More than you ever wanted to know about Alabama native Joe Watts
I’ve been doing the annual report every year for the Alabama Association of RC&D Councils.
Here’s the cover for this year. Lots of good projects inside: a 40 page report on their 2011 work. Mostly gets used to hand out to the Alabama legislators to show the work done in Alabama on resource conservation and development. Full RC&D Annual Report 2011
My brother-in-law, Billy Milstead, retired several years ago. Since then, he’s developed a real passion for all things Southwest Alabama. He’s got a real interest in documenting all the historic places in the area–of which there are many, many, many. He worked on the Alabama’s Front Porches project for a year, traveling the roads and taking photos as a AmeriCorps Vista volunteer. After he finished that project, he wanted to do more. I’ve now built him a website (Rural Southwest Alabama) to hold all these photos, maps and descriptions in a way that lets people from the outside world explore what the rural Black Belt has to offer.
Just completed a redo of the Highland Park neighborhood website (the neighborhood where I live!).
link to the site: Highland Park Neighborhood, Birmingham, Alabama
Oh, and the coolest thing: I finished redesigning the website (well, it isn’t really finished, but at least it is something…) just before finding out that our neighborhood was recognized by the American Planning Association (APA) as one of the 10 “Great Places” in 2011–for the entire U.S.A.!
Still tweaking some details on this website, but mostly wrapped up. Always nice to work on a project that encompasses the area where I grew up!
This website is still very much a work in progress, but it is moving along, so thought I’d share it here first. It started out for five counties in East Alabama, but has expanded to eight. The project is to inventory, highlight and promote the resources in the region that make it special. Here’s a snapshot:
One of the monthly newsletters I work on: The Alabama Sierran. I did the first newsletter for the Alabama Chapter of the Sierra Club in January 2006 and have done one each month since then. This is an 8 page tabloid-size newsletter printed on recycled newsprint. You can download the full newsletter at alabama.sierraclub.org. In addition to working on this newsletter, I just finished an online newsletter for Birmingham, Alabama based CGH Insurance Group (www.cghinsurance.com/newsletter). And, perhaps most fun right now, I’m working on a website on tourism–particularly historical and ecological–in Bibb County, Alabama. I’m developing it almost entirely in Movable Type (using a little Dreamweaver to help me handle the CSS stylesheets). Pretty interesting stuff. Not that far along yet, but I’ve built the shell: www.bibbtourism.com. Other than that, just the usual blog updates at Your Town Alabama and Alabama’s Front Porches.