Eat at Joe's!

I miss it

Sigh.  I miss posting here.  It's also a PITA to manage dual identities.  That is all.  For the moment.  ;)

 

P.s. -- Does anyone actually read this thing anymore?  I admit it's ugly AF, especially after I gave up the other blogs....

Happy Birthday

Today is a special day.  Maura -- my friend, occasional partner-in-crime, and frequent commenter here -- has a birthday today.  She too has a food blog: The Wooden Spoon.  And hopefully she'll be appearing in print, with some food-related writing in the first issue of the forthcoming Durham Magazine.  Go wish her a happy birthday.  :)

---

Today is also Eat at Joe's! fourth birthday!  I'll probably be rolling over 400 posts sometime in the next few weeks.  In the next several days, I'll get my 100,000th hit.  I was kind of hoping I'd get to it by today, but it's all good.  I still have more readers than I ever imagined.  Thanks, gang.  :)

I'm also having to make some choices about how I blog.  One thing I like doing is following up on most comments left here.  It's not that I have to get in the last word,  :)  but I want people to feel connected to the site.  I may not follow up on every comment, and sometimes I'll make one comment be an answer for the previous three or four commenters, but I like to try.  However, I'm failing: right now I've got 21 comments in my inbox I haven't responded to.  I also have unanswered e-mail to [email protected], which is my contact address here.  A couple days ago I realized that I was not posting more entries because I hadn't caught up on comments and mail.  Short-term, that might be ok.  Long-term, it's bad: if I don't post, there's no blog.  So I posted.  :)  But I say something here because I might start backing off on the amount of feedback you folks get when you leave comments.  One good thing is that you folks generally have achieved a sort of critical mass, where your own comments to other comments and posts are self-sustaining.  Just remember that even if I don't answer, I still love you.  :)  I also read every comment, whether I answer it or not.  Hundreds of other readers are reading here, and they may read or answer your comment too.  So keep it coming.

---

Have a happy March Thirteenth.  It's a nice day out there in Durham, so go pack a snack and a bottle of wine, and sit outside somewhere nice.  And if you're having a birthday today too, Happy Birthday.  :)

Edit: I forgot to mention that we've moved up in Google's search rankings.  If you put "Eat at Joe's" into Google and hit "I'm feeling lucky," you'll get this blog.  Same for "durham food blog."  Excellent.  :)

Backed Up

Folks, I'm a little behind on comments and correspondence.  Hopefully I'll be getting caught up soon. 

On the other hand, I've done two of what could be considered reviews in the past week.  Maybe that makes me The Man.  ;)

Feed Me

At the risk of cluttering the sidebar into unintelligibility, I've added a feed for the pork barrel.  TPB is a shared food blog I've set up with some other folks.  I've been inviting a few other people to post occasionally: some have and some haven't.  Anyway, you'll see the subject lines of the last 5 posts as links to the posts themselves. 

"We are building a blogging force of extraordinary magnitude."

Kira, my friend and regular commenter here at EAJ!, has started her own food blog: 

Le Vin et Le Pain

I've linked to her in the sidebar.  I've also asked her to post on my new shared food blog:

The Pork Barrel

I've invited some other folks too, both local and out-of-state.  We forge our tradition in the spirit of our ancestors. You have our gratitude.

The Golden Age of Wireless: Tips & Tricks #4

FWIW, I've put up a page with Durham restaurants that have wireless net.access for their patrons.  I imagine it will constantly be an imperfect work in progress.  I can't decide yet whether I want it to be anyplace with wireless, or anywhere I've actually been and confirmed that there's wireless.  But if someone wants to write me and tell me about places that have wireless, maybe I'll put them up, or maybe I won't.  :)

While I was doing that, I set up a separate chunk in the sidebar for all my "pages," as opposed to "posts."  I forgot about an automatic feature TypePad has for that, so I did it twice, and threw the first one away.  :)  And while I was doing that, I had to reconfigure the sidebar anyway, and while I was doing THAT, I moved the sidebar to the other side, which will make pages seem to load faster.  And I imagine while I was doing all of THAT, I could have easily screwed something up, so let me know if I did, ok?