Intro­duc­ing the Flan­nel Fri­day website!

As many of you know, Anne at So Tomor­row has been an amaz­ing man­ager and archiver of Flan­nel Fri­day infor­ma­tion for the past year. Anne and her hus­band are expect­ing their first baby in June (con­grat­u­la­tions Anne!) so we wanted to give her a break from Flan­nel Fri­day dur­ing her mater­nity leave. So this spring, Anne and Mel from Mel’s Desk and a small group of old and new Flan­nel Friday-ers worked to cre­ate a new web home for Flan­nel Friday.

Here’s the link! http://flannelfridaystorytime.blogspot.com

The new site will be the home of the Round Up Sched­ule, the archives, FAQs about Flan­nel Fri­day, infor­ma­tion about how to get involved with Flan­nel Fri­day, and links to help new mem­bers get started with social net­work­ing and blog­ging. There will also be a link to the week’s Round Up, but the Round Up will con­tinue to be hosted on indi­vid­ual blogs. We’ll just point to each Round Up from the site.

Refin­ing the Round Up Procedure

The Flan­nel Fri­day com­mu­nity has grown con­tin­u­ously over the year, with new blog­gers, new Round Up Hosts, and new mem­bers every week on Face­book, Pin­ter­est, and Twit­ter. We are build­ing an amaz­ing com­mu­nity and are grate­ful to each and every one of you for your par­tic­i­pa­tion and enthu­si­asm. As the group has grown, you’ve prob­a­bly noticed that so have the Round Ups! We’ve seen an inevitable increase in missed links and gen­eral con­fu­sion as the Round Ups are com­piled. We thought that the launch of the new site was a great oppor­tu­nity to take a page from other round ups in the blo­gos­phere and estab­lish one sin­gle method for build­ing the Round Up each week.

This infor­ma­tion will be in the FAQs on the new site, but here’s our new strat­egy in a nutshell:

Every week the Round Up Host will pub­lish a “place­holder” post for the Round Up on the host blog at 10pm EST on Thurs­day.
Each blog­ger who wants to par­tic­i­pate in the Round Up will make a com­ment to the Round Up post with the link back to their Flan­nel Fri­day post by 10pm EST on Fri­day.
This will be the only place to post links for the Round Up! This way the Host won’t have to worry about check­ing Face­book or Twit­ter as well.
If a blog­ger can’t make the 10pm EST dead­line on Fri­day, we’ll ask that the post be held for the next week’s Round Up.
The Round Up Host will gather links from the Round Up post com­ments through­out the day, and pub­lish the Round Up at the end of the day.

We hope this will make the Round Ups eas­ier to cre­ate and eas­ier to con­tribute to! We’ll look for­ward to your feed­back over the next few weeks. Sharon / @ReadingChick at Rain Makes Apple­sauce has the Round Up this week, 5/11, so she’s going to try out the new pro­ce­dure with us and see how it goes!

If you have ques­tions or com­ments, don’t hes­i­tate to share them via the new Flan­nel Fri­day email: flan­nel­board­fri­day [at] gmail.com.

Thanks for all you do to to make Flan­nel Fri­day more than a blog event–but a great com­mu­nity too. Here’s to the next great year of Flan­nel Friday!