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April 22, 2008

Placeholder for Ed’s clever post title

In January, I got an invitation from the blogger behind Eastside Scene to have coffee, tea and just chat about blogging. He invited other local bloggers. The first meeting was small. Just me, Eastside Scene and P3000. The next meeting in February was much better attended. I skipped out on the March meeting because I was touring Texas.

I left work on time to make sure I wouldn’t arrive at El Gallo Café the site of our monthly meetings too late. Eastside Scene was the only one there for a while and we chatted about art and blogging over smoothies. Soon we were joined by Ed from View From A Loft.

Ed’s great. Not only does he have some cool photos of major LA events posted on his blog, but he also comes up with some witty headlines. Well, more like blog titles. He complimented my writing, and I mentioned that I’d like to have his ability to write succinct titles.

“You know, you should re-name some of my posts,” I suggested.

Ed pulled up my blog and looked for recent posts. Ed, Eastside Scene and I came up with some titles for my simply-titled Nopalitos post:

(more…)

Filed under: Los Angeles, Blog/tech | POSTED BY cindylu AT 12:59 am | 8 Comments

April 16, 2008

Dear Readers, I appreciate you

A few months ago, K posted a list of simple pleasures, those little things that make you happy. I replied with my own list, which had a lot in common with hers.

One of those things was comments on my blog. I love getting emails announcing a response to the latest post. I don’t even mind the critical and snarky comments all that much.

Of course, I would have no comments without wonderful readers. I think it’s pretty cool that you all find my tales and questions interesting enough to return. I’ve been doing this since 2001 because I like interacting with readers, which also comes from reading your blog (if you have one). I still love writing in notebooks, but it’s not the same. There’s no one there to reassure me that I’m still cool. Hah.

¡Gracias!

I wouldn’t have know about this if not for MsAbcMom, who got the idea from The Other Mother

Filed under: Blog/tech | POSTED BY cindylu AT 10:01 pm | 3 Comments

April 6, 2008

Cindylu en Blogotitlán

I love blogging so much I’m contributing my words to other blogs as a guest blogger or regular contributor.

If you don’t already have these blogs on your blogroll or RSS feed reader (I recommend Google Reader), you should add them.

And don’t worry, I’ll still be regularly posting here.

Filed under: Blog/tech | POSTED BY cindylu AT 10:02 pm | 2 Comments

March 6, 2008

Question of the week: In a sentence or two

It’s happened twice in the last two weeks.

The first time I was asked to describe my blog was at the Latina/o blogger gathering in East LA. The second gathering, set up by Eastside Scene, was pretty well attended. Everyone got a chance to discuss how he/she got started in blogging and their focus. When my turn came along, I explained that I’d been blogging for about 6 years. I didn’t even know I was blogging when I started. Since then, my initial diary-like writings have evolved as I realized people were actually reading. That was the easy part. It was more difficult to describe what I write about.

Yesterday, my friend Jake, editor of Puro Pedo Magazine, asked me to describe my blog in a sentence. It was tough. Jake called it “digital chisme,” but I think it’s more than that even if chisme’s been a current focus. I came up with something last night, but today it looks rather pretentious and the description is still unclear.

La Pregunta: How would you describe your blog in a sentence or two? How would you describe my blog?

[Note: Yes, I know I’ve been lagging on the QOTW posts. I’ve been a little distracted. I have a few ideas for the next few weeks, so don’t fear my lovely readers.]

Filed under: Blog/tech, Preguntas | POSTED BY cindylu AT 2:21 am | 14 Comments

January 22, 2008

Yo, lurkers! (’08 version)

These were made by the Zacatecas peoples
They think you should comment (artifacts at the Natural History Museum)

I missed National Delurking week, which is supposedly the second week of January. I have an excuse. My computer was broken.

For those unfamiliar with the term, a lurker is “a person who reads discussions on a message board, newsgroup, chatroom, file sharing or other interactive system, but rarely participates” (source: wikipedia).

If you’re a lurker*, leave a comment. You can write whatever you want, but if you need a prompt, here’s some ideas: recommend something (a book, film, song/album, website, blog, whatever); tell me about yourself (where are you from? what do you do?); tell me why you love/like/hate Lotería Chicana.

I promise I won’t bite or call you annoying (that was so last week).

*Of course, if you regularly comment you can chime in too.

Filed under: Blog/tech | POSTED BY cindylu AT 5:31 pm | 15 Comments

January 14, 2008

The big switch

On Friday, I bought a 13″ black MacBook.

