Biking with Coffee in Vancouver Photo: David Niddrie

I found ilan to be a guy you like a quality cup of coffee and he really enjoys the coffee blog too. It is one of the reasons he hired me to write The Tree Blog. Over one day and a few Americanos we hatched this idea.

A biking coffee tour to some of the best coffee shops in East Vancouver. After blogging about The Tree bicycle for most of the summer and taking it to a few coffee shops I found the bike and coffee blog share the same goals: More sustainable products through education of consumers about the products they were purchasing, It is also great for cross marketing and promotion both were started and localized to East Vancouver and The Drive.

Without further ado here are the Details:

The East Van Biking Coffee Tour

Sponsored by: Bikes on the Drive & Vancouver Indy Coffee Scene

You can just show up but we would like to get a feeling of people who want to attend the event,
You can sign up on the coffee website.

It is the first event I have ever put on and it should be a lot of fun, I hope you can make it out!

Frozen Fog one of many image from Native Landscapes

In my former life as a news photographer and I did a fair amount of travel around Western Canada covering the events of the day. So when Joe and Audrey asked me to show my work at the Bump and Grind I was more than happy (it is the closest cafe to my house).

This show was commissioned five years ago for the Bienal Fotosemana, which had photography exhibitions across Bogota, Colombia. I was chosen too as the international guest and showed at Universidad Nacional de Colombia Meseo De Arte, The National University Art Museum.

With the help of Vince over at 49th and Bump and Grind we will be serving the Colombia Timana during the event.

So here is the skinny:

Show: Native Landscapes
Where: Bump and Grind 916 Commercial Drive
When: Saturday, June 13 5:00 – 7:00 pm

But I here is story about How I got banned from the social rating system Yelp.

Powered by WordPress

But I took the writing for the web course in stride and had to sign up for a WordPress.com account. I decided to write on coffee as it was close to home, easy to write about and a popular topic. My class only required me to write 12 posts, but after those 12 posts I saw the power of blogging and had 1,200 unique page views and a number of comments about the blog.

So I really started to take the WordPress blog seriously about that time and got a domain name and style that fit and the readership continued to grow. WordPress was growing right along with my own blog, the two seem to feed off each other (no pun intended).

When I started to see other blogs link to mine in some authority I knew I was on to something. So what to do? Well the first thing was to make the blog self hosted and, well, that was the hardest part. But, it was also important to keep the blog looking the same. I picked the Freshy theme by Julien De Luca as it was one of the 16 different themes available to WordPress.com users at the time. While I could make a change when I moved the blog why change? As it works for me and the readers seem to like it. (p.s. the theme I am using here is a highly customized Orange Coffee)

Change is a good thing…I think…

While WordPress had designed a way to take your content with you when I moved it wasn’t that easy. I had three issues with my content moving:

• I wanted to keep my old Freshy theme and while it was still available for download it wasn’t optimized for WordPress 2.7
• My old content from WordPress 2.1 didn’t format that well into WordPress 2.7 So if I wanted to edit any of my old content I essentially had to re-align the entire post.
• All of media, pictures and video had to be manually copied from the wordpress.com site and uploaded to the new server while persevering the perma-links.

Yeah this totally wasn’t that easy and I would never suggest trying to do this and I am sure there are easier ways to go about this but just not to me and not at this time.

When moving call friends

But with any move you need to enlist the help of some good friends and I really couldn’t have done this without the help of:

• CSS guru Jeff Hifner.
• My service provider Site 5.
• Developer Kevin Ganapathy of Second Sites Communications • WordPress Plugin Developer Dylan Kuhn at the Cyber Hobo• And of course my awesome, awesome editor Stefania Seccia

So what is new?

Better Cafe Reviews

Lattes and Laptops

The whole essence of this blog is to pass on the most accurate information I can. I’ve done some minor editing of archived posts but only to keep information current as some of those old posts are damn popular.

Interactive Map

I always liked maps especially when they are interactive so now you can find a visual representation of the great cafes (in my humble opinion) via this map. Just click on the cafe review icon to bring up the review of that café.

Our Mantra

I really like to show people where I am coming from when I write a review or give my opinion. This page is after two years of coffee knowledge, what we at the Indy Coffee Scene and what I rate on. Also a code of ethics for users to see where we’re coming from and what we look for, and once advertising appears on the site, what type will be allowed.

Coffee Terms

Well I decided to stake my claim on this lexicon and collect over 100 coffee terms that are currently used in Vancouver.

Social Media

We have also joined twitter so you can follow us at coffeevancouver. We have a flickr group called (Vancouver Indy Coffee) where we’re posting some awesome coffee photos.