Melinda's Musings

My husband and I had been planning a staycation this year in May. We decided it would be nice to just stay home and chill instead of traveling. It would save time, money and hopefully be more relaxing. Then he found out his company decided to do a two week shut down at the end of March and everyone would be required to take a week of vacation time. So we are taking our staycation a little earlier than planned.

Staycations became popular last year when the economy started going south. Although according to a blog by Chris Elliot, this is the year of the naycation, but we decided we still need a break. If you aren’t familiar with staycations, they simply involve taking vacation time and staying at home. Exploring local attractions is popular and a lot of people find there are many interesting things to do in their own cities. Some people even like to get a hotel in the area but to me, that starts to defeat the purpose of the saving money part of staycations. I will be chronicling our staycation here so stay tuned!

My husband and I recently went to Via Vite an Italian restaurant in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio with some friends. It is located on Fountain Square in the heart of downtown. The restaurant was opened by the owners of Nicola’s, an Italian restaurant in Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati. The chef is Cristian Pietoso. The restaurant is appointed with contemporary furnishings and decorations and is very inviting.

We had made reservations from the restaurant web site via Open Table which was very convenient. We were seated promptly and our drink orders were taken right away. I started with the arugula and pine nuts with shaved parmigiano reggiano salad which was good, but had a little too much dressing for my taste, I should have asked for it on the side. For the entree, I had the pork tenderloin saltimbocca with Tuscan-style green beans and pork jus. The pork tenderloin cooked to perfection and was complimentary to the Tuscan style green beans. The service was excellent and our glasses were kept full.

Overall, this was a wonderful dining experience and I would highly recommend checking out Via Vite the next time you are in downtown Cincinnati.

Isn’t every WordPress blogger required at some point to write a post about their favorite WordPress plugins? Perhaps the title of this post is a bit of an overstatement but these are my favorite WP plugins that I use on a regular basis.

1. Contact Form 7 This is a very simple and flexible contact form.
2. Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu An extremely useful admin plugin. It puts all of the admin options in a handy dropdown.
3. Secure WordPress Helps secure a site from hackers.
4. Wordpress Automatic Upgrade This plugin is a lifesaver, plugins can be automatically updated with the click of a button.
5. WordPress Mobile Edition A very simple plugin for making a blog mobile friendly. Be sure to read the readme since the installation is slightly different than a regular plugin.
6. WP Decoratr Pulls Creative Commons pictures from Flickr based on keywords in a post. Pictures can be inserted simply by selecting them.
7. Subscribe To Comments Adds a checkbox to comments that allows commenting users to subscribe to the comment thread.
8. All in One SEO Pack Makes your blog more SEO friendly by optimizing titles and meta tags. It is also customizable.

Download and try out some of these plugins if you haven’t already. The thing I love about WordPress is that someone has developed a plugin to do just about anything you can think of.

I recently set up a Twitter account for my husband’s band, 3 Days Blind. (@3DaysBlind). I think that bands should really consider creating twitter accounts, it is a great way to interact with fans and promote shows. One band I follow, the David Crowder Band (@crowderband ) is a lot of fun to follow. They post random thoughts, pictures of set lists, concerts and other fun stuff. Once they posted a pic of several fake tattoos and had twitter followers vote on a tattoo for one of the band members. They later posted a pic of him with the tattoo. Obviously the more popular a band is, the more followers they will have and can interact with more. But even small bands can benefit from Twitter and it is a great way to keep in touch with fans.

Here are my 5 band uses for Twitter:

1. Promote shows
2. Ask for feedback from fans by posting links to song clips
3. Accept song requests
4. Post random fun band facts
5. Post pictures using an app like TwitPic

Try not to put too much thought into and just have fun with it! Twitter can definitely be a band branding tool along with a website, Facebook and MySpace pages.