Google Alerts, Blogs and RSS feeds

I still remember when I bought my first fax machine twenty years ago and marveled that each day for 2 weeks before my fortieth birthday my cousin Hector Martinez of Hermosillo, Sonora, could send me a memory of a moment we shared during summer vacations at our ranch in Chihuahua when we were growing up.

Our favorite after dinner past time was to sing and we accumulated an impressive repertoire. Each anecdote started with a line from one of the songs we used to sing that set up the story. They were touchingly evocative and I treasured them but the thermal paper was thin and curled under annoyingly and the ink was pale, almost illegible and would smudge easily and when I found them in a file the other day, I could barely read one of two. I went online and typed in “recovering faded faxes” and learned that all I had to do was to heat an iron to the “wool” setting after turning the steam off and run it lightly over the document and everything but the writing or typing turns black and voila I brought them back to life!

There was no internet at that time or, if there was, nobody I knew used it. I had barely gotten my first computer and my friend Jim Dickson was teaching me how to use it and giving me writing lessons that eventually helped me produce “>Food from my Heart, my culinary autobiographical cookbook.

I don’t think I had email and when I finally got it, the only search engine seemed to be altavista. Now I can find punch in “Dreamers and Schemers” and stories that were published in the San Diego Union Tribune in the 1850s about my great, great grandfather Hilario Gabilondo, a hero in Mexico for keeping General Crabb and the filibusteros from appropriating more land in my home state, Sonora, after the Gadsden Purchase was signed in 1853. His methods were quite brutal but effective.

You may be wondering what this all has to do with this post on this website but years ago I signed up to get Google Alerts and usually get an alert almost every day. But now usually instead of referring to an article in a newspaper or magazine, they refer to a post in a blog or website who are probably signed up to get my recen t posts through the RSS (Real Simple Sundication) button on my site and you can too! One of today’s pieces was from www.gourmetsleuth.com and dealt with tomatillos so out of curiosity I searched my name on their site and discovered that there were 31 posts that include recipes, snippets of things I’ve written, etc. Because I have a restaurant and value practically every kind of publicity and am frankly delighed to be used as a source for all kinds of information, I don’t mind and even welcome the exposure. But my freelancer friends don’t. In fact many resent that we give our content away.

My mission is to make my culture known and understood and my theme is “alone one cannot share life.” I plan to continue sharing wih my readers but you need to refer friends to the website. I spend hours working on it every week and it’s important more people use it,