This post is counter programming to other events happening in the world. It's a shelter for those who want to be online but could care less about the big story of the day.
The big story in Salem is the upcoming sunny weather. In this town you have to be outside if it's 65 degrees or better. Expect the Saturday Market to be packed. For parents like myself, it will be great to watch the kiddos compete on the ball fields while our bodies soak in much needed vitamin D. BBQ's will be heating up and there will be a chorus of lawnmowers buzzing in the neighborhoods.
If you are online, write up a blog post about your weekend events. The salemites.com blog has over 100 blogs to follow. The site sees about 30-50 unique visitors daily. The network of sites that have the salemites.com widget averages about 770 unique visitors daily. That number continues to rise as more original content is produced online.
One new site that looks promising is Strange Up Salem written by Brian Hines. With the recent #Salemia craze unleashing some local creativity, maybe now is the beginning of Salem's renaissance.
Feel free to use this post to comment about other things happening in the world or get outside and enjoy what we have here in this great little town.
Showing posts with label shameless self promotion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shameless self promotion. Show all posts
Super Blog Sunday
Welcome to Super Blog Sunday. We are taking this day to promote local blogging in Salem. Please take the time to click on all of the local blogs in our RSS feed to the left of this post. Those are blogs written by local folks about a variety of subjects. When you are done, come back to this site and tell us which blog you thought was the best. Just leave the name of the blog in the comment section below this post. Thanks for being a part of our fun. If you do not have a blog and would like one, it's really easy. Click here to learn how to start a Blogger blog or click here for Wordpress. We want to hear your voice and many of the bloggers on here are willing to help you get a blog going. Good luck.
Click here for Super Blog Sunday Pep Talk
Giveaways
Super Blog Contest, free giveaway
NW Kid Chaser Giveaway
1/30/11
Are you ready for some
<a href="http://www.salemites.com/2011/01/superblog-sunday.html" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjX3DDHhkGKm7RxTqKhxYIBtdB1z2Co-Jmih9zuXeCOiQ5xDVGZL0cXAlo9P2xilWhC0Ql4Bng5pnr6VP6meQx4tI4XFDGTL72dNSQZ13QG37_8bz_sy06ssxG9axHQMWNA6dIfy8kt2Mo/s320/sbsunday.gif" width="320" /></a>
See you Sunday!
Blogger Getting Better
Which blog format is better, Blogger or Wordpress? That's the age old argument online and here in Salem. My blogs eatsalem.com and salemites.com are both Blogger blogs. I have had on several occasions people try to convince me that Wordpress is better. Their reasoning is that Wordpress is friendlier to search engines. I've also heard that people like the stats and believe that Wordpress has a more elegant or professional work look.
One Hundred Five Sites to See
Did you know that Salemites.com has over one hundred blogs attached to it now? I just check and it was at 105. If you are a blog writer in Salem, send me an email and we'll put you up on this site. eatsalem@gmail.com. This site does have a decent amount of web traffic passing through it and I was wondering if other site owners see salemites.com as a source of traffic to their own blogs. Comment below if people have found your site through salemites.com. If you don't know, you should put Google Analytics or statcounter.com on your site. These free services will measure the traffic on your site and tell you where these visitors are coming from.
Changes Coming Soon
I have some ideas in the works that are going to improve the amount of fresh content happening on this site. Things are being tested elsewhere online and positive results from these tests will make their way to posts on this page. If you have access to posting on this site, feel free to do so. Please look at salemites.com as a kiosk to promote your events and activities happening in Salem. Stay tuned for the new improvements.
Pushing 1000
We are getting lots of web traffic to the salemites.com network of sites. According to our statcounter stats that are attached to the orange salemites.com badge, we are getting close to a thousand unique visitors in a day. 80% of that traffic is from Oregon. Nice work everyone.
Contest Coming Soon...
This weekend I got some exciting news from a talented local artist who wants to give away a piece of her work to a reader of the salemites.com network. I'm getting the contest ready to be online Wed.
If you have an idea for a local contest or event send us an email at eatsalem@gmail.com.
If you have an idea for a local contest or event send us an email at eatsalem@gmail.com.
