great calendar feature that enables us to share dates and information that are important to the whole community. What’s on at the club? When is the next social event? Book club meetings, moms groups, we can put it all on the calendar so if it is happening in Hiddenbrooke, we’ll have it here.

We’ve built the new site with very easy to use (and cost effective!) open source coding meaning we didn’t have to buy expensive web-design software or pay huge fees for a sophisticated design. It also means that adding and editing content will be easy for us non-techies and our all-volunteer editorial staff. In the coming months we will continue to tweak the site to make it more interesting and useful and attempt to utilize more of the simple functionality that we have built into it.

As with anything like this, the site will only be as good as we make it…that is “we” as a community, not the royal we! We are hoping that we will have volunteers who will help us with editing and reporting (we need reporters to give us the scoop from Hiddenbrooke). If you’re interested in helping us keep the site up and keep content fresh, please email either Sasha Jain or me and we’ll get you enlisted, trained (if you can send an email you can edit content on this site!) and on the web site staff.

There’s a comment section here at the end of this piece and we’d love to hear from you. Please make sure that you’re a registered user on this site so that you can post your comments. We’d like to have any constructive ideas from you – all we ask is that you be nice and, above all, be patient.

We’re proud of what we’ve done here. For Sasha and I, this has been an adventure, but the end result has made it an enjoyable one. We hope that you will like it and that it will be another asset to this beautiful and friendly place that we all call home.

Kevin Elliott, Hiddenbrooke Community Association