Belated convention recap

Hmm - thanks to my jam-packed weekend, I think I have the privilege of being both the first and the last to blog about the first-ever Greater Cincinnati Bloggers Convention. (UPDATE. Harrumph - Joe and Kevin proved me wrong.) It was a fab time, and I met plenty of cool people. Here are links to them:

• Cincinnati Locavore
• Cincinnati Commercial Real Estate
• Cincy Chic
• Buy Cincy
• Queen City Survey
• QueerCincinnati.com
• Juliet and Juliette
• Permasmirk
• 5chw4r7z
• Live Green Cincinnati

There were lots more folks there, but I get a little shy meeting new people. So I spent a lot of time talking with the people I already knew - Gerard, Chris, and, of course, Mr. W.

Here's what other attendees had to say:

• Building Cincinnati
  
• Cincinnati Blog
• Clark Street Blog
• Die Fledermaus
• Gerard
• Juliet and Juliette
• Journey Is The Reward
• Kate's Random Musings
• Not Really a Book Blog Book Blog
• Report This!
  
• Stacked
• QueerCincinnati
• 5chw4r7z
• wine me, dine me (in cincinnati)

Oy vey, now I've totally got to update my blogroll. But those Mercantile folk know how to put on a shindig, and I look forward to hanging out there more often. (Also, I found out that some of the librarians are fans of my languishing copy editing blog. Guess I'll have to make a special effort to start updating that again.)

At the Mercantile

More on Sitemeter

In the comments to the last post, QueerCincinnati.com asked about Sitemeter. I've been playing with it for about a week now, and I'm enthralled. It's free, and it gives me tons of information about who's coming to the site.

When I log in, this is what I see:


So right away, that's some pretty good info. And you can break that down in graph form.


But Sitemeter also pulls information about my individual visitors. Like, crazy amounts of data. Like what monitor resolution they have. (I can actually see how this would be helpful, depending on what you're trying to do with your site; you could scale your design up or down to fit the majority of your viewers' monitors.)

Also, you can pull up a world map that shows where all your visitors come from. This is the most fun part.


The cursor disappeared when I took the screenshot, but what's happening is that I'm mousing over a little green dot on the eastern edge of China, which causes a white box to pop up with the viewer's server and location.

So if I click on that visitor from T'ai-pei, I discover that he found this old post on a Google search for "something told the wild geese" (OK, wow, that post is the #1 hit for that search in Google Taiwan!) and stayed for 0 seconds. Guess he didn't find what he was looking for. Also, he was using IE 7.0 on a Windows NT machine.

Anyway, that's Sitemeter. Can you see why I love it so far?

UPDATE. Sorry, I forgot to mention my one problem with Sitemeter: as far as I know, it doesn't track RSS subscribers. (Or if it does, it doesn't distinguish them from regular visitors.) Anyone know more about this?

The blog ... of TOMORROW!

This weekend I decided to finally install the Sitemeter code I signed up for like three months ago, which led to me upgrading to Blogger's new templates. Let me know if anything looks weird to you, and I'll try to fix it - I already had to poke around in the HTML to keep the end of the post from butting up against the date below it.

A day at Yankee Stadium

Last week while Mr. W and I were on vacation in New Jersey, his brother took us to a Yankees game. Can you tell from the above photo how great our seats were? No? Maybe this will help:


Why, hello, A-Rod! Call me if this thing with Madonna doesn't work out.

We were in one of those "order your food from your seats" sections. Sweet! I got a Hebrew National Deli Dog, which was listed as being a quarter pound. Have you ever heard of a quarter-pound hot dog? Anyway, it was huge, delicious, and served on a nice poppy-seed roll. I was enthralled. And it came with chips!


While I was eating my hot dog, the baby being held by the woman in the seat in front of me looked my way. I went into my usual "baby" routine - funny faces and arm waves - and he started bouncing around and reaching out for my hot dog, which was part of the show.

The woman said, "Uh-oh, he's trying to steal your hot dog!" I said, "He'd better not - this thing is good! I'll fight him for it."

Hebrew National should change their slogan from "We answer to a higher authority" to "So good, you'll fight a baby for one."

You better watch out, kid.

I felt lucky to be there for one of the last games to be played in the old Yankee Stadium. One of the big outfield ads is also a countdown of home games left, and after the fifth inning, it changed from 33 to 32.

And to top it all off, the Yankees won. (I'm not normally a Yankees fan, but when in Rome ...) So we got to exit the stadium to the sounds of Frank Sinatra.

"Start spreadin' the news ..."

Quick post-vacation note

One of the best possible ways I can think of to have your vacation mellow utterly harshed is to come home to a car with a dead battery.

Thursday open thread

Some blogs do a "Friday open thread." Inspired by Gina's need for a space to discuss my cat, I'm going to try a "Thursday open thread" instead.

Got something to say about Thursday (the cat or the day)? Put it in the comments.

Vacation!

Guess who got awesome tickets to the Yankees game?

Happy Independence Day from the American Wide Web!

The Substitute

I've known my mother long enough to know that if I come to watch one of her sporting events - heck, if I'm in the same neighborhood as one of her sporting events - I will most likely wind up being drafted to play. (This is a general hazard of knowing people who play sports: sports teams never have enough people, so you're always being asked to play. This pressure is doubled when your mom is asking you, and trebled when you're right there on the sidelines looking on.)

But that didn't occur to me when I went out to Setters this evening to watch her play sand volleyball. I showed up showered (even moisturized!) and wearing jeans and looking generally not like someone who is expecting to play sand volleyball.

This assumption worked just fine for two games.

My mom's team won both those games. They play the third game notwithstanding - but one of the team members must have forgotten, because she booked it out of there five seconds after game two ended.

So the three remaining team members were standing around, thinking their friend was in the bathroom or something, and I saw my mom gesture toward the stands where I was sitting. Her teammate looked in my direction.

I said to my dad, "She's telling them I can play."

My dad paused for a moment, then said, "No!" I don't know why he sounded so surprised - he's been drafted into coed softball games before.

Sure enough, a few minutes later, my mom came over and said, "Hey, Kel - can you play until the other girl comes back?" So I rolled up my jeans and was three points into the game before I found out that someone had seen the regular teammate peeling out of the parking lot.

Anyway, I didn't embarrass myself, we won the game, and I did have fun. But now I have to take another shower tonight, and I can't wear these jeans to work tomorrow.

Maybe I should just start showing up to watch my mom's games already wearing the right clothing to play the sport. After the game, I found out she once made my sister play softball in a skirt. ("But it was a sweat skirt!" she said.)