Nice Mention
"one of the most exciting new developments in this town"
What a terrific thing to say about this blog. Thanks Emily.
If you haven't read it yet, the new issue of Salem Monthly is out and in there is a nice little plug for salemites.com by fellow blogger/real journalist Emily Grosvenor in her column Desperately Seeking Salem. Go out and get yourself a copy of the newspaper in stands all over downtown.
What a terrific thing to say about this blog. Thanks Emily.
If you haven't read it yet, the new issue of Salem Monthly is out and in there is a nice little plug for salemites.com by fellow blogger/real journalist Emily Grosvenor in her column Desperately Seeking Salem. Go out and get yourself a copy of the newspaper in stands all over downtown.
Capitol Favicon
Have you ever noticed that little orange "B" in the tab of your web browser when you are on your page or in blogger? You may have noticed that some sites have their own tiny picture up there. Those are called Favicons. They not only show up in the tabs but also in the URL bar. There are several sites that explain how to customize your favicon, here's one. It's a little bit tricky to do this so I've come up with a simplified version for salemites blogs. By the way, this will not work when you view a page with Internet Explorer, but who uses that program anyway? If you are looking at this site with Mozilla Firefox, you'll notice a capitol favicon. 
If you want to have one like that, here's how to do it.
Go to your blogger dashboard.
click "layout" of the blog you want to change
click "edit HTML"
Back up your blog template saving the file to your desktop(not mandatory)
Find the word "</head>" in the HTML code
Just above </head> put in the following code
<link href='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpXAAecSgmrV42VJZBqkrTlJoe8Y2EcI0dVbUA4Nboqq04WuUvAo1vvHrKUGUjUXkK14q0sIdprYx9qWlqr4QPV5BH5GztD9kxZZYGyuH776ZmFAGyI15T6ykrngNjeNjPr3PE-sroOGo/s1600-r/capitolfavicon.ico' rel='shortcut icon'/>
<link href='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpXAAecSgmrV42VJZBqkrTlJoe8Y2EcI0dVbUA4Nboqq04WuUvAo1vvHrKUGUjUXkK14q0sIdprYx9qWlqr4QPV5BH5GztD9kxZZYGyuH776ZmFAGyI15T6ykrngNjeNjPr3PE-sroOGo/s1600-r/capitolfavicon.ico' rel='icon'/>
7. Now click "save template" and view your blog in Mozilla Firefox.
If you have any questions or just want to let me know that you did this send me an email at eatsalem@gmail.com
Good luck
Blogger Vacation
Input/output is the best way to describe how creativity works for me. Life experience, processed through the brain, creating ideas that are carried out online and elsewhere. It's as if reservoirs are filled with ideas and then consumed by expression and vision. Over time, without filling up those reservoirs with life experience, they have dried to a level dangerously close to a drought. The flow pumping out of the damn has not tasted very good to me for some time. It's has become difficult to re-energize my creative muscles with the murky leftovers at the end of the tap. That's part of the reason there hasn't been a lot of new posts here. I have taken a vacation from the output part of this process to work on collecting more input. I'm looking for new streams in hopes of finding ones that are full of rich material that can be used to refill my engines. Trips to this computer after dinner have turned into trips to my nightstand where there are books that I've been reading.
Through years of working as a news photographer, I've learned to pace myself and put out a consistent product over long periods without breaks. The input at my work is non stop. There is a back up of new ideas that can't be used up fast enough. The constant learning is what I really love about that process.
I'm not sure if I'm in the middle of my blogger vacation or at the end. I guess I'll see tomorrow morning when I look down at this keyboard. It has been really great to see that traffic to this site has stayed fairly consistent even without new posts. It seems that salemites.com is a regular visit for folks looking to see what others in town are writing about. Don't forget that if you have the ability to post here, you are welcome to do so.
Through years of working as a news photographer, I've learned to pace myself and put out a consistent product over long periods without breaks. The input at my work is non stop. There is a back up of new ideas that can't be used up fast enough. The constant learning is what I really love about that process.
