This is just a quick post announcing that all accounts from Medicine Hat Media who have never posted and/or commented on anything will now be deleted. If this was done in error, please let me know, otherwise, if you want your account back, simply re-create the account. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Also, no the site isn’t dead.

After going through a period of tons of posts, we have this, a silent lull. Most of this is due to less people writing on the site, and me being busy on other projects. Of course, I am referring to the fact that Sean, no longer lives in Medicine Hat, but in the traitorous town of Lethbridge; as such, he won’t be posting as much anymore (or at all), but let’s make him feel guilty. Just kidding, or am I?

That’s also not to say there isn’t anything happening in Medicine Hat, but I don’t see a reason and letting our readers know about park washrooms opening up, when you can get it from the City of Medicine Hat public releases. As always, I encourage you to submit what ever you have in hopes of filling this lull.

In light of certain recent events, I thought this topic deserved a post. There’s always two sides to every complaint. You can’t please everyone. Some lessons I learned a while back when similarly sharing something negative myself, and posting it on Medicine Hat Media.

As a co-owner of Medicine Hat Media, a person who runs a personal business, is employed by another business, and partakes in the offerings of other businesses, it is of my opinion that complaints and criticisms of businesses in Medicine Hat are not only important, but vital  to both parties. We provide a service for consumer complaints to speak out against bad business and service, but we also provide that same service for businesses to promote themselves (for free), and like recently, provide a forum for businesses to represent themselves how they so choose. This creates a non-bias, non-partial, open and local environment for these topics and more.

We allow local businesses to advertise written content on our site for free! What other source locally with our reach allows something like this? But as typical humans, we love to hate, or hate to love negativity. Let’s compare comments on positive articles versus negative ones. There’s a post a couple down that promotes a showcase of local businesses with 0 comments for an example. It’s kind of sad really. It makes me wonder, what’s the point of offering this service to businesses when so rarely, they use it at all.

As Medicine Hat Media is a free, non-profit, public-driven blog, we allow an open forum of speech between any party and any person, no matter what their opinion is. As long as their written content provides a valid criticism, provides positive and negative points, appears to be factual (see definition of defamation), and encourages/allows comments for disagreement or agreement we will allow it.

Unlike publications, newspapers, and other forms of advertising-based media, we have the opportunity to do something unique for our users, readers, and writers. Let’s not ruin that.

And in that spirit, you are free to comment that you disagree or agree with me. If enough people are in opposition, then I am open to change (for example, removing a post). That’s the beauty of it.

Medicine Hat Media has been around quite awhile now, coming up on to three years. It hardly seems like that long ago Sean and I didn’t know what we were doing with this. Over these years we have made changes to the format, the layout, the type of posts, community-content and more. One thing that almost stuck out in my mind was the frequency of posts. Our updates are completely random, and has been that way since we started the site… although in the last while we tried to space things out at least a bit intelligently.

It’s long been known to me that this isn’t exactly the best for the readers, relegating to their RSS feeds or the home page to see if anything has changed. Because we can’t commit to anything daily, we want to open a dialog to give your input in this regard. Maybe Medicine Hat Media updates on Satudays and Wednesdays for example. Sometimes it will be 3 posts on Saturday and 1 on Wednesday, or sometimes 1 on Saturday and 2 on Wednesday depending on the amount of content we create or have submitted. Obviously for breaking news, we may update between those dates as well. Again, that is just one of the options and example scenarios. So please vote and please leave a comment describing your thoughts on this.

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Have you ever wanted to get involved in the community, tell a story, or advertise an event or a band? Well, we are always looking for more content to publish on Medicine Hat Media, and that includes anything you might have to offer!

If you are reading this, then you have probably read a few Medicine Hat Media articles and know what we are all about, but in taking a look behind the scenes, you can quickly come to realize that Medicine Hat Media is a fantastic resource for public awareness and promotion, and best of all, it is completely FREE.

Statistics:

• We are currently partnered with 21 other Medicine Hat-based websites, including the City of Medicine Hat website itself.
• We currently receive about 4000 unique viewers per month, which equates to about 6,000 page views per month.
• We have many regular contributors who have wrote 731 posts in total, which have received a total of 1,371 comments.
• Aside from Google and directly going to MedicineHatMedia.com, most of our users come from following us on Twitter, which automatically updates with every new post we do. Our twitter currently has 1,178 followers. Our Facebook group currently has 83 members.

From these 4 facts, it is evident that Medicine Hat Media is the mecca of Medicine Hat-based advertising.

What you can achieve:

By writing and advertising on Medicine Hat Media, you can can achieve a more public awareness – completely free of charge – for any events you may be hosting or advertising, including bands, trade shows, art shows, new restaurants, and the list goes on…

The events that are advertised do not necessarily have to be in Medicine Hat. If there is a big event going on anywhere in southeastern Alberta, we love to create awareness of it.

