FROM THE EDITOR | By Bret Bradigan

Ojai Brightening

Bret Bradigan, editor & publisher of Ojai Quarterly and Ojai Monthly

The Ojai Hub has been live one month and it’s been off to the races! More than 7,000 people have clicked through the site, checking out an average of 7 pages each (we have more than 60 active pages on the site). We have posted more than 1,000 events and have well over 100 posts. And those numbers are rising by the minute.

It’s been gratifying and, yes, a little daunting. We knew there’d be challenges to building Ojai’s only community-oriented website, but after the devastation of the Thomas Fire, the need couldn’t have been more obvious. We need one place to go to find relevant, current and credible information, but not just in a crisis. Now, we can help you find the answer to the age-old question, “What’s going on in Ojai?”

This is not meant to be a huge, world-changing event, just a local convenience. But there is a purpose lurking behind such trivial achievements; it improves, by however small a degree, our community. As I’ve mentioned before, Benjamin Franklin wrote about his simple, yet brilliant design for street lamps, “Some may think these trifling matters not worth minding. But they should remember that human felicity is produced by little advantages that occur every day.”

That is how we view Ojai Hub: a little advantage that occurs every day. Those Franklin streetlights – with an innovative flue and chimney design, with four panes of glass each to make them easier to clean and replace when broken — are still in use today, 265 years later.

In today’s terms, that’s an eternity. We’re not thinking of such a long game. In our case we are hoping to build a span to links one generation to another, so that our local culture and social climate becomes more open and understanding, where the past informs the present and shapes the future, and where we can easily find out “What’s going on in Ojai?”