The concept of the gravatar – the ‘globally recognized avatar’ – made sense a few years ago.  With the advent of social blogging communities like MyBlogLogs, gravatars seem to be less in use (certainly less by our readers).  So I’m switching from gravatars to MyAvatars, a WordPress plugin that adds MyBlogLog avatars to comments.

This past week we got stumbled.  StumbleUpon.com is a website sharing social network, and someone liked my 5 reasons to move to Costa Rica.  There was a DRAMATIC effect on our traffic – we went from some 20-ish visits per day to over 8,000 in 2 days.  The majority of the visits were less than 1 minute, but a few people took the time to read and some did comment.  Our feed subscriptions also increased by more than double, but I was immediately skeptical as to how many new people …

We’re in Costa Rica!  We’ve been here for over a week now and while we’ve had internet access, we’ve been a little busy having fun and working.  We spent most of the past few days on the Caribbean coast, in Cahuita and Puerto Viejo.  I think we’re finally settling down enough to start writing again (we’ve rented a house for a week), so keep checking for updates on our Costa Rica experience.  So far, we love it and the wildlife we’ve seen so far is absolutely amazing.  Here’s a little …

Thanks to a cool countdown widget for WordPress (KB Countdown), I just made our Costa Rican Dreamline to the right. I’ve had the date of September 1, 2008 floating in my head for awhile. It’s not oriented towards the academic calendar as a new beginning but towards the end of summer and wanting Winter 2007-2008 to be the last one we spend in cold. Of course, our house isn’t anywhere near on the market or ready for it, but we could keep putting stuff off forever until …

We’ve been using WordPress 2.0 for a little over a week now, and I feel comfortable enough to give an assessment of our experience thus far. First off, we both enjoy using it because writing a post is easy. With our previous system (Joomla), it involved logging in, clicking a button for content items, clicking a button to make a new entry, being limited to one category and clicking between a couple of other pages to do stuff like upload pictures, edit tags (to circumvent the single category …