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.
