Quality Horse Time

I envy those of you who are actively riding and enjoying your horses. I miss the weekly arena rides with friends and the weekend trail-riding excursions. After my mare, April, was diagnosed with Navicular, I decided to give her this year off. We may take a gentle trail ride or two this summer but it’s time she goes barefoot and rests for the season. Sounds like something I’d like to do!

I’m dusting off the old mare, Dawn, and seeing if she can pack me around for a season. At 24 she still looks and feels great. Her back is showing her age a little but she is just as fresh and active as she was at half this age. She can’t do the hard-core riding I was doing last year but I can still hang with friends and enjoy the outdoors. I think Dawn enjoys being useful again.

We’ve been working very hard on updating the website to bring you more great resources and easier search capabilities. We’ll have a really cool business and club directory with added features. There’s still a lot to be done and I don’t know exactly when we’ll launch but we’ll make the announcement soon. I’ve given up a pile of riding time so I hope you enjoy the new website.

Keep up with all our latest news through the reader newsletter. These are sent out twice monthly. We have the upcoming issue teasers, horse keeping tips and even some Northwest News. If you haven’t signed up yet please visit the homepage of our website and sign up.

I appreciate the comments that are submitted. We’re populating the new website with all the blogs and comments so make sure and keep sending them. I really appreciate the interaction. You can make a comment below this article or email me: karen@nwhorsesource.com. Have a great week and enjoy some quality horse riding time!

New at NWHS, Plus Northwest News

You may have noticed a bit of a new look here on The Cyber Saddle. This is something we're slowly implementing across the site to make it easier to find the articles, news, and other items you're here to find. Is it working? Let us know what you think, either in the comments below (click here for comment help) or by sending an email to info@nwhorsesource.com. Play around with the links at left and see if you can find what you're looking for. If not, let us know! After all, nwhorsesource.com is for you, the reader.

Also, don't forget to send us your reader stories for Fridays on The Cyber Saddle!

Now for a few Northwest news highlights from the past week:

Equine Assisted Team Building in Snohomish, WA

The Evolution of Horsemanship: International Horseman Chris Irwin Returns to Oregon

Showdown at Horse Slaughter Pass: Slaughter Issues Heat Up in Montana

Making Life Easier

We would like to thank those who have taken the time to call, write, or email us about how to make NWHS and www.nwhorsesource.com a better resource for everyone. Thanks to the feedback of readers and our new webmaster, Christy West, we have made a few minor changes the way this blog and the rest of the site operate. Now, when you leave a comment on a news item, article, or blog posting, it will appear right away instead of waiting to go through our moderation channels. We still receive notification of all posts so we can remove any irrelevant or offensive content immediately, but this allows you to interact more freely with the site. If there is anything else we can do to make your user experience on the site easier, don't hesitate to let us know. You can use the suggestion box in the sidebar or the email address at the bottom of every page.

Site Tour: More About Searching and Newsletter Signup

2008 is truly a year of change at NWHS. We've grown our distribution by about 1500 copies per month, we've broadened our variety of columns, and of course, there's the new website. The funny thing is, we still have more content than we can fit into the magazine, and with the high volume of news being posted daily, sometimes it seems like it would be nice to have have someone go through it and pick out the most relevant bits, don't you think?


If you know what you want and you want it NOW, I recommend using the search box we added last week, or the one in the black strip at the top of each section on the site. What's the difference? The sidebar search covers the whole site, old and new, but it takes it a day or two to register newly posted items. The top search bar searches only the section of the site you're on (News, Articles, Blog) but it finds even the most recent postings. Which one is best? It's up to you.






If you'd rather have your news delivered right to you, again, you have options. Do you want all the news headlines delivered to your Internet home page or other reader software so you can click on anything you find interesting without having to search? Sign up for an RSS feed in the sidebar of the News page. There are also RSS signups for the Articles and Blog pages. Click on the Help button at the top of the sidebar if you want to learn more.


If you want just one or two news items that the NWHS staff members find the most relevant, plus horsekeeping tips, peeks at what's coming up in the magazine, early notification of contests and more, sign up for our semi-monthly newsletter. We're in the process of revamping that as well, and the first of the new edition newsletters comes out next week. Click the image below or its twin in the sidebar to use our simple signup form so you don't miss anything. As always, we'd love to hear from you.

(note: image has changed since original posting; image at left is the current signup link)

Site Tour: New! Site Search

As we continue to upgrade our new website, new features are added. We now offer a full site search that allows you to search all categories of the new website and our old archives in one search! You'll find a box that looks like the one below in the sidebar on each page of the new site. Go ahead, try it out.

Site Tour: Go to the Polls

The next stop on our continuing site tour: Northwest Horse Source polls. We have three of these little gizmos on the site: one on the home page just below the introductory text, one on the sidebar in the News section, and one in the sidebar here in the Blog section.

Each Monday, these polls are updated (usually by noon), with the old information taken down and the new poll placed. Voting is easy! Just select your answer and click the "vote" button. If you'd like to see other people's votes before casting your own, click the "show results" text link.

Once you've voted, the poll will automatically show you the current results any time you log onto the site.

Quick tip: if you see square boxes beside the poll answers, you are allowed to select more than one. If you see round "radio buttons," the poll will only allow one answer per voter.

Our polls serve a variety of purposes. We hope they're fun for you, and we love getting your feedback. We also use them to learn more about our readers so we can continually improve the magazine and the website. Have something to tell us and don't want to wait for it to come up in a poll? Email us or use the suggestion box near the bottom of each page, in the sidebar.

NWHS Site Tour Continues...

Have you noticed our Photo of the Week contest?

Each week, NWHS posts a photo submitted by a reader here on The Cyber Saddle. Just email your photo to us in jpg format, and each week we will select one photo to post on the site. Photos can be any member of the equine family--horses, mules, donkeys, zebras...we might even post a camel or two!

Want to see this week's photo? Just check out the sidebar and scroll down.

Let the world see what your equine friend are up to! This week's photo comes from Christine Caples of Washington. Thanks, Christine!

Sneak Peek!

Feeling sneaky today? Well, I am. So I thought I'd give people a peek at our work-in-progress revamp of the Northwest Horse Source article archives. We're moving the archives to a blog format to allow for easy commenting and interactivity. Now, you will be able to read past articles and comment on them directly through the site. Check it out at http://nwhorsesource.blogspot.com/.

This is still a work in progress, so only a few categories of article are available, and the look and sidebars aren't yet finished, but feel free to play around on the pages and send us your comments, either here, on that site, or via email. Once it's finished, the site will be integrated with our main www.nwhorsesource.com site so you only have one url to remember for all your equine education needs.

We welcome your feedback, so have fun and drop us a line!

The changes to the full site will be unveiled September 1st as part of an ongoing process of web upgrades.