Member Spotlight

Today, we posted our very first member spotlight feature on the front page. Congratulations to valued forum member Oakleys Girl and her horse Oakley!

The member spotlight is just one of the many new features we would like to add to Canadian Neigh to benefit and highlight some great Canadian horsemen and women across our nation.

If you have suggestions for other ways that we can recognize and applaud people who lead exemplary lives as equestrians in Canada, please email us so that we can give them the recognition they deserve! As always, our email is admin@canadianneigh.com and we want to hear from you!

Suggestions, such as FREE horse classifieds (a member based suggestion - we knew we wanted to go in a different direction with our classifieds but not sure what that direction was!), are greatly appreciated and every single one is considered.

We look forward to more opportunities to serve you in the coming year!

Thanks to everyone for your patronage and support as we develop this member inspired resource!

FREE CLASSIFIEDS!

We are so excited to be able to offer completely FREE Canada horse classifieds now! Our FREE ads include 3 photos and generous write-up space.

The suggestion was submitted by a user, and stands to prove that we DO listen to feedback - to the best of our ability. It was a suggestion that more than made sense that just had not occured to us before. We want to make this site as user friendly and relevant to our users as possible, so we do, honestly, take every single suggestion into consideration.

We are still working away at our new directory software and putting together our Featured Member or Horse article for the month (it will run through til the end of March because it was so late being put together this time).

We are also considering a photo contest, which we have orchestrated in the past, but is very time consuming. We may end up having a seasonal photo contest -- Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall - or perhaps twice yearly - Spring/Summer, Winter/Fall. There are some administration end housekeeping things that need to be completed before we can afford time to run anything new.

Thanks again for your patronage, everyone!

Working, working!

We are currently toying with the idea of a new directory script.

Currently, the directory we use is manually updated, which is a huge pain - some people who have tried to submit links over the last few months may have noticed a serious lag in the time between submitting and the time they actually recieve the reciept email stating that they have been listed.

Our hope is to find a script (we are currently testing some out to see how they fit with our requirements) that will automatically submit the links to the directory and all we will have to do is a simple "accept/reject" click, and then it appears on the page. This would make our life significantly easier, but we have the problem of links we have already got in our directory.

Do we submit all of the links manually on our own, using the emails listed in the contacts of the pages we are submitting, including a note about what is happening?

Or do we extend email invitations to those who already have links in our directories? We could potentially lose lots of links if we leave it up to site owners to re-submit.

The links currently in our directory were previously gathered both by submission and solicitation (well, sort of: we found websites, added them to our roster, and then sent emails indicating that we had and that we would like a reciprocal link) - we recieved many replies to our solicitation emails, but did not recieve emails from all of them. Further, it would be time extensive to email out an invitation to everyone currently listed (we know how time intensive this is as we are currently going through the links in our directory to invite those with stallions to submit them to the Stallion Showcase).

Some food for thought, anyhow. The new directory script won't be ready for over a month, but we can certainly put some thought into it now.

Welcome to the new blog!

This blog is meant to be an outlet for administrators of the website canadianneigh.com to report technical difficulties, additions to the site, and various other news as we see fit.

For those who don't know yet, Canadian Neigh is a website devoted to horse lovers in Canada (though we have a wide network of "friends" in other countries, too!). The site features a forum, a classifieds section, a directory, a stallion showcase, and occasional articles written by both community members and administration. The site is designed to be a "by you, FOR you" site and is largely driven by user submitted content and creative ideas.

The site has been run on a shoestring budget (or less!) for two years as of October 2008, by a couple of hardworking Canadian equestriennes, and continues to plug on by selling extremely affordable and competitively priced advertising to relevant advertisers (farms, tack shops, etc) to help cover running costs. The administration is not paid for running the site, all profits turn around and are used for bettering the site.