Hello to all of you who have found Seeker's new website.
The people who get an announcement of each new edition have already heard this, but others who have been lost from the list due to changed email addresses and still others who have only bookmarked the site haven't.
Just as last month's issue was going up, Denise Ruiz told me that she was logging off as the website coordinator and was closing the brainiac account at which Seeker existed. She had done it long enough, she thought, and was going to head out in different directions.
For those relatively new to Seeker, Denise birthed this baby e-zine in July 1995, mothered it until April 1998 when she gave the editorial reigns to me, and then step-mothered it in getting each issue onto the website. Truly, she has been Seeker, and her vision, described in the Mission page, holds true for me, also.
I spent about three weeks grieving her forthcoming absence in our collaboration and figuring out what I was going to do, because I knew that Seeker is dear to my heart. I had met up with a woman who runs a local contact for a server, and I decided to buy a domain name, so that should servers need to change in the future, what you look for would remain unchanged. Hence, the debut of www.seekermagazine.com (seeker.com was already in use).
I had played at learning a little bit of HTML but not to any great extent. I had not the slightest idea of how one actually put the files onto the server. The wonderful thing about previous issues is that you can save the files as HTML and use them for a template to paste in the new stuff (as long as you don't use Word). That was pretty easy. The next wonderful thing is that David Langer, my son and every-now-and-again Blind Crow, sent me to a site to download an FTP program. After I had played with that for a while, I wrote back to him and said, okay, now, how to I get to the Seeker site? And his instructions were exactly what I needed, since I had misunderstood the site name. So the fact that you have retrieved this letter demonstrates some successful "show me how it's been done, and I'll figure out how to do it."
I thank Denise for pushing me a bit further than my ultimately lazy self was going to go, unless I had to. Sometimes, it's very important to have to. (If you want to send Denise an e-mail, her address is eodale@yahoo.com.)
You may notice that I haven't gotten the Staff page and the Contributors page updated for this issue, though. Will work on that this month.
The Feedback Board and Passing the Plume were endemic to the previous server and couldn't be downloaded. Frankly, I am not sorry to lose all the flag-burning comments. There are plenty of other sites to send those to, if you have them. I'll be working on getting a feedback capability though.
One of the fun things about editing Seeker is that frequently people write you from out of the blue. I had two fellows from "down under" find Seeker while searching a topic on the web. And one of the articles was from 1996. Proves the worth of keeping the archives. One of them sent along an article on his first experience in a "spiritual expo." The other (actually from New Zealand) has sent a .wav file of him reciting a poem he wrote. I plan to have it in the next issue, because I enjoyed hearing a definitely different accent than my own reading a poem.
Enjoy the issue, and if you've got a friend who may not be aware of its new address, tell them, please.
Truly,
Cherie Staples
Editor
Heed the winds and the waters,
the lights of sun and moon,
be here now.