Hello and welcome to The Compass!  My name is Anthony and I’m going to walk you through all the changes we’ve made for 2012.  Please hold all questions until the end and no chewing gum.  The carpets are new.

First off, everything looks nicer and more professional.  The blog no longer looks like an 8th grader’s project for social studies.  This new format has a lot of new features.  If you click the extremely excited “ABOUT US!” button on the header, a window will drop down containing our classic picture, a Twitter widget (oh yeah, we have a Twitter now: @WeTheCompass), and a brand new mission statement.  If you close that window, you will see under that tab that you may also view our blog for mobile devices.  Next to that, you can check out our archive to dig up older posts.  There is also the RSS feed so you can put our blog in a reader of your choice.

Moving from left to right, we have a shiny new “Random” button.  That button will take you to a random post.  That one is fairly self-explanatory.  The next button is very important.  It is for reader submissions.  We really want to post the work our readers create so feel free to use that button often.  Next to that is the “Ask” button where you can ask any one of us anything you want.  Need some help thinking of a question?  Try asking Paul the story of how he pooped his pants as a grown adult or Patrick how he gained the nickname “Mario” or Hillary what kind of skulls are best for drinking brandy out of.

The next button reads “Pages” which is something new for us.  Right now, we only have two pages but each one is amazing.  The first is a contributors page.  It has a brief bio of all of us here at The Compass.  Speaking of which, we have new contributors!  These people are highly talented and we are so glad that they are joining us.  Check them out on the contributor page.

The other page is our schedule.  The ways of that old Compass are gone.  We are doing something new.  Instead of having only one person post a week, we post in teams now.  This will lead to multiple posts in a day as well as posts everyday.  More content.  More conversation.  More everything.  Each sunday will be a “Trailhead”, which pretty much is what this is; it is an introduction to the week.  We will rotate that around.  On mondays, Team “Big Pete” will make all their posts.  On tuesdays, having mentally digested their work, everyone will comment and converse.  Team “Little Pete” posts on wednesdays and thursdays are another conversation day.  On fridays, everyone will put up our traditional link posts in our old, familiar style.  And saturdays are reserved for reblogging other things from around tumblr because tumblr is full of creativity.  This information and the team rosters are on this “Schedule” page.

Next to that on the header is a search bar.  It doesn’t seem to work.  I’ll look into that.  Under that, are our links to our Twitter account, our Facebook page, and our email account (wethecompass@gmail.com).  There will be more links up there in the following weeks.  This is another thing you should know about.  Since we are all trying new things, none of us are really covering a specific medium anymore.  We are all creators and we don’t want to limit ourselves.  During this year, you can expect to see much more than writing and music and painting.  There will be photography, podcasts, sculpture, videos, events, and a whole bunch of other things that we don’t even know about yet.

The Compass is brand new for a new year, people.  Get to know it well.  Love it.  Because we love you.  Thank you all.

All new posts start this monday.  Get excited.

-Anthony