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There are still a few more days to participated in the CHS Census 2009, flawed as a few questions might be. We have about 250 respondents so far. One question is an open-ended opportunity for you to provide feedback about CHS. I'll share all the data from the census when it's complete but here's a sneak peek Wordle style at the kinds of things you're telling me need to be fixed on CHS.
My favorite piece of feedback so far called for fewer 'self important' posts on the blog about the blog. Sorry. Here's the second in two days. Can't help it. Don't do many CHS web traffic posts these days -- things keep growing, story is good. But while we're doing a few About CHS posts like this one (re)introducing Maps, I wanted to point out a milestone that I'm extremely proud of. CHS has now reached 1,000 subsribers on its RSS feed. 
That's a lot of geeks
You'll note a few ups and downs along the way. The big dips are screwups at feed provider Feedburner -- but CHS takes credit for all the peaks! The RSS milestone is important to me as a proxy for our success with the kinds of neighbors who are the most connected, most engaged with the site on a long term basis. Some sites bemoan their RSS audience as disconnected and a phantom presence but I've found that making all of our content (including our advertising, of course) available to the RSS audience results in participation over the long haul. Want to join the crowd -- you can add our feed here. Meanwhile, if you are curious about how many visitors are coming to the web, CHS makes its usage statistics publicly... We've had this feature from when we first made the move to the new site but it's been buried. No more. You'll note a new tab at the top of CHS -- introducing Maps:
Oh boy. New thing to click.
Here's what you get when you click it: 
Map marks the spot(s)
It's an alternative way to check out what is going on recently on the site and across the Hill. Still some cool stuff to add -- coming soon: You'll be able to filter the post marks when you zoom in and out. Enjoy exploring.
Sorry for the abrupt exit, but you may have noticed CHS lost its stars today. The idea behind the star ratings was to give users an easy way to leave feedback and I still believe that is important. It was also potentially a way to find great content -- here, for example, are the top-rate posts from the last three months:
They're all good stories. Top-rated stories weren't the problem. The anonymous and ambiguous nature of the one and two-star ratings is what troubled me. What did that 1-star rating really represent? Was it because of the tone of the post or an error? Was it because of the content or because of the creator? Too many questions. So, for now, the stars are gone. When they come back, it will probably be a simpler system -- I'm hoping for something like "Suggest... CHS is giving away free capitolhillseattle.com crow buttons. All you need to do is swing by CHS sponsor Emerson Salon on Tuesday or Wednesday (or any day they're open). 909 E. Pike St. next to Via Tribulani if you're looking for it.
So, starting this afternoon, we're making the CHS crow buttons available for pick-up. For free. No purchase necessary. Stop by CHS sponsor Emerson Salon and ask, nicely, for the CHS crow button jar. Take a button -- one per person, pretty please -- and put it on and sport the CHS crow wherever on the Hill you go. It's like getting the Happy Meal toy without having to buy the Happy Meal. Emerson Salon is located at 909 E. Pike and is open despite the ice and snow. When I talk about CHS (when am I not talking about CHS?), the word 'experiment' comes up a lot. It is both an accurate description and an overstatement. A lot of stuff we do here is new journalism or new media or new community. But most of it is only the natural course of what is interesting, what is fun and what is necessary to tell the story. So, here's an, um, experiment to ponder. I will be out of town next week. Except for a few planned stretches of time, I will be online and updating the site from afar. That's part one of the experiment. Part two of the experiment is what will determine the longterm success of CHS -- the community of CHS neighbors is running the site. It happens all the time already -- I logged on last night to find three posts suddenly appear on the front page of what I used to consider 'my site.' Anybody can post to capitolhillseattle.com and I've given a wide range of experienced contributors the ability to feature the best posts on the CHS homepage. I'm just part of the team now.... 
Dear people who post on CHS Capitol Hill Seattle, Thought I'd post this out here in the big wide world instead of restricting to e-mail. Haven't bothered you all in awhile so, first, let me again thank you for doing so much to make the site a great source of information and entertainment. Let's get to the meat of the matter.
Black Friday is gross and dangerous. But nobody has ever died on Cyber Monday. We're adding our bit to the 2008 online holiday shopping experience with our newly minted CHS Crow Ts.
