Posts Tagged “blogging”

I recently helped a friend set up a blog. It’s a bit like turning somebody on to a drug - you know it’s bad for them and it’s going to eat up their life, but it’s already eaten yours, so why not share?  Over time, I’ve been “blogfather” to more than a couple of RSS feeds, some of which are in the duckroll blogroll at right.  Tonight I was rewarded with a wonderful dinner of thanks, and it’s only right that I should blog about it.

L took me to Great Bay in the Hotel Commonwealth, an excellent choice for many reasons, not least that she’s pesco-vegetarian. Great Bay - another awesome Michael Schlow joint - is in a beautiful space with a vaulted ceiling and a central sashimi station with a great lampshade-like canopy floating above it.  I recommend sitting at it if you can.  As is often the case, it was a bit dark for good photos, but I did the best I could with the meager candle.  Also note (excuses, excuses) that Great Bay’s online menu is a season or three behind what was served, so I don’t have all the precise details of ingredients.  I guess you’ll just have to check it out for yourself.

Service was attentive almost to the point of making us nervous, but they split both our soup and salad without complaint, and I’m sure we got more than the usual portion in total.  We started with a nice half bottle of Albariño from Lagar de Cevera, a salad with golden beets and candied pecans and a marvelous butternut squash bisque with perfect little scallops lurking just beneath the oil-dotted surface.

From the raw bar, we had Tasmanian salmon sashimi wrapped around crisp daikon with a topping that looked like tapenade but was actually black bean, rocoto pepper and lotus root for a nice zing.

Next up, two small plates as a main: lobster and shrimp dumplings with ginger soy and crab cake over corn salsa with a squirt of lime.  Despite the engaging and limey presentation, the crab cake was merely good, while the dumplings were more rustic in appearance but exceptionally tasty with a good dose of lobster meat.

Satisfied but not quite full, we walked through the hotel to the other end where we had coffee and superb dark chocolate cake with coffee buttercream at the bar of Eastern Standard.  As if having two great restaurants weren’t reason enough, I also love the Hotel Commonwealth because it hosts the Panopticon Gallery of Photography. Thanks to its hallway location, Panopticon never really closes and so might just be the art venue with the best hours in town.  We were lucky enough to see the new show - it doesn’t officially open until tomorrow with the reception on Friday - called Prohibition: Celebrating the Repeal, Photographs from the Collection of the Boston Public Library.  The show features modern prints of vintage photos from the BPL collection depicting life under prohibition and ties in with the 75th anniversary of repeal coming up on December 5.  In addition, images by Panopticon regulars Bradford Washburn, Karin Rosenthal, John Ponwall and Keith Johnson (among others) were on view.  Don’t miss it.

It seems goofy, but I’m thinking I should take a holiday in my own hometown and stay at the Commonweath.  When the weather gets cold, being able to see great photos and eat great food without going outside sounds pretty good.  Kenmore square has come a long way since I first moved here, that’s for sure.

Into the category of “why didn’t I think if that” falls Food 2.0: Nom Nom Nom, a London event last month wherein food bloggers, food photographers, food journalists & authors, everyday regular cooks, influential bloggers & senior members of leading UK based internet companies met up, mashed up, and made up dishes in an Iron Chef style smackdown. All for a good cause, Action Against Hunger UK.

Until we have food 2.0 here in the states, I urge you all to vote for my transoceanic colleages on team #7, the Cream Team. You know, like Dream Team. I know… Just go with it and vote for them, ok? Need further proof of their creamy excellence? Observe the sketch and the realization of the Tartiflette:

And there’s more on their flickr site (Jonno is the only person I know who has more food photos in his phone than I do, and Kai’s food flickr is epic) but you really should vote first… Nom Nom Nom…

Let me call to your attention two excellent maps that in my humble opinion should make sweet cartographic love and spawn a mashup of some sort. This confluence of maps, blogs and public transportation has got the limeduck quacking loudly.

