Cathy’s Blog

This weekend is one of my most favorite weekends of the year and I loving being here in Washington for it. It’s the Washington Brewer’s Festival which is held each year at St. Edwards State Park in Kenmore, WA. Now, I’m sure you thought I was going to say that Father’s Day weekend is my favorite weekend, but when you live exactly 2,897 miles away from your father, I couldn’t imagine a better way to celebrate in his honor!

We’ll be heading out to Kenmore on Saturday to taste beers from all over the country; from as far away as Alaska and Delaware and as close as 10 minutes from my house!

Don’t miss this weekend, as it’s the place to be for the best craft beers around! Just note that if you’re planning to travel from Seattle to the Eastside, 520 will be closed for the entire weekend!

Can’t figure out if you should take 520 or 90 home from work? Well the other day, I ran into the Bing truck driving around campus and it clearly decided for me that 90 was the way to go.

I am hoping next time it can suggest a 30 minute recipe for dinner or predict if the driving range will be crowded tonight!

Have you ever used the stitching or the “create a panoramic photo” feature in Windows Live Photo Gallery? Well if you haven’t it’s pretty sweet and before you know it you’ll find yourself out in the wild with your camera moving from left to right in a steady sweep of the scenery in front of you. This is my 3rd stitch so far (and one of the best yet)! Now if I could only find somewhere to print these amazing photos…

My List “Fantastic Seattle Beer Bars” was featured today in the Seattle Weekly Yelp newsletter. Of course, I don’t actually subscribe to the newsletter so it was my friend (who now lives in St. Louis but loves to keep up on Seattle happenings) who let me know that I was featured.

This is one of my prized lists besides the WABL (Washington Associate of Beer Lover’s) List where I record the best places in WA to drink and enjoy great beer. Since we are constantly traveling in search of good beer, I am able to constantly keep my lists up to date.

Anyway, I hope to create more lists in the future as I think they are a great way to compile and group restaurants, breweries, and attractions while seeing how much I enjoyed them at the same time. Stay tuned for a Yakima (all you can eat, drink, and have fun) list from our recent Memorial Day Weekend adventure!

I will soon be writing my 100th Yelp review. I’ve been Yelping since October 2008 and became Yelp Elite shortly after the new year in 2009. Since then, I have documented my explorations from the east coast to the west coast and met some great people during the Elite events around Seattle.

Tonight, I’ll be attending my 2nd Yelp Elite event at Cinebarre in Mountlake Terrace which is a new 21+ dinner and drinks movie theater. I’m pretty excited about the opportunity to try out this new place especially since we’re getting a sneak preview before tomorrow’s Grand Opening!

I have lots of URLs. And unlike most people, I am stuck between a rock and a hard place. You see in just a few short months I will become a Sullivan. Now that’s great because my intials won’t changem, but what about all my web presences where I am known as “cswenton.” Lets review my plan:

1. Yelp – From the begining, I have been know as “Cathy S.” Great! This will obviously work going forward and a few weeks back I secured the URL alias of cathysull. So my new Yelp URL is now: http://cathysull.yelp.com.

2. Flickr – Now onto Flickr…I have been on Flickr for years now and used swenton as my alias (which is also used in the URL). I checked the availability and cathysull is available. When should I make the switch…

3. Twitter – I secured my handle. Just in case I decide to starting Twittering. http://twitter.com/cathysull

4. cathy.swenton.com – Now onto the precense that brings everything together. What do I do here?

I guess the real question is when to introduce the confusion. Do I wait until September or start now? I think I’ll take the plunge.

So today, I decided to overhaul my website. Back in 2005, I wrote a custom blogging tool for my website. Okay, maybe it wasn’t really an “tool” but it was definitely cool. The admin page consisted of features to create a new post (with tags), edit an existing post, and delete a post. I worked for several weeks on this tool and in the end I was proud of the outcome. I used mySQL to store each post and all associated information about it (date, time, subject, author, etc.). I then wrote a PHP script which I called Feed Builder to generate the mySQL rows (only the most recent 5 or so) into standard RSS XML. From there my feed was readable by almost all RSS readers and my own website of course.

This was awesome! Now speed forward to today. About 3 years and 4 months later, it’s just a pain in the you know what to post anything to my blog. I decided to give WordPress a try. After reading through the hosting features of WordPress.com, I found it was extremely limited in terms of what customization was available. Of course, if you are willing to pay a small fee, you can get some of that customization back. I then discovered WordPress.org. It was like finding my way into Heaven (if I could imagine that for a second). Anyway, self-hosting WordPress sounded like a dream.

So here I am about an hour later after customizing this thing from left to right and top to bottom. I can pull in my Flickr photos, post directly from Flickr (with the photo of my choice), and pull in custom RSS feeds (like my Yelp reviews). Ahhhh, I feel right at home. Now if only I will feel more at ease posting to my own blog. Enjoy.