Spring Clean

Those wise souls among you who read PrestonWN through a reader might want to click through this time, because the PrestonWN team have done a bit of spring cleaning in the side-bar.

We've been up and running since March and a big part of what we've done since then is to find all you writers, bloggers and readers and try and get you talking to each other. At last count (and it will be more, I'm sure, by the time this blog post has been slotted into September's Schedule) we'd found over 120 Preston based bloggers... 120. One hundred and twenty. If we were all in a room at the same time, that would have to be quite a big room. I'm having ideas about a Blogging Word Soup special as we speak...

To make it easier to navigate through all those lovely links we've gone and broken them down into categories for you. At least one of us is a librarian, and found the task strangely soothing.

We've got Creativity - blogs about art, design, crafting, cooking, books, television, music, theatre, bands and photography. Fictional blogs, blogs for web and graphic designers, blogs for fashionistas and lifestyle gurus.

We've got The Great Outdoors - a fairly wide-ranging category (as big as outside is, in fact) that encompasses travel, gardening, environmentalism, conservation, sport, animals and games. We never knew how many of you felt as strongly as you do about our Ribble, and now we do.

We've got Community Blogs, for those of you commenting on the world, politics and society, creating your own digital newsrooms, blogging about your street, neighbourhood or suburb, for activists and commentators of all ilks, and for those of you blogging collectively about your group, church or society.

And finally, we have the Personal Blogs - mums and dads, relationships, your jobs, daily lives, darkest secrets, pets, houses, the world of work and anything else weird and wonderful you see fit to put hand to keyboard about and share with the world.

Now we want to ask you a little favour...

Go off and spread the word. Tell us about blogs we've missed so we can link to them from here. Go and tell other Preston bloggers about us. Have a click through the links, find a new blog to read and tell them where you found them. And, if you must, tell us when we've put you in the wrong category or spelled your name wrong (we are only human...)

That's all. Once you've done that, you can get back to your lurking.