Dunbar Residents Association News and Events

Almost all of us have a list of web sites we browse daily for updates. For some of us, the list is in our browser’s Favourites or Bookmarks, for others the list is just in our heads. Anyway, you find yourself loading ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty or more sites a day and then you notice some of them aren’t being updating often, so you stop going there.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you knew ahead of time what sites were active, so your time was spent reading rather than waiting for a stale site to load.

There is a way!!! Syndication is the name but the key to it all are News Feeds & News Readers. The former exports the news from a site while the latter imports the updated news and displays it!

How to find a News Reader? Here’s a good description from the BBC: News Feeds and News Readers.

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Back already? Good!

To sum up! When you spot an orange icon like this it shows the site has a feed. Click the icon then your browser will present some News Feeds. Select one from their supplied list and you’re cooking with gas! Bookmark/Favourite your choice, then go back to that News Reader periodically and you’ll see everything new since your last visit.

Wasn’t that easy?

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Last month we emailed the Dunbar mailing list that the October Newsletter was on the website. We had an incredible 172 visits that day downloading the newsletter.

What does that indicate? Well, the DRA Website has been fairly quiet recently but that shows we have a lot of people just waiting for new items.

A thought occurred: maybe we could encourage contributions from our Dunbar Neighbourhood!

What type of contributions? Well neighbourly ones like Dunbar is… in bigger words, contributions that are non-political and non-controversial but interesting and unique.

One thing we’re very proud of: Our postings have been copied elsewhere BUT not the reverse. Our postings are all original material. We would like to carry on this tradition.

Some examples of current contributions on our site:

• Tom Grant was the predecessor to the current DRA Webmaster. Tom left two unique contributions on our site: his Dunbar Photo Gallery, a wide photo survey of Dunbar, plus his Dunbar Video.
• We have FOUR walking tours of Distinctive Houses in Dunbar done by the late June Binkert.
• Then we have our Terry Slack who often passes on tales of being a commercial fisherman on the Fraser as well as his environmental concerns, local history moments, and many other diverse topics.

So we’re looking for people who have Dunbar interests that may interest others and who would be interested in contributing an occasional posting.

Some ideas…

• “A Year in a Dunbar Garden”. A gardener, or a collective of gardeners, could offer postings on what they’re doing in their garden. This could cue less active gardeners into action or let others live vicariously as we read about tomato seedlings while the Olympic news is the only news in town.
• Personally, I’d like someone with architectural or building experience to point out and explain some of the unique architecture of Dunbar… before it disappears.
• What about contributions on State of the Art Recycling! If not the information directly then the sites that have the information.
• Books! Reviews and recommendations about books that are not the common ordinary best sellers. Perhaps we could organize a book exchange in a local coffee shop, if one hasn’t been organized.
• Old photos, with some redeeming quality, of life in Dunbar back then.
• Historical memories, ones that never made it into the Dunbar Story. Stories of old Dunbar when the trams still ran down Dunbar, when men wore hats that weren’t baseball caps, when all children walked to school or even fainter memories when that old 60s scourge of Dunbar, the Dunbar Gang, ran loose.

Already, as this was announced at the DRA AGM, a Dunbar resident has offered to occasionally write a retrospective of various people who are Dunbar Residents of Note. If you have someone in mind, feel free to contribute a retrospective.

Finally if you have thoughts about what you could contribute, then get in touch with webmaster@dunbar-vancouver.org.

We will mention that contributions will have to be approved by the DRA plus all contributions may be subjected to editing and formatting.