Somehow we made this list of top sports blogs to follow. Number 49. Not too shabby! And what a cool infographic. We’re just under Sharapova’s Thigh. Levi might enjoy that part most of all. :p
Hope you discover some fun new blogs to watch!
An infographic by the team at CouponAudit
My friend Tony from Hooked On Golf Blog is doing something really cool tomorrow. He’s playing four courses in one day in four different states. Why he didn’t give me the heads up so I could be there too? I don’t know… maybe he’s not that good of a friend. (c: J/k Tony. You guys have a blast tomorrow and I’ll be looking forward to your tweets and blog posts! Follow him on his blog (linked above) or on Twitter at @HOGGOLFBLOG for all the pics and updates!
Incidentally, I thought today was the longest day of the year. I guess one day doesn’t really make a difference for their purposes, just for the title. Happy summer everyone! It’s finally actually here in So Cal!
I want to write about golf. I have a huge list of topics and products I want to cover but weeks pass. Sometimes life gets in the way, you know? I know that’s no excuse to keep my readers hanging. I do. But I sit here and think of all the latest golf stories and look at my list of topics and products yet still can’t do it. Tonight I thought maybe I could just “phone in” something (heaven knows I’ve done it before – if you’re an astute reader you can probably name them) but I can’t even seem to do that right now so I thought I’d just tell you the honest truth.
My cursor just blinked at me for about ten minutes before I decided that I could share the fact that I am dealing with some difficult personal issues without disclosing the details. We all have difficult times. Some of us have blogs. Some of us have blogs in which we share every thought. Obviously this isn’t one of them. This is only a golf blog. While I know some of you have become invested in my personal life, I typically only share personal details as they relate to golf. I think I’ll keep it that way. But I want you to know that I’m still here, golf still means a lot to me, this golf blog still means a lot to me, it will continue with relevant content soon, and I appreciate all your support and readership.
Trust me, golf is still a huge part of my life and actually more so now than ever. If I’m lapsing on you now, I will more than make up for it in the future. I do have plans and your contributions have been invaluable. Personal difficulties aside, my plans are going forward and I thank you all for the feedback and ideas you brougt to the table.
I plan to resume my typical blog posting as soon as I’m emotionally capable. Since it’s been a few weeks and I was able to post this, perhaps it won’t be too much longer. If you’ve hung in there this long, thank you! And i’ll bring more golf stuff as soon as possible!
If you have a niche blog (meaning it doesn’t include personal drama) and you keep up with your topic while dealing with personal issues, I applaud and admire you. I wish I could.
The rest of you, I hope you’ll bear with me.
I love life. I love golf. I love blogging. And I’ll bring the golf blogging back soon.
Twitter is a relatively new craze that seems to be sweeping the online world. Many of my golf blogging
buddies are using Twitter, but I was slow to get on the bandwagon. I wasn’t sure why except for maybe it was just something else to follow and take up precious time and thought energy.
Promotion
Many people promote their sites or blogs by using tools like social networking sites, photo sharing, participating in forums and now Twitter. I never really did any of that. I make comments on blogs I read that pique my interest but never just to spread myself around. Some people are really good at that and their sites grow in traffic and popularity because of it. I understand the value of all that, I just can’t keep up with it all – there’s so much to follow and stay up on. I joined many of the sites where perhaps I should spend more time to actually make them work for me, I just can’t be bothered. Now I’ve done the same thing with Twitter.
What is Twitter?
In case you don’t know, Twitter is basically a constant chat room in which you can select the people you want in it at all times. You find people to “follow” and add them to your list, and you can have all their “tweets” come right into your own custom chat room. (Tweets are how people communicate on Twitter – kind of like text messages – and must be 140 characters or less.) People can choose to follow you, and your tweets are seen by them. If someone clicks on your Twitter place, they’ll see your room and all your tweets and can choose to follow any of your followers or followees. It seems to be a great way to share interests, join groups, and expose your site to potential new readers/customers. It probably works more quickly because of the directness and interaction than myspace, facebook, flikr and many others. But again, now that I joined, I just can’t seem to put in the “work” to go around networking and getting myself out there to really make this chat room for grown ups work for me. Maybe I’m just lazy – I don’t know.
