Fancy Food Show, here I come

I’m spending the day at the Fancy Food Show at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Look for short posts from the show today, plus tweets at http://twitter.com/tomprete.

Wireless connections are a bit spotty in Moscone Center and no cameras are allowed in the show, but I’ll post what I can, when I can.

How did you get here? Week of Friday, Oct. 3

I don’t know what was more fun this week, watching the Palin-Biden debate on TV or watching MC Hammer at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in Golden Gate Park. In any case, both events proved quite popular among visitors to PretePress. I’m sure that if I had included that photo of a woman dressed as a cow that’s going around, it would have beat everything.

Some of the search terms that brought people to my blog this week, in no particular order (remember that WordPress truncates some terms when compiling its lists):

• weird stuff found in the bay after hurri
• galveston pictures – fish in fence
• bay bridge tanker oil spill san francisc
• anti-palin rally burlingame
• elitada
• carmen chu
• vice presedential debate grading
• newspaper headline “bastards” for 9/11
• http://pretepress.wordpress.com
• palin biden debate
• nucular
• cnn debate audience response graph meter
• old fashion gas stations
• animals covered in oil
• dave burgin
• oil spill photos of cosco busan
• tom prete
• is stuart hanlon a good attorney in san
• na lei hulu i ka wekiu
• i hate critical mass

Elitada News stole my content

I know I’m not the only blogger whose content has been stolen and reprinted in its entirety elsewhere without payment or acknowledgment of ownership, so I won’t whine on forever about this — but I do want to say something for the record.

Please don’t visit the site (no reason to reward thievery with page views), but this morning I found that my post analyzing the first McCain-Obama debate reprinted on www(dot)elitada(dot)com/news/ — every word of it. The only indication that they got the content from me was a tiny link to my original post at the bottom of the page, with the permalink concealed. This isn’t an excerpt or a blogroll we’re talking about, it’s a clear violation of U.S. and international copyright laws.

Furthermore, the site seems to have a dummy comment form designed to prevent feedback. The form looks normal, but trying to submit a comment results in an error message that the commenter didn’t fill out the email address field — which doesn’t exist on the form.

The content presented at this site seems to be almost entirely stolen from other sources and reprinted without acknowledgment, so I’m not the only one with this issue.

How did you get here? Week of Friday, Sept. 26

My post about the fish stuck in a chain-link fence after Hurricane Ike was still the most popular post this week, but other popular pieces included one about Sarah Palin’s witch-proofing procedure and one about a party for local bloggers thrown by KPIX-TV’s blog about blogs, Eye on Blogs.

Some of the search terms that brought people to PretePress this week:

• fish stuck in fence (and variations)
• biggest rally in alaska’s history – oppo
• biggest rally in alaska opposing palin
• rush on the anti palin rally september
• palin witch blessing
• palin reverend blessing olbermann
• oil spill animals
• california adopts budget
• seal beach rock crab
• san francisco public space hidden
• robert mccarthy
• robert j. mccarthy sf
• number 317 (Um, OK.)
• sf events calendar polit*
• san francisco examiner september 11th
• “david burgin” 2008 editor
• california politics by county
• san francisco mccain obama debate 6 p.m.
• watch debate sunset san francisco

Fun at the Eye on Blogs party

So I went to the party thrown by Eye on Blogs last night not knowing what to expect, but I ended up having a good time and meeting some good people with interesting blogs.

First mention, of course (and many thanks for the party), goes to Brittney Gilbert herself, author of the Eye on Blogs blog at KPIX-TV/CBS5. I didn’t get to talk with Brittney for long, though, because the effusive and charming Beth Spotswood of (among other things) I’ll Flip You. Flip You for Real showed up and stole the show.

I know I’m going to forget someone, so apologies in advance, but I also had a great time talking with Kathryn Hill of Kosmonaut, Johnny and Shannon from funcheapSF, Janice from Sunset Style (nice to meet another blogger from the Sandy Quarter of San Francisco), Chris of Spot-ON and Becca of Bullpen Baker. Links to their blogs are below.

Some hastily-snapped pics from my phone:

P.S.: Only one sort-of complaint. As an old-time journo by temperament, I’ve always thought that three of the ugliest words in the English language are “no host bar,” so I was pleased to see Eye on Blogs spring for the beer and wine. But I still was a bit disappointed not to be able to get a gin and tonic, which is the perfect business-party drink because you can easily swap it for just carbonated water while everybody else’s tongues are getting looser and looser. Ah, well, free Anchor Steam and food — I think I can take the punishment.

Resources:

Eye on Blogs

funcheapSF

Sunset Style

Kosmonaut

Spot–ON

Bullpen Baker

How did you get here? Week of Friday, Sept. 19

If you want to know how people found PretePress this week, you need to know only three words:

• fish
• fence
• Ike

I was looking through photos of the aftermath of Hurricane Ike on Tuesday and found a picture like nothing I’ve ever seen, showing two fish stuck in a chain-link fence as if it were a fishing net. It appeared as if the fish were carried along by Hurricane Ike floodwaters, got stuck in the fence and were left behind when the waters receded. It was a photo from the Associated Press (reproduced in conformance with fair-use practices), but there wasn’t much information in the AP caption. I thought it was interesting, so I posted a tiny thumbnail of it, with just a few words of commentary — not really a serious post, just an off-topic one-off. Much to my surprise, that little one-off post has brought hundreds of people to PretePress every day since.

