About The Blog

SA-Austin.com – The Blog is the companion blog to South Africans in Austin.

South Africans in Austin started in 1999 as a formal social club for South Africans living in the Austin, TX area. The “formal” aspect ceased to exist about a year later. We (John & Esme Els) felt it would be a shame for such a useful thing to simply vanish. So we decided to continue with the ideals of the original club through the website, SA-Austin.com.

Why A Blog?

This blog was added to SA-Austin.com to provide an easy method to publish additional information that could be useful to our visitors, who are mostly South Africans.

How Do Blogs Help?

Blogs also allow people to participate by providing feedback and making comments on blog posts. We encourage you to do that.

We ask that you keep your language appropriate for children’s eyes and that you remain courteous when you disagree with something or someone, but do express your opinion.

Participate! That way it gets better for all of us and we all learn from one another!

What Will Be Posted On The Blog?

We aim to publish a whole variety of useful information here.  Among that will be:

• Selected articles from Esme’s monthly newsletter.
• Information about South African social events held in Texas.
• Articles about immigration issues.
• Polls on questions that may interest our visitors.

This list may grow as time goes by!

Using The Commenting System

We are currently using the IntenseDebate system for comments. It allows you to do at least two very useful things in addition to normal comments:

1. Reply directly to a particular comment. This is different from just adding your own comment to the post. If there is a specific comment that you’d like to respond to, click the Reply button directly below that comment. Your reply will then appear directly below that comment. It then becomes a mini-conversation within the comments!
2. You can rate comments by giving it a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” rating. Comment authors will then build up their own overall rating, which gives you an indication how much others value the author’s opinions. The higher the positive rating, the more valued the author is!

(Note: If you’re blocking JavaScript, you won’t be able to use the IntenseDebate system, and will use the regular commenting system. So unblock JavaScript for this blog to get more fun out of it. If you don’t know what JavaScript is, it’s probably not blocked in your browser.)

How To Get The Most From This Blog

There are a few ways that you can use the blog:

1. You can bookmark the blog to make it easy to return to. Then look on the home page for the latest articles that interest you.
2. You can share any interesting blog posts with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, or wherever you like to hang out. At the bottom of each post is a line that starts with “Did you like this?”, and next to it will be links that allow you to share the post with your friends on many social networks.
3. You can subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed and get instant notifications when new articles have been posted.
4. When you make comments on posts, you will have the option to receive an email notification when others also comment on that post.

So you can see that there are many ways to stay in touch with the blog.

Our overall goal with the blog is to provide added value to SA-Austin.com’s visitors. We hope that we will succeed in that!