chicago or bust!
June 6, 2009.
Chicago, Illinois.
Shana and Mac are at an art fair in Hyde Park.
It is so cold out that Shana can see her breath.
Also, the blog is back.
June 6.
Mark it.
The blog is dead!!! We plan to resurrect it, sometime, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen anytime soon. Maybe in the meantime you could watch this video about how to make a robot out of a toothbrush:
I totally meant to resurrect the blog on Monday with some flying, fabulous endorsement. And Mac has a Tuesday post all ready to go, all he has to do is click “publish.” He didn’t. Oh well.
The real problem, you see, is that for that my book club meets tonight, and for the last 48 hours, I’ve been trying to finish this book. This doesn’t mean I’ve spent 48 hours reading, just that I’ve spent 48 hours thinking that I ought to be reading, not updating the blog or nagging Mac to update the blog or anything like that. So the blog has been unresurrected from its week long nap until now, Wednesday. Just in time for some food.
Anyway, I’m sure you’ll get a retroactive techy post at some point today, and I’m happy to report that I’ve only got 44 pages left to read, having already polished off 70 this morning, and 9.5 whole hours left to read them. Piece of cake.
“What if we were to advertise this humble little Chicago blog?”
That’s a question I’ve been pondering lately, and I’ll address it shortly, but first, allow me speculate a bit on why we blog.
We started sharing all these stories, photos and randomness from our lives mostly for the benefit of our family and friends. I think it’s fair to say that maintaining this blog helps us, and reportedly our readers, feel a bit more connected. My father lives in Portland, OR and my mother in Washington, DC. We talk on the phone with a healthy degree of regularity but being able to share all these photos and thoughtful stories seems to really deepen that dialogue. So, while it’s a whole lot of fun for both Shana and myself to work on this blog, I think the real reason we continue doing it, everyday, is because we receive such positive feedback from all of you.
Now, let’s talk about “gas money” (just bear with me here). I don’t know about you, but we could use some extra “gas money” now and again. I use the term “gas money” loosely because we don’t actually have … a car … per se … but it still seems like the right metaphor because we do have bicycles and I sure have felt a bit low on fuel lately. This is where that whole advertising idea I mentioned early comes into play. The basic idea being that if we could drive enough traffic to our site and gain a wide enough readership we might be able to slightly augment our income. It wouldn’t be much, but we wouldn’t be looking for much — just a little gas money.
Finally, to get to my point in all of this, I really like the idea of this blog getting more exposure, but I don’t want to change the way we write posts, or to feel like we need to censor the photos we share, or otherwise suck the life out of what we’re trying to do here in an attempt to accommodate a more generic readership. This blog is for you — not some generic “everyone.”
It’s with that balance in mind that I created our first ad (you might need to refresh the page to watch the animation!):
We are probably going start advertising the site and trying to bring in more readers, but we are not going to betray our original and intended readership–our friends, our family and, perhaps most importantly, our cats.
P.S. The banner ad above was made using a brand new SaaS (Software as a Service) application called BannerSnack. It takes all of the work out of creating cool flash web banners by providing a easy to use point and click design interface as well as generating all the code needed to share your new creations with the world. And with that now said, I’m totally counting this as my Tech Tuesday post.
This is just a quick update to let you know that I’ve linked my blip.tv channel to our blog and that any new episodes I post over there will now show up here as well. Most of them are fairly dry technology tutorials created by yours truly. I don’t have much of anything there yet, but I will be posting a lot of videos in the weeks to come–mostly for my colleagues, but also for general viewing.
In part, this is an attempt to justify my recent purchase of some high-end screencasting software, but more so it’s my way of giving back a bit of what I’ve learned about web design, development and the internet. Anyway, I thought it’d be fun to have them cross-posted so that you all can see a bit more of what I’m up to.
Don’t let this little notice distract you though! Check out today’s Chicago Thursday post now!!!
So, as per our new daily/weekly blogging structure, Friday was supposed to be “Smooth Move of the Week.” A smooth move is anything someone does that makes you look at them and say “smooth move,” or maybe, “smooth move, pal.”
For example, a smooth move is like what those dumb criminals do in the “dumb criminal” mass e-mails that you get from people who send mass emails. Or it’s like when someone’s walking down the street and and they trip and fall. And run into an old lady, knocking her over. Or they snag their pants on a bench and they fly off. Or it’s like when Rohn tries to jump up on the windowsill and doesn’t make it and falls back on his butt because he’s not a very good jumper and he’s kind of fat. Or it’s like when you say you’re going to update your blog with a smooth move on Friday and you just don’t.
We’ve decided we don’t like smooth moves anyway. Too snarky. We will henceforth be doing gold stars on Friday instead. I’m guessing you don’t need me to explain what a gold star is for. You probably didn’t need me to explain a smooth move either.
There’s are at least two little imbalances to our little blog here. I’m sure you’ve already noticed, but nonetheless for some reason I feel like these should be explicitly addressed.
In an effort to bring some semblance of order to the chaos we’ve come up with a topic-centric weekly posting schedule.
I’m going to leave it at that and refrain from explaining these categories. I feel like if we start imposing rigid definitions right off the bat, we could potentially make it much harder to justify fitting our cats in. At this point, for all you know, Wednesday Bites you very well be about cats…
So, stayed tune. It’s Monday and today Shana will present you with our first official Product Endorsement. 
The bad news first: our blog got eaten by the Silverstripe content management system. Something went terribly wrong–we don’t know what–and two days ago our blog just up and disappeared. We lost ALL of our previous posts. I cried a little.
Now, the good news: We’re back up and running, but this time using good, old, reliable WordPress. Keep on the look out for new posts including Chicago facts, winter biking tips, fashion advice, product endorsements, new recipes, snazzy photos and more!
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