Now the whole family can sport the CHS crow
A few notes about the new shirts:
We've added a simple upgrade that is pretty cool. We are now organizing comments from CHS registered users on their profile pages. So, if you want to see every witty comment I've ever left on this site, here's my comment history.  My profile page now has comments It's cool to be able to see all of Final Answer's posts and comments in the same place and appreciate fully the contributions of CHS neighbors like Yancy who comment frequently. While I'm at it, allow me to tout another cool CHS feature -- this one is not new but you may not have known about it. Did you know that you can view all CHS posts tagged with a location on our Posts Map page? It's an interesting way to see what parts of the Hill we've been writing about. We're working on a few ways to make it even cooler by allowing you to drill in on specific locations to see the CHS archive associated with the area.
Any neighbor can post on this site. While only the best stuff gets promoted to the CHS Homepage, everything appears on the CHS Posts page. Why contribute a great post to Capitol Hill Seattle?
If you're willing to jump in with both feet, consider joining the CHS Revenue Sharing Program. We're open to all -- young journalists in training, struggling writers, folks looking to have their lattes subsidized by the Internet, etc. The more your posts are read, the more you make. The more you make, the better you feel. So make CHS posts with, um, every meal. If you are interested in joining:
We've played this park image on our old CHS banner for all it's worth. Wesa's pretty pic of Volunteer Park served us well. In early October, we planned a contest to replace the park image CHS banner. And we quickly canceled it after being, um, educated that contests are not the best way to achieve good design. Better, the comment masses said, was to hire an honest-to-goodness designer and set her to work designing her little heart out. We were skeptical. The typical design budget for the typical neighborhood blog is approximately $0.35. We're not your typical neighborhood blog so we were able to up that a bit. But, really, it was out of the goodness of her heart helped by her knowledge that pumping out a super-hot CHS banner design would make her famous that we were able to hire our first ever CHS Design Intern -- EmilyP! One morning meeting at Fuel Coffee and a few e-mails later, EmilyP submitted five proposals. Here is the CHS feedback she received at the time so that you can a) enjoy our version of the creative... One of my favorite things about working on this site is taking geek technology and using it in the neighborhood. The best tools bust out of the tech blogs and nerd sites and become useful. With that as intro, here's your invitation to follow me on Twitter.
Many (most?) of you dear neighbors are already Twitter savvy. You are geeks. The rest of you -- yes, the same ones who decided to join Facebook to friend this blog and are still wondering why -- should take the leap too. Here's how I use Twitter and why you might be interested:
So please consider adding me to your Twitter club and I'll surely add you -- it's a great way... Tuesday night, I was living the neighborhood blogger dream. I was covering a celebration that will be remembered in this city for a very long time -- and it was all happening in the heart of the neighborhood I write about every day. I broadcasted pictures. I captured video. And I was worried the entire night. I wasn't freaked out by the raucous crowd or even worried that the Shell station's gas pumps still seemed to be operational. I was worried that my journalism was going to turn into evidence.  Obama famous  Obamanonymous
What would have happened had Obama Day not been so joyous? What if the crowd had done what crowds have been known to do and turned angry and destructive? For every person dancing in the streets, there was a phone cam screen glowing somewhere in the nearby crowd. And there I was taking pictures of everything and everybody. What this neighborhood blogger wanted that night and every time I am out taking pictures of my neighbors is a way to record but let you all be. Give me technology in every... According to our CHS Event Calendar, there is nothing happening in November. Have an event upcoming you want neighbors to know about? Add an event. With the restoration of comments to our CHS archives, it's also a good time to appreciate the lifetime achievements of some of our most prolific commenters past and present. Here is a small selection of some of our most active/long-participating/most provocative participants with an example of some of their legendary input.