First up, Boston Blogs’ map of Boston blog by T stop.

Still in beta, this excellent map is simply the MBTA’s official subway (and Silver line) map with a link at each station to blogs tagged with that T stop. It looks like Davis square is the belle of the ball with 25 blogs as of this writing, and my own dear Central has a respectable showing at 15 blogs. The Red line is not surprisingly the bloggiest MBTA line.

My second nominee is Unmapped Boston from Unmapped Cities.

This is a completely new view of the Boston area. It combines major streets, subway routes, and most importantly, a pretty comprehensive list of the squares that define Boston neighborhoods, all while remaining substantially but not literally true to geography. The map is available on paper ($20, get one today, I just did!) and is a beautiful work of design.

Here’s my immodest proposal: Unmapped Boston should hook up with Boston Blogs to create a cartographic listing of Boston area blogs by square, and not just the squares that have T stops. Sure, there’s lots of geotagging going on and you can find blogs by longitude and latitude, but I think I prefer a neighborhood-centric blog geography. It’s not so specific that it sets off privacy alarms, and it lets neighbor blogs self-identify their location to the area that suits them best.

So don’t forget, list your blog at Boston Blogs and check out Unmapped Boston, and if you like them, maybe encourage them to get together sometime for a coffee. No pressure.

Are we alone? Nobody watching? Good. I want to tell you about a secret blog. (Don’t arch your eyebrow at me, KC, this isn’t about your secret blog) I’ve been working hard at migrating Ipswitch’s Daily Network Monitor Blog from its current Movable Type install to a shiny new WordPress setup. Here’s the old DNM, and here’s your secret preview of the new one. (of course once the cutover is complete, both links will show the new site)

The DNM blog has been a little neglected of late, but we’re getting back on daily posting, and with the new setup, I think it’s going to be a serious SEO force for the main product site. Here are some technical reasons why this is going to be so:

• Moving the blog from an Ipswitch-owned domain to a hosted domain will give it some separation and make the links from the blog to the company site more valuable
• Taking advantage of tagging and categorizing makes it easier for bots to understand what the site is about, and also creates more pages for indexing
• WordPress’ easy architecture will make it possible for us to extend the web visitor tracking system to the blog to better understand the flow of traffic
• Updating the social bookmarking links - digg, stumbleupon, delicious, reddit, etc. - will help get the site noticed (and it wouldn’t kill you to use them to spread the word about limeduck, either)
• and most importantly, getting more technical posts and some guest authors will make it more readable and commentable

I have to give lots of credit to the tools and vendors here. You already know that WordPress is excellent, and that I dig the Mandigo theme. What I’ve also discovered is that the folks as BlueHost have an amazingly easy to use system for automatically installing and setting up WordPress on your hosting account, and their tech support people are actually clueful and available.

Well, that’s enough geeking out for now. Look for the new Daily Network Monitor soon, and expect some of the learnings to come back and enhance the limeduck experience, too.

Ok, I waited for Wordpress 2.3 and have installed it. Next steps, importing all the old entries and fixing up the template. Thank you for your patience during this time of transition.

Looks like some of the images have broken and the video is definitely busted. And there are some odd duplicates of a couple of posts. I’ll start cleaning up from the present back. I think the old archives are still around even though the homepage is gone.

And wordpress has somehow turned my tags into categories. Oops. That’ll take some undoing…

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9/29 update

1. Actually, the old homepage is still there, and seems to be fully functional. I guess I’ll leave it there, but please update any links you might have from www.limeduck.com/index.html to www.limeduck.com or www.limeduck.com/index.php if you must.

2. I ditched the tags temporarily but categories seem to be ok. I really want a tag cloud, so I’m going to have to figure out how to get that working again.

3. I found the most awesomest wordpress theme ever, Mandigo. It’s exceptionally customizable, mostly without touching any css, and seems to be rock-solid code-wise. I made up three header graphics, and the theme rotates them at random.