Tuesday, December 19, 2006 Hello World: Well, here begins my first restaurant guide blog entry. After 10 years of running this guide, it is about time! First thing I want to do is THANK YOU ALL for posting your reviews in my restaurant guide, day after day, year after year. YOU have had a huge impact on the quality of restaurant food and service in Santa Barbara. Restaurant owners really read your comments. How do I know this? They email me constantly. Some local restaurant owners get upset when they see that you wrote a negative review about their restaurant. Some even threaten to sue me for posting what you wrote. To be fair, I'd probably be upset too if I owned a cafe and you trashed my pride and joy with a scathing review! It's difficult to not take your comments personally. The VAST MAJORITY of Santa Barbara restaurant owners, however, REALLY appreciate your feedback. They WANT to know what is REALLY happening to their customers so they can improve their food/service and prosper. Many restaurant owners regularly print out your comments and post them in employee work areas. Some print out your comments and hold meeting to discuss what you wrote with their staff. Santa Barbara restaurant owners email me all the time to tell me this. About this blog First thing you'll notice about this blog is that it is not a "real" blog - meaning that users cannot post comments. That feature will be coming soon. I am working on it as we speak. I don't like to use off-the-shelf software (i.e. WordPress). I prefer building my own blog software from scratch. This helps cuts down on automated blog spammers and hackers. For the moment, if you wish to reply to comments just send me an email with your name,the date of the blog you are replying to and your comments. Your email address will not be posted. Sneak Peak: New Features Coming Soon To The Guide A few new lists will soon appear in the guide. These include:   - Breakfast - Open Before 8am - Open After 10pm The Breakfast list will list all places that serve what I define as "breakfast". My definition of "breakfast" would be places that I might consider taking a group of visiting relatives to.  It will not include every place that happens to serve food in the morning. For example, I would unlikely take a group of visiting relatives to Taco Bell for breakfast. Likewise, I would probably not take a group of visiting relatives out to breakfast at a coffee shop that serves just muffins or perhaps a breakfast burrito. The Breakfast list will more likely contain places where you can 1) sit down, 2) look at a menu, and 3) have a selection of different breakfast items on the menu. For example: Cajun Kitchen The Open Before 8am and Open After 10pm lists are self-explanatory. Every restaurant/coffee shop/bakery/whatever will be included. The only requirement will be that their hours fit the criteria of the list. To create these 3 lists I need to update the hours for every restaurant in the guide, because some of my hours data is 5 years old. I have been slowly calling all the restaurants one by one (all 652 of them!). I have completed about 250 calls so far and will make an extra effort to finish the rest. It really sucks doing that kind of work because it is so repetitive but the I know those three lists will be very popular and are very much needed (I need them too!) so that is my inspiration. I won't be creating lists for other hour increments (open after 7pm, 8pm, 9pm etc) because my hours data is just too unreliable. Restaurants shuffle their hours around constantly and I am always battling to keep up with them. By the time I finish calling all 652 places, 10% of them will have already changed their hours again. Places that are open early (before 8am) or late (after 10pm) tend to not change those perimeter hours very much. Hence the reason I am willing to create these lists - and make a zillion phone calls. It's 11pm and time to go to bed. I still haven't caught up with my sleep yet from the huge Christmas party at my house last weekend (I barbequed tri-tip for 75 people). It was great!