Back in the saddle again

Brenda, Shine Community Manager

Hi everyone,

I'm back from maternity leave and eager to catch up. I have lots of news to share with you so let's get to it!

Last month, our fearless leader Brandon Holley returned to the magazine world to become editor-in-chief of Lucky Magazine. Brandon was a tremendous force in growing Shine to 25 million users and championing our community. Let's wish her well in her new adventure!

We also lost our product manager, but we are thrilled to have our Manager of Design and User Experience Yun take their place. He has been with Shine since we launched and is just as passionate about building a community as he is about design. To wit, when Yun had the opportunity to present to the Yahoo! Design department, rather than discussing a design topic he chose to put together a "debunking the myths of community" presentation so he could spread the word about the virtues of user generated content. Having him as our new product manager will be a great boost for Shine.

I'm sure you remember the nasty spam situation facing Shine last spring; we even had to remove the Chatter module as a result. I'm happy to report that we have the situation under control now and Chatter is scheduled to be restored after the holiday lock down. We never wanted Chatter to be gone for this long, but we wanted to be certain that spam was at a minimum before we put the module back up. We want to thank everyone for your patience - we know it wasn't easy for you.

Have you seen the new Facebook "Like" and share and Twitter "Retweet" buttons that have been added to every post? We want to make it easy for you to share your favorite Shine posts with your social networking circle so go ahead and give them a try.

On a personal note, a huge thank you to everyone for all the kindness and good thoughts you sent during my pregnancy. My boys arrived 5 weeks early, happy and healthy, and they're turning into quite the little characters! I'm sharing a picture so you can see the new loves of my life.

Speaking of new additions, I'm excited to welcome the 20 Shine users who were recently selected as Parenting Gurus. This diverse group of women, from single moms to working moms, are ready to share their experiences with you. Look for their stories each month in our Parenting channel.

Now that you're caught up from our end, tell us what's been on your mind. Do you have an unanswered question or is there something that's been driving you crazy on our site (besides the absence of Chatter)? I will be rolling these up to Yun and the team, so let's hear from you!