Have you noticed that we gave our membership roll a makeover of sorts? While it won’t make any of the TRIBE’s sites look thinner or younger, we hope our membership roll makeover will help us all get to know each other better, as well as attract new readers to our sites.

Here’s what’s new and improved.

Not just for “Bloggers”

The first start date on our membership roll is January 15, 1996. (If you’re thinking it’s Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter, you’re right! If you guessed Cyndi’s list, you were only off by two months—March 1996.)

We’ve come a long way since then, in number of sites and in the technology we use. Now our roll includes podcasters, vloggers, micro-bloggers, family storytellers, “mommy” bloggers, and genetic genealogists. They represent a wide variety of backgrounds, experience, and specialties. We want all those content creators to feel welcome, regardless of age, experience, location, technology, and genealogy-niche.

Broken Links Removed

As promised, GeneaBloggersTRIBE transferred every site with a functional URL still publishing genealogy-related content from GeneaBloggers.com.

That doesn’t mean, however, that every site listed on our membership roll is actively adding posts. That’s okay. Much of that information is evergreen—still relevant to those doing research or looking for cousins. Hopefully, those site-owners will come back to their projects and update their sites.

We had a team of five people researching each listing, making sure each URL took readers to a live site. We also worked diligently (and largely successfully) to repair any links that returned 404 errors.  However, those URLs that now sell things like Armani tennis shoes or whose domains are for sale have been removed.

You Choose your Categories

Now content curators can submit their own categories via our site registration form to describe their site’s content and specialties. We invite our veteran members to check your listing and see if the categories shown still make sense. If not, you can let us know of any updates you’d like via the same form. You don’t have to choose just one, either. We have no problem carrying three to five descriptions per site. (Realize, though, with 3100+ members, updates won’t take place instantaneously.)

For instance, many sites carry only the category “family,” which readers might find ambiguous. Perhaps your site is about family stories, or is a journal of your research.

Other Information You Can Add

We’d love to have your name and email, so that if we get a broken link report, we can send you a brief note. We won’t publish this on our membership roll, but knowing your name comes in handy when we highlight your blogiversary (yes, send us that too). Rather than referring to you as “this blogger,” we can let readers know your name or pen name.

And, while we were at it, we added a request for a 35-word-or-less blurb about your site for the same reason. Rather than peruse your most recent posts to make assumptions about your site in our spotlights, we’d rather communicate what it is that you’d like readers to know about it.

What Else You Can Do

Peruse the Membership Roll, visit a few sites, drop notes of encouragement (comments), and share the nuggets of wisdom you find via social media.

Contributed by Laura Hedgecock
© 2017 GeneaBloggersTRIBE