Tag: Portland

Onion rings at The Original

Hiking Devil’s Rest via Wahkeena

Got out for a great hike this morning with Daniel and Leah. Hiked about 8 miles in the gorge up to Devil’s Rest. We lucked out with weather, it only started to rain when we were within shouting distance of the car.

Post-hiking donut and coffee

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Just got back from an 8 mile hike with Daniel and Leah. Now for an afternoon of reading and relaxing.

The beginning of a delicious pasta sauce

The last of the fall color

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Chai ice cream with caramel cookie

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Sushi at Bamboo

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Status

Lesson learned: When competing in WordPress pancake art do not mess with Tom. He’s a master.

WordCamp Portland New User Workshop

This weekend is fast approaching and it’ll be filled with WordCamp Portland.

In addition to the WordCamp we’re running a new user workshop on Friday, September 16th from 9am to 4pm. We did this at WordCamp San Francisco and it was a blast. Over 60 people went from total newbies to knowing everything about publishing with WordPress. Now, you can join them.

If you’ve always wanted to start blogging but never knew how, now’s your chance. We’ll walk you through each step of the process and by the end of the day you’ll have a great looking site you can take with you.

Or, if you’re one of those people who is always the default “guy/gal who knows about computers” in your social circle you can use the workshop as a way to get all your friends set up with sites. We’ll do the work so you don’t have to. 🙂

By the end of the workshop you’ll not only know how to publish and customize your site but you’ll be prepared to get the most out of the two days of unconference sessions as well. You might even think of a session topic to pitch yourself.

Index your city: An idea for local news

A while back I moved into a new apartment in Portland. It’s in a great neighborhood and a terrific building. One of the best parts is the top floor view of Lone Fir Cemetery across the street. It’s a cemetery that saw its first burial in 1846 and has quite a bit of history tied to it.

What is interesting to me is that on the edge of this massive, historic cemetery is an empty corner of land. It’s roped off and is mostly gravel. After digging through Wikipedia’s footnotes I found that this lot is tied to some controversy.

The one useful article I could find online states that:

The county would go ahead with plans to tear down its building at the corner of Southeast Morrison Street and 20th Avenue — a squat beige box and parking lot built atop the graves of Chinese immigrants buried there in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

To me that’s fascinating. It’s a corner of land that has roots going back over 100 years but is still empty and unmarked. There’s no reason I should have to dig through Wikipedia and track down an Oregonian article re-posted on another site to find that out.

Dave Winer says that, “Rule #1 of local blogging: If you hear fire trucks in the night, in the morning you should be able to find out where the fire was.” If that’s local blogging then a thriving local news ecosystem should adopt a mindset akin to “If you have a question about something in our city, we’ll answer it for you.”

The Oregonian, or a startup news service, is missing a golden opportunity here. Portland is a town with pretty well-defined neighborhoods that each have their unique histories. Someone who can index those locations as well as the news and history of each has created a solid product which they can deliver to residents as well as visitors.