So we have finally, officially, caught up to the rest of the online world and we now have a few certified bloggers on staff at The Oakdale Leader.

Sure, they were blogging before but that was strictly personal … this time it’s on the newly redesigned Oakdale Leader website, which you can access at www.oakdaleleader.com.

Along with staff members blogging, the website has been totally made over and it is much more user friendly, has a wider variety of features and should serve us well as we continue marching in to the 21st century.

Already, we have welcomed some new community members, who likely will be periodically posting comments and blogs of their own.

New features, still being fine-tuned, are the ‘Ask the Expert’ and our community calendar, where we invite you, our readers, to post upcoming events. Also, you can now post photos you have taken in our photo gallery.

The site will also allow us to post more photos from events we cover, rather than just what goes in the paper. While we are often limited to a couple of photos from an event because of space available in the pages of the newspaper, we have room on the web to post multiple shots for your viewing enjoyment.

It’s a new and exciting time; reporters have been busily chattering amongst themselves about how many ‘views’ each blog has gotten — Craig Macho currently leads the way — and we’re all abuzz with the possibilities. Craig and sports reporter Jagada Chambers are already scheming to do weekly football roundtable discussions in the fall, tossing names for the Mustang show back and forth.

For me, it brings me back to my radio days just a bit, as we will also soon be deploying our ‘Mo Jo’ — Mobile Journalism — packs and will have the capability for live reports from local events, whether it be a fire, community gathering or just some kids selling lemonade at a street corner stand this summer.

As we’ve said before, our paper fills a particular niche in the community, covering those stories that the larger, daily papers tend to ignore but are just as important to our readers as the front-page headlines. Now, we look forward to an even better working relationship with our readers, both those of the printed word and the electronic version, to keep you updated on what is important to this community.

Take a moment to navigate the new website and give us some feedback. Since our overall goal is to be more responsive to you, let us know what you think.

We look forward to hearing from you.