Have photos of you and your shoes? Got news? Help us.

…BirthdayShoes was built by people like you! You can help us make this site better.

Do you have Vibram FiveFingers, New Balance Minimus, huaraches like Xero Shoes or Luna Sandals? Nowadays, there are is a slew of “barefoot shoes” and folks are doing just about everything in them.

The growth in the minimalist shoe world is a great thing as people begin to reclaim their health through their feet, but it also makes it pretty hard to figure out which shoes are best for you. Well, swapping reviews, news, and stories is one of the things that this site is all about and if you’re up for sharing, you can help.

1. Submit a photo story/mini-review.

Do you have a great photo of you in your “birthday shoes?” Willing to share what you’ve been doing in them with the readers here at BirthdayShoes? If you do and you’re willing to have your photo and story published on birthdayshoes.com, fire an email to [email protected] with the photos attached and …

Along with your photos, please include in the email where the picture was taken, a few sentences about what you’ve been doing in your shoes, and any other information you’re willing to share. Write a little “mini-review” so that others (often people who know nothing about “free feet”) can benefit from you sharing your experience. Got multiple pairs? What’s your favorite and why? Had issues? Tell us about them — others can benefit from the knowledge.

Here’s an example of what a good photo might look like (note it includes all of the person and not just the feet. Feet shots are neat but feet without the rest of the person tell an incomplete story!

Managing a creek bed on a hike in the Smokey Mountains in the KSO Trek FiveFingers.

Small print: This site is about birthday shoes (it’s a pun for bare feet), not your birthday suit! The difference is important! I do not want to see you in your birthday suit! Photos submitted may be altered by birthdayshoes.com to make them suitable for the site. Submission of photos to justin at birthdayshoes dot com constitutes both an acknowledgement that you possess the full rights of submitted photos as well as a general release of all rights to the pictures to birthday shoes dot com. Basically, submission means you own the photos and are giving them to birthday shoes dot com to publish. Your email address will not be published!

2. Send us news, scuttlebutt, or rumors!

Who doesn’t love to hear the latest news in barefoot? We try to cover breaking stories, new product releases, leaked upcoming shoes, huge promotions and big sales, and more. If you’ve heard something that you think would be interesting to others on the blog, contact us!

3. Get even more involved. Help us keep the lights on!

BirthdayShoes is a side-project. It’s no one’s full time job and is currently being kept up in the spare hours of folks who are busy with work, school, families, or whatever. That said, the site has had over three million unique visitors since it began in Spring 2009 and these days, it takes a lot of work just to keep things moving — to say nothing of keeping up with all the reviews, news, and other stuff we like to share.

If you’d like to get really involved and have some basic knowledge about HTML, an eagerness to do some blogging, can take a good photo, and want to look behind the curtain, well, we could use your help. While generally we’ve got a number of reviewers of shoes already (though we could use more female reviewers!), we could use help to edit user story submissions, write original news, and more. While we can’t promise fame and fortune, you’ll get some great experience seeing what it takes to run a successful blog on the internet. If that sounds interesting, drop an email about who you are, what you’re all about, and how you think you could contribute to justinowings at birthdayshoes dot com!