Many thanks to all who have been posting letterboxes! We web hosts
for LbNA are very excited to see the positive spirit and the growth
in this wonderful pastime. Everyone has been great about posting
boxes with the info that makes our lives easier and we truly
appreciate it. The LbNA links and courtesy cluepages are done the old
fashioned way, by hand, one at a time, by volunteers: anticipating
ever-increasing quantities of letterboxes with spring, I hope you
don't mind if I mention some reminders of what helps us get your
letterboxes posted from the yahoogroup to the LbNA links pages: these
are not meant to be didactic "do it our way" rules, but rather
suggestions for what helps us help you. Some letterboxes with more
mysterious natures won't fit this little model and any letterboxer
can always post any way they desire. We're totally open to new ideas,
so if you've got one, please let everyone know.

One of the things that helps the most is having everything all up
front in the post: please consider putting the state name in the
subject line of your email, and then open it up with something like:

Letterbox Name: "No War on Iraq"
Placed by: The Peaceful 'Boxers
Number of boxes: 2
Date: March 14, 2003
City: Cincinnati
County: Washington
State: OH
LbNA regional page URL:
http://www.letterboxing.org/oh/midwest.htm
My webpage URL:
http://peacefulboxers/geocities.com
Clues as follows: take a left at the Peace Memorial and walk...

For Mystery clues, give us as much or as little as you want people to
know: they will show up either on the state or the national mystery
pages depending on how you instruct us.

Another format that we can easily work with goes something like "on
Feb 14th WasabiGal planted the Spicy Sushi letterbox in Florence,
Pinal County, AZ."

We're working on a new automated website design that will let you
post and update your own letterboxes without having to wait for a web
manager to do it for you (a-la geocaching.com and bookcrossing.com).
Hopefully this new system will be up for test runs soon. Since we're
firmly committed to a dot-org, noncommercial venture, this is taking
a while and not nearly as sophisticated as those more professional
websites. Still, we're pretty proud of it and looking forward to a
grand opening. Maybe we should make the site a virtual mystery box at
first.

One of the less-often-used tidbits folks add in their clues are the
regional page it should go on at LbNA. It's never been hard in the
past for us webmasters to remember what goes where, but with the
amazing growth in letterbox plantings this year it's getting harder,
for me at least, to remember these things. Letting us know which TX
page your clues should land on is a huge help.

Similarly, if you have one of the personalized pages at LbNA
(i.e., "Squirrel's, VA Letterboxes") please mention that the new clue
should go there, as opposed to getting it's own separate cluepage,
and give us your pages' name/url.

Having your own outside webpages that we can link to is heaven for
us: if you're not comfortable with creating and uploading them, check
out the Random Acts of Letterboxing Kindness page at

http://www.letterboxing.org/raolk/raolk.htm

to find a volunteer who'll help out. If you are using RAOLK
volunteers, it's a big help if you post the clues directly to them
first, so that they can post the yahoogroup with the clues and your
webpages, the way the Psycho Kiwis do for Leader of the Pack. That
way we don't have to do those links twice.

If you'd like to include your own email address in your clues so
Finders can contact you, please type your email address in with
spaces (i.e., drewclan at aol.com). None of the LbNA web hosts are
yahoogroup moderators, which means that we cannot see your complete
email address. Cluesheets often get posted with the useless
yahoogroup truncation "drewclan@a..." in the text. Dot dot dot just
doesn't connect...

"Attachments" to email overwhelmed us with virus problems. We
discourage them whenever possible but of course there may be reasons
people would want to use them (like for graphics or formatting). So
if you must, please send them directly to webmasters@letterboxing.org.

You can track the amazing growth in letterbox plantings each month
at the bottom of

http://www.letterboxing.org/lbna/whatsnew.htm

Thanks so much for your patience with this overly-long posting (hint:
there are no mystery letterbox clues imbedded....this time).

Jay in CT
P346F325X159
http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/drewclan/

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