The Future of Feministing!
As Feministing approaches its fourth year anniversary (April 2008!), the gals and I have been giving a lot of thought to the future of the site and what we’d like to accomplish.
I know we’ve alluded before to big changes on the site, and we were waiting for the right moment when we had everything together, to announce them. So here’s the deal, dear readers.
We’re doing a redesign–hopefully to be completed by the new year–that will change Feministing from a blog to a community site where readers and commenters can create their own profiles, blogs, and more. It’s going to bad ass. Here’s just a sampling of stuff that Feministing readers will be able to do when the upgrade is complete:
Create personalized profile pages with (if you’d like)personal info like a photo, interests, your location; a list of all of your comments; a list of posts, forums, and comments that you recommend;
Create your own blog housed on Feministing (if you’re unfamiliar with diaries, check out sites like DailyKos and MyDD) that other readers and commenters will have access to;
Rate posts and comments that you like, and see Feministing posts and diaries that are highly recommended by other users.
And so much more.
We’re really excited about this, because it means that we’ll be community-building, not just blogging. Now, anyone can sign up to create their own diary–but as part of our ongoing effort to bridge online and “real life” activism, we’re also going to be inviting certain women’s organizations to start diaries that we’ll highlight on Feministing. We’re hoping that this will not only help to shine a light on the important work that women are doing across the country, but that it will also get these organizations more involved in online work. But most importantly, we want to do this upgrade so that we can open up Feministing to everyone who wants to get involved. Whether it’s writing a blog, advocating for an organization, or just reading–we want Feministing to be a one-stop online activism shop.
Here’s where you come in. Part of the reason we started taking more ads was so we could afford this upgrade and, in the future, start to pay our writers and tech folk (who do this all for free). We’ve estimated that the upgrade (software and pay for techies) is going to cost us around 5k–no small amount. So were asking for your help. If you come to Feministing and enjoy our content, please, consider making a donation. We want to create the best site that we can for our readers, but we can’t do it alone. If you can’t make a donation, consider sending our call for cash out to feminist friends.
All of us here hope you’re as excited as we are about the upcoming changes to Feministing. We’ll be answering questions in comments about the upgrade–so feel free to ask away.
Thanks, as always, for all of your support. It’s the readers and commenters of Feministing that inspired this move, and we wouldn’t be anywhere without you. Kisses.
Posted by Jessica at 03:33 PM | in Feministing | Comments (47) | TrackBacks (0) Share this post:
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