I'm not sure if I'm in the middle of my blogger vacation or at the end. I guess I'll see tomorrow morning when I look down at this keyboard. It has been really great to see that traffic to this site has stayed fairly consistent even without new posts. It seems that salemites.com is a regular visit for folks looking to see what others in town are writing about. Don't forget that if you have the ability to post here, you are welcome to do so.
Restaurant of the Year 2009, results are in
Congrats to Word of Mouth Neighborhood Bistro for winning the eatsalem.com Restaurant of the Year poll. There was a huge turnout of votes this year. In fact, Word of Mouth got more votes, 222, then the total number of votes cast in each of the last two Restaurant of the Year contests. This has been a good year for dining in Salem. Most people believe improvements in quality have been made by both the new and existing restaurants in town. Lets hope we see this momentum continue in 2010.
Word Verification
Another word verification application called reCAPTCHA, that is used on sites like Craigslist and Ticket Master, actually has an interesting second purpose. Check out the story on NPR.
Persistence
Internet guru and Salemite, Rob McGuire, has been offering great advice on his site recently about building a blog. Here's the link to his site. I would like to add one thing to his recent tips. Persistence. Writing a post everyday that engages the readers will bring a larger audience. If you are looking to have a popular blog you need to be disciplined enough to provide valuable content over a long period of time. I'm not talking about a month or two. It takes a year to gain traction. It also helps to have promotion outside the internet. I've written for Salem Monthly a couple of times and found that those articles gave my sites a boost. Other ideas might be to have a business card with the name of your site on it and pass it out to friends or post on community billboards at work and other public places. But after someone comes to your site for the first time, you want to make sure that, when they come back there is something new to read. If you can, it's also great to write about things that are timeless so that the reader can look at other posts you have written in the past. Once you have built up a large archive of posts, people may go back and read them. It isn't easy to write something everyday. Posting videos works so does providing links to interesting sites and articles.
Local Blogging
Beer and Blog Salem is not dead. The event last night at the f/stop Fitzgeralds was fun and informative. The web is an incredible communication tool but doesn't come close to face to face dialog. The presentation last night by Ross was about the inner workings of Wordpress, Facebook and Twitter. There was also a discussion about local blogging, how it can be used to bring information to the locals connected in. A big part of the whole deal is content creation. What drives traffic through the internet is new information distributed through sites like google and linked to from social networks. Salemites.com was created based on the principle that connecting local content together we can make a destination for people to learn about what's happening in Salem. This connection of sites will link readers to new sites, more places to explore. Think of each site as an island, with a volcano shooting lava out of the top each time a blog post is written. The lava cools off into the sea and the island becomes bigger. If all the islands are pushed closer together, the tiny land masses can grow into one larger piece of real estate. The key to it all, is the creation of interesting content that is either very well written or has very good relevant information. A combination of both would be preferable. I use this site and eatsalem.com as laboratories to see what subject people are interested in. What are people talking about online and what are they seeking information about. Anyway, it was fun and f/stop Fitzgeralds was a great place to hang out.
Vicarious Diner Badge
Help promote Saturday's Vicarious Diner event by putting a badge on your blog. It's a mystery where these sneaky social networkers will be stuffing their stomachs in Salem. Alert your readers about this one of a kind online meal. It's all happening Saturday Oct 3rd at 5p on eatsalem.com or you can follow along and interact on twitter. I made an rss badge for the event, you are welcome to put it into an HTML gadget on your site. To see an example, look to the top right corner of this site. Here's the code.
<table border="1" align="center">
<tr>
<td><center><a href="http://eatsalem.com/2009/09/vicarious-diner-does-fine-dining-on.html" target="_blank"><img vspace="" border="" hspace="" usemap="#" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwSHx2V42u_FKSXm_suiLxXmOhWRnlGQ4kA57aesQowNT3CFlR93duF1QZWPVK7PsVNyySh5GQWA1NyxXKkrQTyWnSghLH4wu7M3bM_SzFVAL_91jmHDlwbTGCmPXcNROsuYCAEhvNl8M/s400/vicariousheader.gif" align=""/></a></center></td>
</tr><tr>
<td><script src="http://www.gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://1o4.jp/google/module/slim-reader.xml&up_mtitle=Slim%20RSS%20Reader&up_mfeed=http%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fstatuses%2Fuser_timeline%2F24184578.rss&up_contentsnum=1&up_titlelink=http%3A%2F%2Fgoogleblog.blogspot.com%2F&synd=open&w=150&h=80&title=&border=%23ffffff%7C3px%2C1px+solid+%23999999&output=js"></script><center><a href="http://twitter.com/vicariousdiner" target="_blank">Follow Me On Twitter!</a></center></td>
</tr></table>
Vicarious Diner Returns!
