I haven't mentioned this much here at the website, but earlier this year CCLaP started its first apprenticeship program, a one-year intensive training routine that will hopefully result in our first paid employees in 2013; in fact, between our apprentices, interns, bookbinders, Summer School staff and party planners, there are nearly twenty people now who in one way or another are doing work for the center these days, all of whom will soon be featured on a new "About Us" page here that I am fatally behind on getting done. And one of these people is local lit-community organizer Kelly Pearce, who is in training right now to eventually become the main number-two person overall at CCLaP; and one of the things she recently asked about is whether I'd like the center to have a bigger presence at both Facebook and Twitter. Um, yes please! The simple fact is that this is the single biggest complaint we receive here, especially from Twitter aficionados who use that service to keep informed every time their favorite blogs post updates; but I myself find the signal-to-noise ratio at Twitter to be infuriatingly high, not just a barrage of mostly meaningless posts that I could care less about, but even with the important ones nearly indecipherable because of the amount of shortcut gobbledygook that most people add. (Sheesh, all those hashtags and 'at' signs and weird abbreviations I don't understand...sheesh.) And while CCLaP has technically maintained a Facebook group for the last three years now, under the old system it would send an individual email to each and every person every time a new update was posted there, and with no option for us to shut that off, an equally infuriating experience that has mostly kept our Facebook group a quiet ghost town.

That's why I'm extremely happy to announce that CCLaP is migrating to a new Facebook page starting today, located at [facebook.com/cclapcenter], which works under a new system that will be much less obtrusive to members; updates will now simply appear in your usual Wall feed instead of being emailed to you, while still giving us a chance to send out occasional direct emails regarding more important things like upcoming events. We'll be shutting down the old group on August 1st, so I encourage you to stop by and join the new page whenever you can; and starting this week, that new address will also start appearing on all permanent Facebook links found here at the blog. Oh, and we have plans as well to get CCLaP's old Twitter account up and running again, which hasn't been used since our experimental TwitLit anthology project back in 2010; but more on that next week when things are more active there. My many thanks to Kelly for taking on this big responsibility, and I hope that these two new developments (along with our usual RSS and Atom feeds, still chugging along as faithfully as ever) will make it much easier for all of you to keep up on the latest going on here at the main website.