It was weird. I wasn’t just buying a new laptop. I was making the switch from a PC to a Mac. I’ve been wanting to do this for awhile, and still don’t know why I didn’t buy a MacBook a few years ago when I was in the market for a laptop. That laptop, my trusty LifeBook is currently out of commission. Luckily, I have 99% of my files backed up and my main concern in switching to a Mac is about my iPod.

Oso, my favorite globe trotting blogger, believes owning a MacBook will make me more popular. Who knows, maybe I’ll even get my own fan club.

Photo by Oso (his flickr photostream)

Filed under: Blog/tech | POSTED BY cindylu AT 1:01 am | 13 Comments

January 18, 2007

Delurking week follow up

Dear Lurkers,

Thanks for speaking up!

I know we all have reasons why we might not want to participate in the more interactive aspect of blogs, but I’m glad some of you broke it out of it for a day.

I learned some interesting things. I had no idea anyone in Australia was reading, or that some of you really enjoy the stories about my cool cousins and siblings, and that a few of you have blogs of your own.

If you want to keep commenting, great. If you don’t, that’s cool too. I’ll just try my best to keep writing and doing whatever it was that got you to come back after that initial chance encounter.

Peace,
Cindylu

Filed under: Blog/tech | POSTED BY cindylu AT 5:01 pm | 6 Comments

January 5, 2007

Doing vs. teaching

The past few nights, I’ve been having long telephone conversations with Ralph. Rather than spend time talking about our exciting day, I try to give him instructions on how to set up his blog over at Ollinkoatl.net and customize it to his liking. I keep getting frustrated and just telling him I’ll do it for him… because I can. I know how to modify a theme enough to make it look like something that didn’t just come out of the WordPress install box. Finding the right directory to upload an image isn’t tough. The process may give me a bit of a headache (modifying the Puro Pedo Magazine blog wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be), but I know I can do it.

I do the same thing when it comes to my family. Rather than patiently teach family members young and old how to make sense of their gadgets, I just do it myself. Not a good look… ’cause then I get stuck always looking for the tia Consuelo’s phone number in Papa Chepe’s cell phone, making all the party invitations, and adding music to my brother’s iPod. Somehow, I’d rather have the extra responsibility as opposed to challenging myself enough to teach someone who might just need a little push.

Anyway, as Ralph sets up his blog, I’ll try to help just enough… and as my sister Lori gets her beautiful new MacBook up and running I’ll do the same. After all, they’re intelligent people and if I can figure it out (after lots of trial and error), I’m sure they can too.

Filed under: Blog/tech | POSTED BY cindylu AT 1:22 am | 2 Comments

November 6, 2006

Venting 1.0

Written sometime in October 2006.

Every single time I check my blog, it looks different. Sometimes it is completely blank, other times it looks like it should, and ohter times it’s somewhere in between.

This is frustrating. I miss being able to publish to my colorful and personalized blog. Even without the technical difficulty, I know I had slowed down a lot. I hardly ever post over at blogging.la. I miss the sense of community of blogging, the tongue in cheek comments, the battle of wits from the Chicano corner, making fun of HP in “public” (I do it over IM all the time), and the words of wisdom from folks like Frances.

That’s all the venting for now. I really need to get back to being a student and reading Pierre Bordieu’s Distinction. It is time’s like these when I both love/hate the fact that the difficult part of my “job” as a full-time student means reading sociology classics translated from French. I’m lucky that hard is reading long sentences (what I’d call paragraphs) from a guy who loves commas and hates periods.

Filed under: Blog/tech | POSTED BY cindylu AT 1:19 pm | No Comments

October 9, 2006

My blog has issues

For some strange reasons, my blog is broken and it’s not my fault, at least I don’t think so. I don’t know what could have changed in the last week or so. HP thinks it might be someone who doesn’t like my ideas trying to hack in to my site. His other theory is that the increased traffic from Ask a Mexican might have done something too.

I’ve had issues since Friday. I’ve submitted a request for assistance with the tech support for my host (siteflip), and checked the status of my SQL database in cPanelx. I’ve backed everything up, but am still worried I could lose more than a year’s worth of writing. Yikes.

So, for the time being, I won’t be blogging much until I get my tech issues worked out. It’s probably a good thing, I have a lot of work to do for school, work and GSA.

Don’t miss me too much. If you do, there’s always flickr.

Filed under: Blog/tech | POSTED BY cindylu AT 7:57 pm | 2 Comments

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