We’re delighted to announce that we’re launching a second community website, covering the Portswood area, in early February.We hope that the site will become a valued source of local information, and even a dynamic resource for community action. It will also cover ‘lighter’ stories of local interest.
Like bitternepark.info, the new site will serve a ‘fuzzy’ area, seeking to reflect the communities that identify with Portswood, rather than the strict ward boundary. Newsgathering will stretch into the edges of Swaythling and Bevois Town, but will look less to St Denys, which will continue to be covered by bitternepark.info - despite being technically within the Portswood ward boundary.
We have already had a positive response from the people who have seen an early version of the new site, including the members of a local residents’ association, the police community support officer, councillors and residents.
We will be officially launching in early February, but portswood.info is already up and running, and frequently updated, so feel free to take a look at how we’re getting on. If you want to contact portswood.info please use that site’s ‘Contact us’ menu link. There is also an article under the ‘About’ link describing how we see our area of interest.
The site follows a similar format to bitternepark.info, although you
will need to create a separate login on the Portswood site to use
certain facilities, like commenting (but there’s nothing to stop you
choosing the same username and password).For the moment, entries to the events calendar also need to be made separately, although we’re hoping this can be streamlined soon.
You can also subsribe to portswood.info’s RSS, or ‘webfeed’, here, for automatic updates; if you’re unfamiliar with this system it’s well worth getting to know — the BBC has a good explanation about how to use RSS here. The bitternepark.info RSS feed is here.