exciting news for 'flannel friday'!

Introducing the Flannel Friday website!
(with apologies for posting a day late)

As 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


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On a personal note, the ladies who run #flannelfriday are just amazing... I've only hosted ONCE but I have plans for lots more flannel and lots more posting this fall. As a library community, we are *so* lucky to have dedicated, passionate people like this in our midst. Long Live Flannel Friday!