Introducing the new Pioneer Writings Blog! 🎉

Hey guys! Grace and peace be unto you from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ his Son. It's been awhile since we have published any news about what we've been up to here at Pioneer Writings. It's been a busy couple of months to say the least, but although it appears as though there hasn't been much going on, the reality is actually quite the opposite.

We've been busy working on several things, one of which is our official blog! Ever since we launched Pioneer Writings, we have been in need of a blog, a dedicated space where we can openly and freely share updates, news and announcements that are relevant to all things Pioneer Writings. When I started building out the Pioneer Writings platform, I was so consumed with all of the many aspects of how and what the platform would look like and how it should perform, that I had no bandwidth left for building a blog. And of course, as the only designer and software engineer on the team, I was stretched very thin, and had no choice but to postpone the idea of having a dedicated blog until I had reached the point where the platform was stable enough that I could focus on other areas. I resolved to open up an official Facebook page and just share updates from there.

The challenges

There are some issues that come with this approach though. Facebook is just one platform, and we can't guarantee that every user on our platform has a Facebook account. This means those users would be left out of the loop on important updates and announcements that they might be interested in. Another issue, is that I started sharing my "news" posts on some of the Facebook groups, and unfortunately, we were removed from the group without any sort of warning or notice. It happened after sharing this post announcing the latest version of the website:

I am not sure why we were removed from the group, especially since these kinds of posts were not in any violation of the rules of that group. However, it does go to show that we were obviosuly in need of a place where we can share news and updates freely, and not suffer any "disciplinary actions" like these.

There is still one part of this blog that still needs to be built, and that is the newsletter feature. Newsletters are helpful for subscribers to receive our updates right to their email inbox, without having to visit this blog everytime new updates are published. We know how valuable this is, and will begin working on this feature very soon, so please bear with us. 🙏 In the mean time, we have been working behind the scenes to bring you some great improvements to the plarform that should greatly impact the user experience. We will make an announcement for that in the next couple of days, so stay tuned!

Going forward

Now that we have an official blog to publish our updates, our intention is that we will no longer publish platform updates and news on Facebook, but rather use it to post general content for things that we may find interesting in the articles that we publish. We will also make announcements regarding any new articles or series that we've published from this blog and not on Facebook. In the mean time while we build the newsletter, we will share the blog post on Facebook, but the post itself will not be published there. This makes it possible to easily share it on other platforms like Twitter, or email for example. Anyhow, that's it for now. Thanks for reading thus far, and of course, thanks for being a valued Pioneer Writings user. We're glad that the work that we do is valuable to you and to those whom you share our articles with.

"The LORD bless thee, and keep thee: The LORD make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: The LORD lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace." (Num 6:24-27) — The Pioneer Writings team