What we will do for you:

If you are interested in becoming a writer for Medicine Hat Media, all you need to do is email us at info@medicinehatmedia.com and let us know that you want to get involved. We will then set you up with an account, and if need be, assist you with logging into the website and navigating through the back end to post your stories. Normally, if you are tech-savvy enough, you can do this all by yourself with no need for our approval before registering and logging into the back-end, both of which can be done here. Alternatively, you may submit content using our online submission form.

If you plan to be a regular contributor, you can also submit a biography and/or photo for yourself and we will add it to the About page.

Things to note:

Medicine Hat Media tries to maintain a level of professionalism in its articles. This is achieved by writing our articles with completely original content and attempting to maintain proper spelling and grammar. If we receive an article that needs editing, we will generally clean it up before posting.

Conclusion:

Advertising can be expensive, but with an ever-growing number of readers, your articles are guaranteed to be read by members of the Medicine Hat community, and best of all, it is completely free!

Contact us at info@medicinehatmedia.com with any questions or concerns.

Facebook Connector is no longer installed on Medicine hat Media due to speed/loading issues as well as poor coding/design implementation of the WordPress plugin.

I could go on a long Facebook rant like I did a couple days ago about Twitter, but I’m pretty sure everybody knows what Facebook is, and most likely also know how they spend too much time on it. What you need to know is this: Facebook Connector has been implemented so that you can log in to Medicine Hat Media to comment through your Facebook login. What this means is that you can comment on the site and it will link back to your Facebook profile as well as take your current Facebook profile picture. This will only work if your privacy settings allow. For example, if you don’t have a public profile or public picture, they won’t be displayed – it doesn’t break any of your rules. You will also be able to do some other things like write status updates directly based on your comments or posts on the site. I’m sure I am missing other functions as well – I also seen a cool little Facebook overlay pop up on the site when I logged in via Facebook through Medicine Hat Media.

To log in using Facebook, click the “Facebook” login button above the comment submit section of every post. Normally though, it should log you in automatically if you are already logged into Facebook. Facebook and Medicine Hat Media now go together like bread and butter, and a hamburger between them, and maybe some BBQ sauce.

The now controversial fledgling segment of Friday Failure is now gone and dead.

Originally started as a way to add some localized humour to the site, it has has ruffled a few too many feathers in a negative way for Medicine Hat Media on behalf of myself. While I did receive some nasty emails about it personally, I also got some “laugh-backs” as well, but unfortunately the people that liked the humour aspect will have to look elsewhere, more specifically, just add some locals on Twitter to get your fix. I’m definitely interested in any opinions on the matter, especially on the following aspect, please read on: THE JUMP – Read the rest of this entry »

Medicine Hat Media has launched its new RSS feed powered by the popular FeedBurner system. This will allow us options we never had before using our old system including support for older browsers as well as some mobile browsers. This will allow us to see how many people are subscribed to us as well as open up new options for subscribers, including: Having updates sent to your email, adding our feed to tons of RSS readers with a click of a button, as well as full articles in RSS (don’t even need to visit the site if you don’t want to). I’m sure there’s other benefits too that I am missing.

So if you are not a subscriber yet, or are subscribed to our old feed, update or add our new feed: Medicine Hat Media RSS Feed to whatever browser or reader you want – it should now work with everything.

One thing that is important to Medicine Hat Media are the visitors and potential for a community. With a growing amount of visitors, we have to try to keep the site updated and current as much as possible, which isn’t always easy given the circumstances. Along the way we have developed quite a following, but there is still room for growth and improvement which this post highlights. I know, what I wrote might not have anything to do with the article, but in a way it does, because the most of the statistics relate to our visitors.

Here’s a little information thus far, as of  July 26th, 2009 about Medicine Hat Media’s visitors, connections, general information, and statistics on and off the site since our launch in October, 2008.

• 172 posts
• 214 comments
• 114 registered users
• 15 submitted emails
• 32 members on the Facebook group
• 155 followers on Twitter
• 84 friends on MySpace

THE JUMP – Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick note here: Along with some internal shuffling, we have also decided on a full top nav bar to house all of our internal and external links. Hopefully this solution will remove some of the clutter from our previous system and help to remove some of the user confusion, as everything you need to click on is now at the top instead of scattered on the side.

I might not be completely satisfied with the design of it, so it may change in the future depending on feedback. *Update* As of July 6th, I took the comments and feedback about it and changed it accordingly.

On a side note, this will free up some room for our “Partner” spot which has also recently been added to accomodate all of our partners. If you wish to be a sponsor or partner, please email us with a 90×90 graphic for your site and make sure to add us to your site. You will also now find Medicine Hat Media graphics on the bottom of the right sidebar as well as a press-kit PDF including a vector version of our logo.