A restaurant review in real time with live feedback will be happening Saturday October 3rd at 5p at eatsalem.com. The Vicarious Diner is hungry for fine dining and is headed to a local restaurant in Salem Oregon. Join them for dinner as they offer a unique online experience that will satisfy your appetite for restaurant information in our town. It's a mystery, even to me, as to where they will be eating. The only clue is that it will be fine dining at a low cost. In the past, the Vicarious Diner has eaten at La Capitale, Morton's and Macedonia both went live on eatsalem.com and Twitter. If you want to join in the fun, it's easy just got to eatsalem.com Saturday night at 5p and follow the action. You can also follow along on Twitter just be sure to follow Vicarious Diner. Stay tuned for more info.
Raindrops in my Coffee
The walk to the school bus stop this morning was a bit depressing, except for the fact that I thought of that clever post title. Actually, I don't want to talk about the weather, I really don't want to talk about the weather. there have been a couple of interesting things happening with salemites.com recently. One thing is that the site somehow ended up on stumbleupon.com. It's a site that randomly posts other websites. Stumbleupon.com has lots of readers, maybe tens of thousands. And when salemites.com showed up on there, a couple hundred readers showed up to our site. The statcounter showed 238 "uniques" that day. When I investigated how we got on that site I discovered we were linked in by fellow Salemite Gary J. aka Jugbo on Twitter. Gary is the ukulele player who posts a blog called droll exhaust. I've never met him in person but we've traded tweets and I often read about his life on his site.
I'm always amazed at all the different sites there are out there and what they do. Who would ever have thought that people would want to surf the web through random sites. Because so much of the traffic from stubleupon was from beyond Salem, it wasn't effective in creating new readers. That's OK because more sites are continuing to be added. Recent additions include; http://creativityon.blogspot.com/, http://foodandbooksandstuff.blogspot.com/, and http://www.robmcguire.net/.
If you'd like to add your site to this Salem web ring, send me an email and we will put you on.
I'm always amazed at all the different sites there are out there and what they do. Who would ever have thought that people would want to surf the web through random sites. Because so much of the traffic from stubleupon was from beyond Salem, it wasn't effective in creating new readers. That's OK because more sites are continuing to be added. Recent additions include; http://creativityon.blogspot.com/, http://foodandbooksandstuff.blogspot.com/, and http://www.robmcguire.net/.
If you'd like to add your site to this Salem web ring, send me an email and we will put you on.
Blogging on CSPAN Book TV
Book TV, that's a funny phrase. This morning I was watching a presentation about blogging by Scott Rosenberg who has a new book called "Say Everything." It was an interesting explanation about how blogging started and where it's headed. To watch the CSPAN presentation click here. That link might get blocked by your pop up blocker but it's from CSPAN so I trusted allowing the site to do pop ups. I've often been asked why I do blogs and I don't exactly have a great soundbite type answer. Many of you out there reading this probably have your own blogs and have thought about why as well. When I started writing Eat Salem a couple of years ago, it was an attempt to learn something new. There wasn't a clear long term vision for the site, mostly a hope that readers in Salem would get involved and contribute their own ideas and opinions about local restaurants. Reading everything that came through and the email feedback I started to learn that, besides the newspaper and it's .com, there wasn't a whole lot of other Salem places to go online. Sure, there were a few business web pages but there wasn't a community of voices discussing their lives and experiences around town. That's where the idea for salemites.com came about. Nowadays, with Instant Messaging, Facebook and Twitter there's an abundance of voices. People are reconnecting with old friends and finding new ones at a rapid pace. I have a Twitter account for Eat Salem but I have yet to sign up for Facebook. There are a few reasons why I have avoided doing Facebook. The main reason is that it is more stuff to do. Maintaining these blogs is enough online activity for me(more than enough) and FB just seems like more to do. Another reason is that I feel like it forces you to categorize your friends. I've always thought of relationships as not being black and white. I don't declare someone as being a "best" friend, I actually don't even take inventory on who I have as friends. Twitter is different, I just allow anyone to follow and I look to follow people in Salem.
