Blogging about blogging

December 12, 2007 at 12:59 pm · Filed under Internet

So, today I switched the name of the blog to “11 months in San Francisco” on the WordPress site. Those of you who get the e-mail version of this blog are still seeing this as “Two Months in San Francisco.” I’ve tried and tried to fix this – this has something to do with Feedburner, the folks who provide the e-mail option and adds my Flickr pictures automatically to my blog feed. I can’t figure out how to change the title of this e-mail, and I apologize to all seven or eight of you who get it. However, I hope you still are enjoying the e-mails.

But back to the blog title: We’ve been here for eleven months as of yesterday, and we’re quickly approaching a year of residency. That’s making me think that maybe I should try to think of a better title overall for this blog. I’ll probably just switch to “Our Second Year in San Francisco” when the anniversary rolls around, but if anybody has any awesome suggestions, let me know.

I also switched the picture in the header at the top to a more sunny day. One intrepid reader noticed this change (and you know who you are, mom). I’m not 100 percent sure it’s an improvement, but I was feeling like I needed a little more sun in my life in general and had taken that shot the day after Thanksgiving. The old one may reappear soon, though, unless I manage to take another reasonably good skyline shot. You do see some beautiful views from Bernal Hill.

My resolution for 2008 is to write more in general. I recently bought myself a new Macbook and have been taking trips to a local coffee shop in hopes of accomplishing this. I expect this means that the blog will be a little more active, although you can never tell. If I start producing more blog entries than you have time to read, perhaps you’ll take advantage of this: I signed up for a hysterical new blog feature, and now I’m “podcasting” automatically, using a service called Odigo, which translates my posted blog articles into bizarre electronically-voiced mp3s. Check out this version of my entry about our Thanksgiving retreat to Costanoa:

If you want to listen to more, it automatically updates here.

The mobile blogging from the phone is sort of fun, but it has its problems. The phone doesn’t take perfect pictures, of course; they tend to be a little fuzzy. If I blog directly from the phone, I get a blog entry title that’s just the picture title, which is always going to be the date and time the shot was taken. That’s not bad, really, but it’s not as aesthetically pleasing as I’d like, and, you know, I like to make up clever titles for things. I won’t complain too much, though – it’s fun to be able to capture an image and send it out so quickly, to my 10s of avid readers.

Speaking of my 10s of readers … On Thursday, a lightbulb went off over my head and I realized I could port my Amazon.com Customer Service Page over to WordPress to allow people to comment on it, which would make it a much more dynamic page. So, it’s been up for less than a week, and, as of right now, it’s gotten about 6,000 more hits than this page, which has been up since last March.

I guess that’s all for blogging about blogging for now. Tonight is K.’s & my seventh anniversary (from our first date), and we’re going out for a lovely dinner at Boulevard. Happy anniversary to us!

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Dopplegangsta

August 23, 2007 at 1:17 pm · Filed under Internet

Greg and Ellen Compared

That little Amazon.com page of mine continues to garner attention, even though, in my opinion, Amazon has done a lot to improve their customer service situation since I first posted my rant about them in 2002. The page certainly brought me my 15 minutes of fame, with the stories on NPR, and in the New York Times, U.S. News, the WSJ and so on. It’s really got legs!

But now it’s also given me my own Canadian twin. I got a blog comment the other day from Greg (you’ll have to scroll down a bit to see it), who saw my picture in a PC World story about customer service. He put together the above comparison shot. Are we twins? You be the judge.

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