I do believe, though, that there is something to be said for journaling. At the very least, it forces you to think about the events that have happened, the decisions you made and the things you felt during that day and that simple act changes everything.

When I was a child, I used to love to hide out in the attic of the house where I grew up. It had a certain stale dry-attic smell that I loved, but even better than that, it was littered with boxes filled of remnants from my father’s past life with my mother. My mother is a topic that we very rarely addressed when I was growing up (and never do now) and so I cultivated a mild obsession with trying to figure out who she was in the vague hope that I would learn something about myself. In one of the boxes, among her paintings and 70’s jewelry, I found her high school year book. Inside she had penned a quote (by whom, I don’t remember) but the meaning was something to the effect of: I wish to leave something good in the place of each day that passes — kindess, not cruelty; happiness, not saddness, etc. Even though I was very young at the time, I recognized the significance of that quote. It occured to me that it certainly would take on a different meaning for a girl diagnosed with leukemia, who unlike many other 18 year olds, probably realized she had a finite number of days on this planet.

Tomorrow I will turn 33 — an age that I used to think was so incredibly old (you know, there was the Big Bang, then dinosaurs and people in their 30’s). I am 7 years older than my mother was when she passed away and today, instead of feeling full of life, I feel unmistakeably world-weary.  I also feel guilty because I know how incredibly wasteful it is to feel this way (so I got that going for me, which is nice).

The past three years have been a series of endings (or beginnings): the end of my marriage, the end of an all-consuming job, the end of a few friendships and the end of the person I was before all those things ended. So, today, on the eve of my birthday, I am fervently hoping for a few positve-type beginnings or maybe just a sense of well-being and vitality. I also recognize the need to make a plan and execute, what I don’t know, but I will figure it out.

This is mine. Created from my Delicious tags.

While I spent two years taking stock of all that I lost, I forgot to pay heed to what I have gained. Goodbye to 2007 feels like the first warm day after months of cold, dark winter.

Amen to that.

1) Sign up for Google analytics — it is free and it is really fun to track your progress.

2) For wordpress users, there are quite a few great SEO plugins out there. I used the all-in-one SEO Pack and SEO Title tag in conjunction with the Ultimate Tag Warrior . All of these require a little bit of manual work to add tags and keywords for each post and page.

3) Let the world know your content has changed. By pinging services when your content has been updated, you let them know it is time to crawl and index your site which increases your site’s popularity. I am using Pingoat

4) Get on the social bookmarking wagon. Make it easy for other to bookmark your site. I found many wordpress plugins out there to do this. I am using Sociable

5) Trade links with other sites that have like content. I haven’t exactly figured out an optimized way to do this yet, other than emailing people I know and asking them to link to my blog. I have found a few services out there that match up people who would be willing to exchange links, but I haven’t tried any myself. If anyone knows of a good service, please let me know.

6) Add rel=”nofollow” to all of your hrefs linking off your site to signal to Google that this is not comment spam. Check out the Google blog for more information on when and where it should be used.

7) Create a site map. I use a Wordpress plugin called Google Sitemap Generator. This will not necessarily increase your traffic, but will make it easier for Google to index your site which may result in a more complete index of your pages.

When my friend and former colleague Audrey Roy left her job we talked briefly about doing some illustration projects together. It never quite got off the ground until last weekend when we spent the whole day drawing. We plan to create enough illustrations between the two of us to launch a site where we will sell t-shirts, note cards and other miscellaneous items.

This is one of the illustrations I did this weekend — our theme was cupcakes.

It was easily one of the most interesting and varied meals I have ever had. We had our choice of a three or four course a la carte menu from which I chose a parmesan and morel custard, a pici (house-made Italian pasta) and fiddlehead fern (which I chose mostly because the idea of eating fern seemed like an adventure) and finally a nettle pasta with house-smoked ricotta. Our host went to high school with the sommelier and she helped us to pair each of our courses with a different glass of wine.

Sadly, the kitchen at Quince is being remodeled, so the chef’s table there is soon to be a thing of the past.

All in all it was a pretty great experience. I was blown away by what everyone was able to acomplish in a mere 24 hours:
–a board game that takes advantage of our sync platform
–a version of mobile hot or not that allows you to take pictures on your mobile phone that appear instantly on hotornot.com
–a collaborative whiteboard space
–push to the web and face tagging
–instant messenger with presence
–and SkyNet which allows us to track actions performed in the desktop app

Cockroach won the prize for most creative. Check out some pictures from the event