For me, blogs are a learning experience. It's almost like doing a never ending puzzle. Everyday, there are new challenges and problems to learn how to solve. Discovering solutions is where the pleasure is in doing this. Sometimes a quick google search will get answers, other times I might have to seek advice from a friend. Writing everyday, I've learned, takes a lot of discipline in overcoming challenges of time and family obligations. I have a lot of places that I look for input and there are many good ideas that never make it to a post. But getting something done, as best as I can, is the goal. I can look back and see what went well, learn from those moments and do better the next time. I hope that what I have been doing is at least entertaining and at best useful to the people who continue to read and contribute to the sites that I have been working on. If you'd like to do your own blog sign up at blogger.com or wordpress.com. If you're writing about Salem Oregon, be sure to sign up for salemites.com and let the rest of us share in your experiences.
For me, blogs are a learning experience. It's almost like doing a never ending puzzle. Everyday, there are new challenges and problems to learn how to solve. Discovering solutions is where the pleasure is in doing this. Sometimes a quick google search will get answers, other times I might have to seek advice from a friend. Writing everyday, I've learned, takes a lot of discipline in overcoming challenges of time and family obligations. I have a lot of places that I look for input and there are many good ideas that never make it to a post. But getting something done, as best as I can, is the goal. I can look back and see what went well, learn from those moments and do better the next time. I hope that what I have been doing is at least entertaining and at best useful to the people who continue to read and contribute to the sites that I have been working on. If you'd like to do your own blog sign up at blogger.com or wordpress.com. If you're writing about Salem Oregon, be sure to sign up for salemites.com and let the rest of us share in your experiences.
Cell Phone Concert Miley Cyrus
This post is somewhere in between being informative and a gratuitous attempt to attract more readers to this site. Although, I don't imagine too many people are searching the words "Miley Cyrus" and "Salem Oregon" together. When the pop singer performed recently at the Rose Garden in Portland, tickets went quick. It seems like the crowd that attended the concert was tech savvy and many of them shot video on their iphones and posted them to Youtube where there is a large audience of fans. The above video has been viewed over 5,000 times. That's nothing, another video from this concert has been viewed over 20,000 times already in just 3 days. Overall, video viewing online is up 41% from last year according to research done by the Nielsen Company. In August 2009, over 7.2 billion videos were played on Youtube. There were 108 million unique visitors to that site in the same time period. As cameras become smaller, there are more people creating videos and sharing with the world. A few times a week, I try to look up what kind of videos people are posting from Salem Oregon. Often, they are videos of inventory from a car dealership or vacation shots made easy to share for distant relatives. What I like to find are videos unique to Salem. The amazing thing about Youtube is that there are videos of everything. I just typed in "salem" and "restaurant" and 155 results showed up. I've even used it for videos I shot for eatsalem.com. Check them out.
Salem Man in the Monthly
Anyone pick up a copy of the latest Salem Monthly? If you did, there's an article in there somewhere that I wrote called Fast Food Derby. It's my first time in print so I'm feeling a bit guilty about all the trees they must have had to cut down to publish that. I'm not going to link to it. You have to go out and get a copy of the actual paper to read what I wrote. Actually, don't get it for the article that I wrote, there's much more interesting reading inside. Emily Grosvenor wrote an excellent piece about the closing of the Oregon School for the Blind and the cover story is a hard hitting piece about the dizzying world of the Cherry City Derby Girls. The new editor of the paper, Eric Howald, is making the Salem Monthly a must read. My only complaint is that I can never find a copy of the paper in the news racks at the capitol. There is usually a stack of 200 Willamette Weeks even plenty of Portland Observers but no Salem Monthly.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
