************* GRAND OPENING *************

WELCOME TO MY NEW BLOG!  

BIENVENUE SUR MON NOUVEAU BLOG !  ¡ BIENVENIDO A MI NUEVO BLOG!

Hip Hooray and Hip Hoorah!! Construction on the new Blog Site has been finished and it is open for business! Monsieur Henri finished his decorating touches late last night and the doors are officially open. Still a little tweaking to do and many, many nature photos to add and put up on the walls, but the form is set, walls are up, concrete has hardened, the paint is dry, burlap window coverings replaced and we are set to Rock & Roll.

To borrow from the Beatles—“Having been some days in preparation, a splendid time is guaranteed for all.”

Are you a regular follower of blogs? If so, you probably know the drill. If not, come on in and let me give you a quick tour and show you around!

Here are the key features and why I set it up—

You can sign up to follow my new blog in one of two ways, either thru a WordPress blog of your own if you have one, or thru your email address. If you sign up using your email address (free, no charge), then you will receive a notification in your email inbox every time I post a new blog entry. There is a quick and easy link in the right-hand column to do this.

By signing up for email notifications, it makes it so much easier to keep track of things, not needing to remember to visit the blog every day to see if there is anything new, and no longer having to worry about whether my Facebook entries show up in your news feed anymore as Facebook continues to tweak and play around with their settings about who receives what posts from friends and pages they follow. Or, if someone does not visit Facebook for a few days, a story post may be buried way down the news feed and never found. Serialized stories like the “Ozarks Ostrich Crisis” will be much easier to follow and keep track of this way, with readers not having to page down and then back up my Facebook page trying to follow along. And in much easier to read formatting. Serialized stories will be in the new post section on the front page with each entry, while also cumulatively building on their own separate page to make reading installments in order very simple now.

Little Red Bear and I didn’t want anyone having to struggle to keep up or missing out on his adventures, so registering with the new blog page insures you are notified of every new post right in your email. And again—it’s free. A note however- if you sign up to follow by email, you will receive a confirmation email first from WordPress, verifying that you did register to follow my blog. That confirmation link in the email MUST be clicked to finalize your registration or it will not activate. It’s a safety check to protect you and verify that you did sign up to follow.

Please do not worry about providing your email address for privacy issues. WordPress, the host of my blog, does not spam. And I do not have any plans to do a newsletter or any other kind of direct mailings to bother you in the future because I already have an active newsletter set up in my eBay store for people to subscribe to, and I have no more time for anything else.

Creatively, the blog format allows me to enter photos within the body of the text, rather than just grouped at the end. And the ability to caption each photo. In the coming months, I plan to share the step by step construction of a few bears, wire wraps and other things from time to time, and this will make it clearer and easier to follow a project along from start to finish.

Another feature you will find is a page entitled “Short Works and Free Reads”, where I can share a selection of my stories and other writing work over time, and the works will stay there, always easily accessible for rereading or referring back to at a later date, not disappearing way down my Facebook page out of sight and memory.

An “Old Glory Creations” page has been set up, to display photos of bears, raggedy dolls, and other creations I make for my store as time goes on. Sadly, the majority of my bear and other photos were lost when a computer was fried by a lightning strike a few years ago. But as new bears and other things are made now, and many more are on the way in the next few weeks, they will be able to be added to the gallery for everyone to see.

For all photos on the site– If you “click” on the photo, the photo will enlarge for better viewing. To return to where you were, just click the browser “back arrow button” to return to the page you were on. A really neat feature!

Another photo gallery you will find is “Mother Nature’s Gallery”. This page will be devoted to displaying unusual or uncommon critters, plants, birds and such mentioned in the Little Red Bear and other stories. This too, will be an ever-growing collection over time. I recognize that not everyone may know what a Queen Anne’s Lace looks like, or a Brown Thrasher, or a Bloodroot plant, or Indian Paintbrush, or Pin Oak Tree, or Rabbitbrush, or Red-eared Slider (a turtle), etc. Since the Little Red Bear stories are intended to be somewhat educational as well as entertaining, as these types of things are mentioned in my stories I will try to find photos of them to include in Mother Nature’s Gallery so readers and children can easily refer to them. A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say. I am always on the lookout for great bird, animal, wildflower, tree, farm and other images to include, so if you might have and be willing to share images for others to see I would be honored to include them. Just let me know at any time. And keep checking back to see new ones as they are added.

A fun feature the new blog allows for is “Polling”. Sometimes I just get stuck or run out of ideas. Or want to have fun. What to name a character in a story? What color eyes to put in a bear- black or brown? Antique shoe-button eyes or glass? What color pads for this bear- light brown or dark brown? The name of a new river or lake or mountain or town in a story? What color vest is this character wearing in a story? Things like that. You will be able to vote on the blog page when such choices come up now and then and help influence a story or other creation to join in the fun.

There is a place to leave a comment at the top of each post, beside the date. There is also an area at the bottom of every other page to leave a reply. I encourage you to do so. Little Red Bear loves to hear feedback on his adventures, and a compliment is always worth another 10,000 words for me.

If you have a comment or question, please never hesitate to contact me thru email. There is a form provided at the bottom of my blog’s About Me page for that purpose. Maybe it is something that I can answer in a post for everyone’s benefit, and we can make the blog interactive in that way, too.

Several links are provided for easy access in the right side column. There you will find links to my “about.me” page for more information about me personally (and different from the “About Jim’s Blog” link at the top of the page), my Author’s Facebook page, my eBay store should you like to pay a visit there, links to follow and/or tweet me directly on Twitter, and to sign up to follow the blog. There is also a link to visit my son Matthew’s blog page. As some may know, he is also a writer with several books available on Amazon. At the bottom of the right side column you will find a list and links to other blogs that I myself follow.

Links are also provided after every post to allow you to easily share the entry on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+, or to email to a friend. Please feel free to share posts and other things.

I have never assembled anything this complex online myself before, and am delighted and proud of how it all came out. And a big bear hug for my son Matthew, who consulted and helped me over some of the more technical hurdles to get this finished.

If you enjoy your visit, and I surely hope you do, Red and I would sincerely appreciate you telling your friends and family about us.

Thanks as always for reading and following along, and I hope you visit often!– Jim (and Red!)