After several weeks of testing, we are very confident that the new 'digest' is ready to launch. We will add a link to the first live issue as soon as it is published.

The whole reason for a digest is to provide the GLRF membership with a recap of activity on the GLRF website for the past 7 days. Whether it is a new calendar event, a blog entry, a classified listing or any activity on the forums, the digest will show it. The digest will only show forward-looking items for two areas: new polls and any classifieds that are due to expire in the next week.

We think this is important for providing timely information to our members who post and hope to get a reply, and it also helps to promote the new Categories feature and highlight not only all of the content that has been added to each of the GLRF Categories but also to draw attention to newly featured articles and videos.

Of course, you can find much of the same information on the "logged-in" home page of the GLRF website, also known as GLRF Central but unless a member logs in frequently, they may not know about new activity that might be of interest to them.

Some or many might wonder why the digest appears kind of skewed. Why are there three columns one week and two columns and a blank space the next week. The answer is the digest template is fixed, and each column serves as a placeholder for various 'update' blocks. If there is no new activity, that block won't appear. So if there is no new blog activity, it won't appear. If there are no new or expiring classifieds, that block won't appear, and so on.

Why the "live and fabulous" link? The digest is sent as an html template. Not all email clients will support html, and some of you will see the plain text version of the digest which looks horrible and has no links except for the link to the web version of the digest. We are trying our best to make it easy for you to see a user-friendly layout of the digest.

The digest is designed to be automatic and timed to distribute every week, on Thursday, at 12:45h GMT. So if you want everyone to know about an event, you need to add it before that deadline or it won't appear until the following Thursday.

Subscribing and unsubscribing is easy by simply changing the settings on the GLRF Preferences page. If you are subscribed but not receiving the digest, check your spam box and make sure that rowing@glrf.info is added as a safe email.