Getting Started - Replacing the Newsletter

At Arizona TPI, I've published a newsletter for quite a long time and hopefully you've seen one or more of these and found them to be useful or interesting or at least not horribly boring. For a couple of years, I published it like clockwork, on or about the 15th of each month. But writing a newsletter like I was doing is time consuming. You have to come up with several ideas to write about and then actually write about them. And, the way I did it was to fit it all on to one page so it looked a bit like the front page of a newspaper. Of course doing that requires that you write enough to fill the page but that you don't write so much that you don't have room for it all. It makes me appreciate newspaper columnists that write a column every day and make it fit into a predefined space.

So, the writing of this newsletter became something of a burden on my time even though I really like putting the articles together and sending out what I hope will be useful information to our customers. But because each newsletter was a big project, it started to get published less frequently and sometimes we'd go for months at a time without sending one. So much for keeping the customers informed and up-to-date on what's going on at Arizona TPI!

I was looking for a better (read that easier) way to accomplish my goal of providing useful information to our customers. After our last newsletter, my lovely and talented sister who was kind enough to be a subscriber and who also, apparently, actually reads the newsletters called me and suggested that I write a blog. She pointed out that I could do the same thing as far as providing information but could do it in smaller pieces. Actually, each blog entry could be very small or large, as necessary to cover the topic. No fitting things on a page! We talked for quite a while about this and it started to sound pretty good. So, thanks (or blame, as you see fit) to my sister, here's the beginning of a blog that will replace our sometimes monthly newsletters. Unlike this first post, hopefully you'll find it full of useful and interesting information!