Cohousing Now! issue #1

Well, we did it! Unfortunately, its a good news and bad news kind of thing!

First, the Good News

The inaugural issue of Cohousing Now! was released on the same day that Barack Obama became President Obama*. The first issue was entirely hand-built, basically flat HTML that was carefully crafted on the cohousing website and then turned into email for the issue.

Now, the Bad News

During the broadcast our ISP's Server had severe memory problems... the email broadcast had display problems for some of our thousands of readers. Instead of black, orange, and blue text on a white background, they received black and blue text on a very dark background... we received lots of very nice emails telling us about this - or asking about the display problem... how disappointing to have this come up!

Since the Jan 20, 2009 issue, we spent about a week working through the issue, testing and retesting. We ended up hiring an expert programmer to help us figure out how to fix the memory problems which have been continuing.

What's Coming Soon!

1. The second issue of Cohousing Now! is almost complete. This time, the content is about 70% automated, so if we actually do get it to work properly, there is much less chance that we'll have problems in the future. This also means that it will take less labor to craft a new issue, which will allow us to create and broadcast more frequently - that's right, more Cohousing, Now!
2. A small group of Cohousing Activists have started working on something big, really big... on a National level. Our efforts are not quite ready to share, but I'm terribly excited about it... Want a hint? Its related to the new Cohousing Movement's Blog.

As always, more to come...

* A number of cohousing communities had fun as they celebrated with Inaugural Parties!