Welcome to Your Blog!

Hello Everyone!

   Welcome to your new blog! Please make yourself at home. Maybe we should take a few minutes to introduce ourselves to each other, since we have quite a few new folks signed on here to participate in this endeavor.

   I'm Terry, (tnichlsn) at DailyKos and most other places online. I'm in Boston. and have been here over 20 years now, since finishing graduate school in Albany, NY. I am a Harvard Professor, scientist, very left-leaning progressive, gay, single, bearish type guy who has meandered through this very complicated life we were all born into. I come from a very large, poor/working class, Irish, catholic family. I am out of the closet to my family and at work. I am very pleased to live in the state of Massachusetts where we fired the opening salvo in this battle for full inclusion in life in the US. Embarrassingly, we don't have gender identity protection laws on the books yet. But we are inching towards that inevitability. Governor Patrick has stated his intention to sign the bill when it finally reaches his desk.

   I decided a new blog was in order when it became clear that some Obama supporters on Daily Kos were unwilling to tolerate any criticism of this administration, especially in regard to the President's tepid support of pro-gay measures. While I am grateful for the tentative first steps this Administration has made, I find Obama's ongoing fence-straddling on marriage equality and his foot-dragging on DADT repeal totally unacceptable.

   So please, take a few paragraphs and share with the rest of us a bit about yourselves.

   I'd like to take a few minutes to discuss what I hope to implement here as we gear up to full capacity. This is your blog! I functioned as gatekeeper in the weekly DailyKos series because we needed someone there to kick folks in the pants on a regular basis to keep our regular schedule  of once or twice weekly diaries flowing. That is not the case here. I encourage all of you to publish as often as you like. My job here is simply caretaker. and traffic cop. Like the diary series at DailyKos, any and all content that is GLBTQ relevant is welcome to be shared on our main page during the day. Please, write up anything newsworthy and submit diaries freely. Writing diaries here is actually easier than the same process at DailyKos. The main difference being we don't use a file-sharing service to embed photos. You upload them here directly. (very easy!) Any questions/problems with your diary writing, please contact me directly and I'll try to help you through the procedure. There is a 'New Post' link on the top right menu of the homepage. Select it, making sure beforehand that your browser preferences is set to 'accept 3rd party cookies'. From there you should be good-to-go! Again, don't hesitate to ask questions, no one here is more technologically challenged than I!!!

   Where we will go DailyKos one step better is our approach to community diaries. What we intend we do each evening, 9 PM eastern through the early morning hours here, is clear the deck of all but the evening's scheduled community diary. (a different topic/host each night of the week, on a recurring basis) We do have the ability to push and pull diaries into and out of archives, so we can open up the site exclusively to the featured evening community diary. What these diaries consist of is up to us, but I hope we can all let our hair down and have some fun in these events. Maybe chat glbt sports, or literature or cinema/theater, or culinary arts, etc. We will also have a 'live chat' feature present during these sessions, for real time chat, in addition to the usual bouncing of messages back and forth. So if you are interested in helping us pull a once-a-week, evening diary series together of some concept you're interested in, please contact me. I have no idea how or if this grand scheme for the evenings will work or even be practical, but let's give it a shot.

   I'm not sure what else I need to tell you about our plans for this place. Our place! If you would like to see us feature something here or change something. Please don't hesitate to ask. My main disappointment with the site infrastructure is the way it handles comments, without nesting them, replies following each individual comment, like is done at DailyKos. One way we might get around that is by tailoring your replies to specific comments with a @Terry, to designate a reply to one of my earlier comments. If anyone can come up with a way for us to tweak the system so that we do have the same system as DK, please speak up!

   Thanks again and again, Welcome. Now help us break the place in!

Terry