The newest feature for the GLRF website, Share A Link, is now live.

The motivation in creating a link sharing feature was to enable our community to list their clubs and programmes. Since the GLRF membership spans rowing communities from juniors to national teams as well as masters, we needed to create a facility wherein our members could list their clubs in a "shared" environment.

By adding the ability to edit the link descriptions as well as comment, our community also has the ability to endorse 'gay and lesbian friendly' programmes, organization, and resources. For juniors and university rowers, that can be an important factor.

For new and returning rowers, finding a centralized source for local rowing clubs that have been shared by our community is very important.

As the design for Share A Link began to get underway, we realized the overwhelming task of how to organize and catalog links from different aspects of our varied rowing community. The result is a list of 15 categories that we hope will encompass most if not all possible links. However, the Share A Link feature can expand to meet the needs of unanticipated categories.

In addition to cataloging links, we have added a variety of geographic and topical tags that allow for easier searching and sharing. Based on earlier experience where overly enthusiastic members have added 50 or more tags to a given item, we have created a defined, closed set of tags and tailored them for each category. Based on community feedback, we can adjust those tags to better suit individual categories, and add additional tags that would be useful. Each country page will display a list of links with a country tag.

Finally, the tags can be favorited or 'fav'd' by members to mimic bookmarks. But more than just personal bookmarks, the fav'd feature allows our community to share those links that are the most popular. These fav'd links will appear in a variety of blocks throughout the GLRF website: My GLRF, and in our demographic Categories community pages.

If you find any issues or problems, please add a comment here, or send us a pm: .

Two additional features for Share A Link are still under construction:

1. a link widget for each All Oars Group where group owners can display links for local clubs or useful resources
   
2. the ability to pin links based on a member's tag or geographic preference (we anticipate a huge list of links once the community sees the possibilities)