Did you feel that last night? The circle was completed. Chocolate and peanut butter were united. Capitol Hill Seattle's archives got their comments back. Here's a look at our all-time most-commented stories. When we moved over to the Neighborlogs platform, we brought along all of the old CHS posts so you could enjoy things like reading our very first ever post. But there was one problem -- we had to leave the best stuff behind in Google's Blogger archives. Our old posts had no comments. And that was sad. We finally put together the magic to reunite old posts and old comments -- suddenly, the CHS archives are 64% less crappy. And you can enjoy comment streams like these timeless classics:
To enjoy the past on CHS, you can either:
For immediate release September 10, 2008
Contact: Dewey Potter, 206-684-7241 e-mail dewey.potter@seattle.gov SEATTLE PARKS SEEKS NAMES FOR THREE PARKS Seattle Parks and Recreation invites the public to submit potential names for parks in the Capitol Hill and Sand Point neighborhoods. Suggestions for names are due to the Park Naming Committee by October 27, 2008. The following parks, characterized here by their working names, need to be named: Capitol Hill Park Acquisition: This property located at the northeast corner of E Howell St. and 16th Avenue E was purchased in 2007. The .39 acre parcel was purchased from with Parks Levy funds. Parks held several public meetings to solicit ideas on the program and design for the park. The preferred plan approved for this site consists of a large, level turf area in the middle of the site that is bordered by a collective garden to the north and a crushed rock plaza and a pathway... 
A great new 1 bedroom condo that's priced to sell just listed here on Capitol Hill. It's a quiet unit right in the thick of things with easy walking to both Downtown and Capitol Hill. The building features secured parking and a secured bike rack to make it easy to get around and enjoy the sights and foods of the hill either on foot or on wheels.
Incentive Zoning Workshop Organized by City Neighborhood Council
Tuesday, October 21, 6:30 - 8:30 p.m. West Precinct Community Room - 810 Virginia Street, Seattle Incentive zoning allows significant height and density increases in exchange for a public benefit, mostly "workforce" housing in the current proposal. What will it mean to your neighborhood? What does it mean to the city? Join the City Neighborhood Council for an evening dialogue on current proposals for enabling Incentive Zoning in residential and commercial areas outside of the downtown. The format will be short panel introduction of keytopics, followed by open discussion. The purpose of the meeting is to share a variety of perspectives on the concept of incentive zoning and the costs and benefits of applying it broadly across Seattle's neighborhoods. Does incentive zoning produce a significant public benefit or is it a financial windfall for developers? Focused discussion on: * What Incentive Zoning could look like in your neighborhood - it would... 
I see cruiser bikes all over Capitol Hill. The problem is that they're never actually moving. Instead they are locked up (and usually rusting away) or clogging up apartment building bike rooms. Unless your entire life is isolated to a few north-south streets, our hilly 'hood is less-than-ideal for cruising around in a steel tank with limited gearing. So why are there so many cruisers clogging up prime bike parking real estate? Do all of those California transplants drag their beach bikes with them when they move? Or are cruisers one of those impulse buys that "seemed like a good idea at the time"? p.s. J, just a thought, but how about adding some questions to the census to empirically test this. e.g., "What kind of bike do you own?" and "How often do you ride your bike?" I'll be the first to admit it -- this site zooms by a lot of stuff and only rarely follows up. So, in the spirit of tying up loose ends, here's a post in which we can take a moment to pause, look back and clean up the mess.
Here's a step by step for posting to this site via e-mail -- works on any device including, of course, the iPhone. 1) Log into the site and go to the Your Page tab
2) Look for the 'edit your profile' link next to your username.
3) Click the edit link and scroll to the bottom section -- Posting by email. Enter the e-mail address you will be mailing from and a simple code you can remember (but nobody else can guess --) in the "Send emails to" box. In this example, let's say we entered 'test98aq'
4) Choose whether you want the e-mail posts to go live automatically or you can store them in draft mode to publish later. 5) Save the profile updates and add the neighborlogs.com address to your contacts for the e-mail account you will be sending from. In the above example, the address would be post+jseattle.test98aq@neighborlogs.com 6) Compose your mail. Subject line will become the post headline. Adding one of the post categories -- About CHS, Community, News, etc., Crime, or Food & Drink -- in parentheses will file the... Poop on down to Eastlake to hear about assorted measures on the General Election ballot:
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Copyright 2009 by CHS CAPITOL HILL SEATTLE, LLC and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License . Terms of Service CHS Capitol Hill Seattle Blog
