Blogger Profile: Jon Strocel

Over the years I have profiled bloggers from the Northwest Territories to the Fraser Valley, anyone that interests me and that I hope will interest you as well. A few years ago I started asking a standard set of questions and I’ve sent these out to a few local bloggers for this week’s series. Click, share, explore, and enjoy.

Jon Strocel

Blog: TheV3H.com
Twitter: @thev3h
Facebook: /thev3h

How long has your blog been around?
Since April of 2009. 639+ posts and going strong.

What is your role/involvement (developer, owner, blogger etc.)
I’m the publisher of the site. So I do the site design, deal with technical issues, sell and organize the ads, and I’m the face of the site in the community.

In the beginning my wife Amber and I did all the writing. Now we have a great team that we work with to write and organize the events calendar, so we’ve been able to grow the site while maintaining our sanity.

What does your site do/what is it about
Our site aims to be the primary destination for community and event information for the Tri-Cities. When my family and I moved to Coquitlam in 2003, there wasn’t really a hyper-local blog that was doing the kind of coverage we wanted to see of places to go and things to do. So we ended up making it ourselves.

Our site is geared towards suburban parents looking for something to do on the weekend close to home. If you’ve ever been stuck in the house with small children on the weekend, finding something to do with that energy quickly and easily is always handy. While events are our main focus, we’ve been branching out into restaurant reviews, coverage of local issues, and other stuff that we think is cool in the eastern ‘burbs.

What can people see, read, and do when visiting your site?
We publish 5 days a week. By 5 days I mean when I get my crap together and write a links post we have 5 days. Luckily our writers are much more reliable than I am so we for sure have 4 posts a week. Every Wednesday is our big event roundup for the week, so you can start that weekend planning on hump day.

The events calendar is a big draw. It’s a big Google Calendar we maintain of all the local happenings we can find. If you’ve got an event in the Tri-Cites, send it to us at news[at]thev3h.com.

The best way to keep up with the site is to fan us on Facebook and subscribe to our newsletter. Our newsletter now has a weekly option that comes out on Thursday mornings, but many of our subscribers like getting a little V3H in their inbox every day.

Why do you blog?
I’ve always enjoyed being a part of the community I live in. There are so many cool people doing cool things in the Tri-Cities, I wanted to be a part of that. Blogging has been a great way for me to learn more about what’s happening in our area. Sharing that journey with people and creating a resource we all can enjoy is very gratifying. If I’m out and about with the kids looking for something to do, I will often pull out my phone and check out our events calendar. Sharing that with others is what it’s all about. Plus, it’s a lot of fun.

What is the ultimate goal for your site, how would you like to see it grow?
I would like to see us branch out into having more pages of resource information about the Tri-Cities. Because we have 5 different cities within a 30 minute walk out here (don’t get me started about that), basic community information is very fragmented. We want to continue making it easier to find what you need to know to get the most out of your Tri-Cities experience.

Follow Jon: TheV3H.com, on Facebook, and Twitter

Read all entries in my Blogger Profile series and feel free to suggest a blogger for possible feature in the comments of this post.