I won’t bore you with all the variations, but by far the most popular search terms by which people found PretePress this week were like these:

• fish stuck fence hurricane ike
• fish fence ike
• hurricane ike fish stuck fence

Some of the other search terms people used, in no particular order:

• alaska rally opposing palin
• biggest rally in alaska’s history – oppo
• sarah palin political successes and fail
• brt in san francisco
• bob mccarthy san francisco
• dead birds
• oil birds
• union bug
• toktumi
• san francisco street sunset district
• the hurried life of journalist (Amen, brother or sister)
• examiner bastards
• sara palin/dolores umbridge
• what can people realize after looking up (My favorite for the week)

P.S.: I know this is a couple of days late, but I had a big editing job this week and didn’t have time to update until now.

Top 69 reasons why blogging is stupid!

Ok, blogging isn’t actually stupid. In fact, I like it a lot. But sometimes it really chaps my hide.

On Tuesday, Sept. 16, I used “Press This” — the new instant-post feature on WordPress — for the first time, to post a tiny little picture of two fish and chain link fence, along with a total of 80 words. That post turned out to be my all-time most popular post by a long shot — popular enough that it earned the 69th position on WordPress’ “Blogs of the Day” top 100 posts for that day.

Blogs of the Day for Sept. 16, 2008: wordpress_pretepress_topposts_091608

Now, I don’t have any problem with a massive surge in the popularity of my blog. But what gets me is that I can spend what little time I have (after changing diapers and meeting freelance deadlines) composing a thoughtful analysis of one of the major landmarks in the current U.S. political landscape (even if it turns out later than I was wrong about some of it), and do only a fraction of the hits I get from posting a thumbnail photo of dead fish — although it was nice to see my blog on television. Something is wrong, either with the people who read blogs or with the way I write the posts I think are actually important. I’m inclined to think it’s a little of both, but since I’m in a better position to amend the latter I’ll turn my attention there.

Thus endeth the rant.

How did you get here? Week of Friday, Sept. 12

These are some of the search-engine terms people used to find PretePress during the week of Friday, Sept. 12, 2008:

• san francisco examiner september 11
• 2008 san francisco taraval street fair
• tank against child (A google search for this turns up all sorts of weird stuff, but I think they might have been looking for a photograph of a Palestinian boy about to throw a rock at an Israeli tank.)
• exxon valdez oil spill
• sad child in a room (I’m not even going to speculate about this one, but it did remind me of the comic-book series “Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children.” If you look up “Beautiful Stories” on the web, keep in mind that it’s for grownups. Kids, easily offended adults and people at work should stay away.)
• bike death embarcadero sf
• headlines bastards san francisco chronic
• s.f. chronicle headline bastards! (Wrong paper, guys.)
• ktvu: presidential race, march 23, 2008
• 9/11
• carmen chu
• ron dudum
• bruce mahoney
• san francisco private public spaces
• bush worst communicator
• worest part of palin’s speech (Twice in one day, with the same misspelling.)
• tanker animation
• sarah palin exception speech
• palin’s negotiation
• dead bird
• patrick makuakane gay (This is interesting. Makuakane is my wife’s kumu hula, and since I wrote about one of his shows, PretePress shows up in this search. But what’s odd is that no one ever clicks to my blog by searching “patrick makuakane” without also including “gay.”)
• taraval st san francisco
• living in sunset district san francisco
• union bug (Insects of the world unite!)
• mike farrah san francisco (Back again.)
• pretepress (Thanks!)

How did you get here? Week of Sept. 5, 2008

I never tire of seeing the things that bring people to my humble corner of the blogosphere. My post on Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin provided a new one-day record for views, and unsurprisingly, searches related to Palin brought in a large number of readers.

The simple search “palin” was the biggest, but some other Palin-related searches:

palin democratic speech

“palin” “dolores umbridge”

palins speech failure

palins speech success or failure

david gergen on palins speech

palin speech failure

was palin’s speech a success? (Someone with a question.)

palins speech a huge success (Someone with an answer, apparently.)

palin failure clinton

sarah palin weakness failure

Some other searches that brought readers my way For the week running up to Friday, Sept. 5:

oil beach

site:flickr.com oil spill bird

clear map of sutter county

san francisco bay bridge bike lane

oil ocean spill

critical mass hate (This one is a perennial favorite, turning up every few days.)

economic impact of cosco busan (I’ve been wondering about that myself.)

tom prete (Gotta love that one.)

janine delavega (This turns up every week or two, like searches for “mike farrah.”)

was mccain’s speech a success or fail?

mccain’s speech…success??

More on McCain and the conventions later

I had hoped to write about John McCain’s speech to the Republican National Convention Thursday evening, but I just got too busy and I won’t be able to do it over the weekend. I know it’ll be late, but I’m going to try to analyze McCain’s speech and grade both conventions some time next week.