I wanted to take a moment to remind you all about FanPosts.

The best part of Bluebird Banter, at least from where I’m sitting, is reading the opinions of others (as opposed to the worst part which is staring at a blank story editor screen trying to think of something to post). Our FanPost area is suffering from neglect of late. I’d love to see more posts.

How do you put together a Fanpost? Well, first click on the link to the editor, you can find the links on the right side of the page, the FanPost list. At the bottom there will be a button saying “+ POST YOUR OWN”. Here, I’ll point to it with a pretty red arrow.

FanPosts are for you to write your opinions on the Blue Jays or baseball. I think there is a 75 word minimum on FanPosts. But, if you are like most of us you’ll blow way past 75 words.

If you hit the Fanpost link, you’ll see this:

Fill in that pretty white space will what you want to tell us.

Some suggestions:

• Give it a catchy headline, get us interested in reading it.
• Use capital letters at the start of sentences. Break it up into paragraphs. If you write 1000 words and it is all one paragraph, one big block of words, odds our it won’t be read. Make it as reader friendly as possible.
• If you Twitter, use the Twitter box to Tweet it out to your followers.
• There are some tools to help you format. You can make words Bold, you can italicize, cross out words,

You can use the fancy quote box, if you are quoting someone.

You can

use

different

sizes

of font, perhaps to do sub-headlings.

• If you write your post in Word you there is a little box (with the ‘w’) and if you hit it, a little window will open that you can paste your story into and it will fix the formatting to make Word work nicely with the story editor.

Beyond all that, if you have any troubles, you can email your friendly blog manager and he can give you a hand.

What should you write about?

Anything that interests you, as long as it is Blue Jays and/or baseball related. A few suggestions:

• Don’t copy and paste a post from somewhere else. If someone else owns the copyright, our ever vigilant mods will delete the post, hopefully before I hear from our humorless wonderful lovely lawyers. The same goes for pictures included in your post, don’t borrow them off another site. Much better to link the post you like.
• Remember you are writing for pretty knowledgeable people. be prepared to back up your arguments.
• Have a thick skin. Honest, if you aren’t ready for your position to be challenged, maybe this isn’t the place for you to write. I’ve had several emails from people saying ‘your readers don’t like me’, and I’ll go look at the post and think ‘no they like you fine, they just didn’t agree with you’. Understand that people won’t always agree. And really, if we all agreed, our comment threads would be pretty boring. I put that in bold because I don’t want to get that email again.
• Join in the comment thread for your post. That’s the fun of it and, who knows, you might learn something and make some friends.
• No politics or religion.
• And, maybe add race to the list of forbidden subjects.

The good part about doing FanPosts here is we have a pretty decent sized audience. We’ve had FanPosts that have received thousands of pageviews. It is a lot more fun to write for a large audience compared to writing for a handful of people.

We try to move the best of the FanPosts to the front page, as they are a little hidden.

I love reading the FanPosts. I’d love to read more of them.