Yesterday I attended my first TweetUp. What’s a TweetUp, you ask? Well, you know how I’ve been chirping chatting on and on about Twitter. And I blogged about connecting with New Jersey locals on Twitter. Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting these people in person: @rongraham1 @ScottBradley @JerseyBites @annie_lr @K9Confections @mikeconaty @Alig7 @SusanLevinson @liajen @Eva_Abreu (organizer of the event!) as well as Paul Grzella and Skip Hidlay of the Home News Tribune.

And if this isn’t enough, Scott Wyden (who wasn’t at the TweetUp) is working on a New Jersey Twitter List. Live in New Jersey? Go sign up on Scott’s list!

Update, more local news: TweetUp FieldTrip @garyvee‘s Wine Library Mon3/23, 6PM Springfield NJ Twitvite: http://twtvite.com/5jy7l3

Sky Watch Friday is a photo meme with photos of sunrises, sunsets, blue skies, gray skies, pink skies, dark skies and any other kind of sky posted by bloggers all over the planet.

She was happy to be included with the sunset. Personally, I think she’s more interesting to look at than my sky photos, which all seem to look alike. To me. Sky Watch is great to do with your kids.

Batya has “cooked up” a delicious Kosher Cooking Carnival.

Thank you, Batya, for including a link to the photos of the Quinoa with Oatmeal Bread that I baked using Mimi’s recipe.

I am hosting JPIX on Monday, the blog carnival of Jewish photo bloggers, so submit your photos soon (by Sunday morning, EST).

How can you use Twitter to connect with people live in your location?

One of the wonderful parts of working on this post is “meeting” so many different people who live near my home in Central New Jersey (mostly Central). Over the past two weeks I’ve “collected” these new friends (in no particular order):


realestatechick	Real estate goddess, cycling chick, aviatrix
dbreakenridge	Deirdre Breakenridge is President of PFS Marketwyse, a full service marketing communications firm and the author of two recent books, Putting the Public Back in Public Relations and PR 2.0, New Media, New Tools, New Audiences. You can read Deirdre's blog, PR 2.0 Strategies.
lorisefp	Lori's Earth Friendly Products: Our mission is to bring natural, healthy, kosher products to our friends, and the world. We carry: Fiber Juice, other fiber products, Stomach Friendly Coffee, Garlic Spray, VitaTops, High-Fiber Pasta and Mac & Cheese, Soy Entrees and Textured Soy Protein.http://www.earth-friendly.com/
jerseybites	Jerseybites.com delivers fabulous and easy recipes, food products and restaurant reviews across the Garden State and beyond.
issuestheseries	An original comedic web series about life in a NJ comic book store. Insanity ensues. http://www.issuestheseries.com/
mikeconaty	Marketer, video producer, web guy & rabid jazz fan, working with nonprofits & businesses to effectively use old & new communications tools. http://michaelconaty.com/
phigirl	likes knitting, running, yoga, writing and taking photos (see Exile in Suburbia)
Rutgers_Newark	Rutgers-Newark website designer. Photoblogger. MFA Grad Student.
liajen	social entrepreneur, cause-related marketer, social media learner, direct selling executive, instructional designer, wife and adoptive mother, living out loud! http://liajen.wordpress.com/
GrahamGudgin	A teacher, a seeker, a part-time tarot card reader. An ex-pat Brit, a stay-at-home Dad. See his blog: An Englishman in New Jersey
Eva_Abreu	It's all about having fun! Organizing Coach, Founder STO / Eva's Edict 5 Minutes #EE5, Speaker, Writer, Volunteer: Intergenerational Programs, Wife, Mom

How did I go about getting these contacts in Twitter?
1) I put “New Jersey” in a search column in TweetDeck and left it there. Each time I start up TweetDeck, I see more tweets about New Jersey. But truthfully, I didn’t find too many new people this way.
2) I asked people I already follow in my location if they wanted to be included in this post. I got much enthusiasm! Some of them suggested other people they follow who live locally. In general, that’s the best way to find new folks to follow; see who your favorite twitterers are following!
3) To make the contact more genuine, reply (use the @, as in @leoraw) to specific tweets to get to know others better.
4) Every now and then, look over everyone else’s tweets, find a good one, and retweet it! To retweet, put ‘RT @twittername’ at the beginning of your tweet. Retweeting is a great way to build community.

Other posts on Twitter:
Twitter Basics for Librarians
A Meaningful Tweet

Update: I hope to meet a few of these “tweeple” (Twitter for “people”) on Thursday morning.
Note: to anyone in this post, feel free to DM or comment below any corrections, edits, suggestions.

It’s cold here in New Jersey, so I thought you would enjoy a trip in time back to last June when my family visited Rosh HaNikra in northern Israel.

It’s a fun place for a family to visit, but beware, there are rumors of a ghost bride.

And then we headed south, down the Mediterranean coast. You can see my daughter’s pink hat peering southward.

For more watery posts, visit Watery Wednesday.

When one works as a web designer, no one pays you to update your own pages. However, it is recommended to spend as much time and energy on one’s own site as a client’s.

Here’s how my portfolio page looks now, after I gave it a face lift and warmed and lightened it up. Through Twitter, I have been connecting with many web designers and finding design articles; some of them give such inspiration! (Others remind me: “don’t do that!”). So I took out a bit of time to redo my portfolio page and my services page.

Here’s how my portfolio page used to look. Some of the code was from about 2001, and if you know the web, that’s ancient. I cleaned it up. Now it will be easier to tweak the pages and make slight changes to the design.

I plan to talk about How to Plan Your Website in a future post. Stay tuned!