The New Cascadian

Jul 2, 2020 Advocacy
Excerpt from The Cascadian.

In compiling The Compleat Cascadian, I had a realization similar to Gretchen Westlight’s when she rebooted the newsletter after several years hiatus. I miss having a place where memories of community life are captured in the amber of a publication medium.

Newsletters are mostly passé these days and, sadly, we’re engulfed by the culture of TL;DR. Our attention spans are shriveling.

I believe the best medium for a communal diary these days is a weblog, and wouldn’t you know it, CascadiaCommons.com is powered by WordPress, and WordPress happens to be the most popular blogging platform; by far. A blog can have many contributors, just like the old newsletter, and there are editorial roles to publish posts submitted by contributors. It’s pretty slick.

Free at last!

Rather than being issue focused (as in vol 9. Issue 7), I envision the weblog as a gentle stream of content, trickling here and babbling there. No pressure, no deadlines, 100% guilt free. And, where the old Cascadian was internally distributed and shared with some other communities, I’m proposing that we feature this on our website under what is now the Stories link in our site header. Yup, let’s bring The Cascadian out of the communal closet.

Here is what the new Stories page can look like. Content for the posts was snatched from our Facebook page or created by me. As new posts come in, the older posts roll on down, with the top post a sticky one to act as an introduction. Feel free to share your thoughts just below my bio in the comments section of this post. Note that you can’t post comments from the blog roll page, only from within a post.

About David Chilstrom

Born in Portland, Oregon; I’ve also lived in Boise Idaho, Seattle WA, and Colorado. My work life has mostly revolved around publishing in some form or another. I’ve worked decades as a printer and moved to digital publishing as a web, ebook, and database developer. I’ve lived communally most of my life, as a founding member of the Still Meadow community in Damascus, Oregon, at Sunrise Ranch near Loveland, Colorado and, since 2012, I’ve lived at Cascadia Commons with my partner Sue Staehli.
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9 comments on “The New Cascadian”

  1. I think this is a really exciting new way to stay connected share memories and talk about life in Cascadia. Thank you to David Chilstrom for getting this set up. I have hopes of contributing sometime in the future.

    I have one request /suggestion that we keep it to Cascadia related posts things that Cascadians are doing or feel. We can share articles and post about other things on Facebook and other platforms.. So let’s not dilute this. I noticed that on Facebook I like a lot of other people spend time sharing other articles rather than talking about what’s really important to us in the present moment. I was prompted to share this after seeing that someone had posted a link to an article by Bill Gates on the pandemic.

    • I placed a widget at the bottom of the post which showed the last two comments, hence the duplication. Removed it.

    • I can give contributor logins for people who want to be able to submit articles and can give a quick tutorial via Zoom to get folks up and running.

  4. I think this is a fabulous idea. I’ve contributed to the Cascadian in the past and would love to do more; meeting deadlines is not my strong suit so this suits me. Can we post pictures here? You will be here to moderate, right? We need a leader.

    • Photos, YouTube videos, Google Albums and more can be easily added. And yes, I’m not going anywhere soon. Also, there are three relevant roles for blog posts:

      Contributors can submit posts for review
      Authors can submit posts without review
      Editors can approve, tweak, and publish posts submitted by Contributors

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