What’s New?

Whew! Just added social sharing buttons to JokesByKids that let you share individual jokes via email, Twitter and Facebook.
Below each author’s byline (the one that says who submitted the joke, and where they live) is a row of buttons for sharing on various popular services. What goes on behind the curtain (so to speak) is that you are not actually sharing the URL you are currently visiting, but rather a unique URL that features ONLY that one joke.
Without getting into a lot of tech babble, this seemed like the best way to implement this, because otherwise if you are sending a friend to a category page (for example) there might be newer, different jokes there by the time your friend came to visit.
Make sense? Thanks for your feedback. I especially want to know if you think the layout or the buttons are confusing in any way!

A reader wrote me today to ask that I correct a joke submitted by a kid. While I can appreciate his sentiment, I think I will let the joke stand as submitted. After all, not all kids’ jokes are scientifically correct, nor do they have to be. What do you think?
Here is his email:

Please correct the joke that reads: “Why didn’t the rooster cross the road? Because he wasn’t a chicken!” YES HE WAS! What do you call a male chicken? The kid who submitted this joke must be a city kid. I’m sure you don’t want your readers to learn this erroneous view of chickenhood.
You could modify the answer to read: Because he was chicken! (I suspect this may well have been the original answer when this joke first started circulating.)

JokesByKids is now available on Twitter. Follow us and you’ll see all the new jokes as they are released. This is an experiment, so please follow us, and let us know how we are doing!
http://twitter.com/JokesByKids/

I was really excited when I finally got the thumbs-up/thumbs-down voting implemented on the JokesByKids jokes. And so far, it’s been going okay, with a number of votes on the new jokes as they appear on the front page. My concern is that too many “older kids” will vote down all the jokes .. and really ruin the fun of voting for everyone.
But a friend of mine posed a different concern that I would like to pass on to you: Is voting on kid-submitted jokes wrong because it might hurt a child’s feelings?
Now, as far as the flow of publishing jokes goes at JokesByKids.com, most jokes do NOT make it pass our trusty joke editor Vicki. And those that do are often published several weeks after they are submitted. So in most cases, the child that submits the joke probably never returns to the site to see their joke “in print.” But I think it is a valid question. And so I ask you, dear reader, what do you think?