Coming soon: the Caferati blog, Version 2

As some of you—very few, alas—have noticed, we have temporarily closed the Caferati blog.

Why? Well, we found that some posts on the blog had never appeared on the forum. It seemed to us like some members were now completely ignoring the forum that is this blog's home. Many others hadn't posted for over a year. And we think that some of what was posted is really rather far from being the best of Caferati.

So we did a rethink.

The blog will soon reopen in a new avataar, one that will bring back its initial focus, to be a Caferati showcase to the world. The moderators, with a selected team of curators/editors* (which we will announce soon), will select what we think is the best writing from the forum and post those to the blog. (The posting page on the forum has been changed to notify all members about this.)

In other words, the only writing that will appear on the blog from now on will be writing that has been selected and voted for by the curating team.

Of course, since many of the original members were invited to the blog because we liked their writing, we're sure you will continue to read work by some of your favourites.

Thanks

Peter (and also for Annie and Manisha)

Update:

Meet the new curators of this blog:
Ashwini Ailawadi
Rohinton Daruwala
Peter Griffin
Priyanka Joseph
Manisha Lakhe
Sridala Swami
Anita Vasudeva
Annie Zaidi

Posting will start soon.

Closed

This blog is closed. Perhaps temporarily. Perhaps not.

The story so far

Caferati is just over a month old, and we've grown.
From one solitary member nagging everyone else to join in, there are eight on the rolls as of today, with another half-dozen who will hopefully pick up their invites and get blogging soon.
From the stray visits that were the result of the previously mentioned nag emotionally blackmailing people into dropping by, we now average around 25 unique visitors each day, with close to 700 total visits and over 1500 page views over August.
From announcements, we quickly moved to animated discussions, spirited arguments and best of all, original creative work.
We have also been linked to by a few popular blogs, and hopefully, as word spreads (please carpet-bomb your email lists with the URL), that list will grow too.
You'll soon see a bunch of posts from the works read at our last real world meet. Your comments are welcome, as usual, whether or not you're a Caferati member (unless you see no 'Comment' button, which means the contributor concerned has turned comments off, which means s/he doesn't want any).

Invitations to join the blogging team are open to all who ask, subject to a quick vote from the existing members. Take a look at the paragraph of text on the top of the left column, and if you think you'd like to be a contributor, mail caferati at gmail.com (or contact any of the contributors via their profile pages) to let us know you'd like to join in. read this post.

Subscribe to our newsgroup

Anyone can join our news group (Click on the link, and then sign up). We use this newsgroup only to send important announcements. You should enter the address CaferatiUpdates AT googlegroups DOT com into your address book to prevent messages from being blocked by your spam filters.

We also have a Contests mailing list, which we use to announce contest that we run or collaborate with other entities to run. Just go to the URL and sign up. Anyone can join this group without being approved. You should enter the address Caferati-Contests AT googlegroups DOT com into your address book to prevent messages from being blocked by your spam filters.

Update (September 2006): Caferati Listings is a newsletter that informs subscribers about opportunities for writers: jobs, calls for entries to contests, calls for submissions from publishers, and so on. You can read more about it here.

You can be assured that we do not sell or share addresses on these groups with any other organisations or individuals.

[If you'd like to keep in touch with Caferati members in your city, join that city's newsgroup. Details on the sidebar, on our
Ryze board and on our website.]

Publicising Caferati

For those of you who'd like to promote this blog, the website, and the network, here's some graphics and code you can use.

You don't have to copy the images, the code will pull the images from my photobucket account. Feel free to use these on your non-Ryze pages and your blogs as well.

If you want to copy the images to your own online storage, you're welcome. In fact that would be nice, because there'd be less load on my account. Just remember to change the html accordingly.

For this image and link, use this code: <a href="http://caferati.blogspot.com/"><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v30/zigzackly/cafe/iBlogAtCaferati.gif" alt="I Blog @ Caferati" width="197" height="112" border="0"></a>

For this image and link, use this code: <a href="http://www.caferati.com/"><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v30/zigzackly/cafe/36CaferatiCom.gif" alt="Caferati.com" width="121" height="34" border="0"></a>

For this image and link, use this code: <a href="http://www.caferati.com/"><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v30/zigzackly/cafe/48CaferatiCom.gif" alt="Caferati.com" width="163" height="41" border="0"></a>

For this image and link, use this code: <a href="http://www.caferati.com/"><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v30/zigzackly/cafe/60CaferatiCom.gif" alt="Caferati.com" width="204" height="56" border="0"></a>

For this image and link, use this code: <a href="http://www.caferati.com/"><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v30/zigzackly/cafe/72CaferatiCom.gif" alt="Caferati.com" width="244" height="78" border="0"></a>

Coffee, Conversation, Creativity Caferati.com

For this image and link, use this code: <a href="http://caferati.com/"><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v30/zigzackly/cafe/stain2.gif" width="151" height="146" border="0"><br>Coffee, Conversation, Creativity <br>Caferati.com</a>

Enter the contest!

For this image and link, use this code : <a href="http://www.caferati.com/SATCT-V1.htm"><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v30/zigzackly/cafe/48SatCT.gif" width="363" height="46" border="0"><br>Enter the contest!</a>

For this image and link, use this code : <a href="http://www.caferati.com/"><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v30/zigzackly/cafe/logoBigWhiteBG.jpg" width="358" height="227" border="0"></a>

For this image and link, use this code : <a href="http://www.caferati.com/"><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v30/zigzackly/cafe/logoSmallWhiteBG.jpg" width="179" height="114" border="0"></a>

Any suggestions for more images?
Good cheer and lazy weekends to you all.
p