When it’s not enough to have good content
I’ve put so much content on this site over the years and I get decent traffic from google because of it. I haven’t really done any SEO or promotion, and just let my content do all the work for me. Dumb, I know. A golf blog can come along and with hardly any content, do some promotional networking, take advantage of Twitter, and surpass me in a heartbeat. At least with quantity of visitors. But what about quality? When someone clicks on an outgoing link or ad from my site, it’s a pretty good click. So am I just a twit?
Oh, Thursday, you bedeviler . Yep, it’s martini time again. I often go months without a martini and now here I am hitting them twice in the same week. If blame must be placed, I lay it on Vito. Well, maybe only for the first night. Tonight’s probably a little Grey Goose and a little me – or should that be the other way around?
Right right right. Blogging about golf. That’s what I’m here to do. Better I don’t get started about my perfectly timed American Idol TiVo experience last night and the confessional that goes with it. Oops. Maybe I need a blog to ramble about off topic stuff. I must have laughed for 5 minutes straight over the debacle, but I have to get to the golf connection!
Speaking of off topic golf blogging – but golf blogging nonetheless
There’s a strange cat on the golf blogging scene and his “name” is Speedcat Hollydale. This nonpareil golf blogger doesn’t always stay on our favorite topic, but he has a clear golf obsession which I dig. Plus, a lot of the time he’s blogging about chicks. Oddly enough, his post subjects are truly fowl and not necessarily the baby version. But hey, which came first – the chick or the golf chick? So what if he has what one might call an unnatural attraction to chickens? He’s an avid golfer, writes funny stuff, digs chicks, and writes about golf. Sometimes.
He even branched off and started a golf-only blog (or two), and while I’m not sure if all his golf posts are located there, I still get a kick out of his all-encompassing site. To my nerdy and somewhat linear eye, his site baffles my senses with all its colors and images, so admittedly I haven’t read a lot of what’s there. But I understand blog readers have a lot to digest and tend to “skip to the nut” and/or get a lot of content through feeds or feed readers. If you like variant content in your golf blogs, you will probably be pleased with Speedycat (or is that Speedcat – I still don’t know). The guy writes entertaining stuff whether it’s on or off the topic of golf. To my knowledge, he has yet to write about the culmination of his golf and chick obsessions. But his [golf] blogging career is relatively young… stay tuned.
I honestly can’t remember how I found this cat, but I think Hollydale might be the town or county he’s from. I like to think that speedycat or speedcat (seriously- which is it?) has to do with how quickly he can play a round of golf. But perhaps it’s none of my business.
*Note – Speedycat is not actually a southpaw, and the image above is from his own site.
Spammers suck. Here I am, minding my own business with my little blog and along comes a hacker. Somehow, they got into my site and added hidden text in my code which ultimately led to my being “blacklisted” by Google. Here’s part of the message Google wrote:
While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines… This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.
Then they go on to show me some of the hidden text they found (which I had already deleted) and I won’t repeat any of that here and get further penalized. Then:
In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have temporarily removed some of your webpages from our search results. Currently pages from thegolfchick.com are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.
Argh. Almost makes me want to return to blogger and alleviate the headaches. (Is that Google’s plan? Could it be an “inside job”? Am I a conspiracy theorist?) I have cleaned up my code to the best of my ability and submitted a request to Google for re-inclusion in the index. Meanwhile, my traffic is down significantly (as you might expect) and I suspect I might lose some PR in the process. I hope that none of this has altered the reader experience as I try to keep this site clean, organized and reader-friendly.
Good news for loyal readers
With much lower traffic, the current contest isn’t getting the number of participants it otherwise would. The contest will run until the prizes are given away, so regular readers have a better opportunity to swoop in and claim the prizes. Thank you for staying with me!
Google, please come back!
Update 5/12/08: They’re baaa-aaaack. Thanks, Google. 
John Elway, George Brett, Ozzie Smith, Ladanian Tomlinson, Dr. J, Mario Lemieux – these are just some of the professional athletes who will be competing in the Team Challenge. It’s a charity golf tournament like no other. Fans actually get to participate by virtually coaching the all-star team of their choice and having money contributed to the charities just for doing it. Star players from professional football, baseball, basketball and hockey will be competing against one another for bragging rights and dollars for charity. $250,000 that is, that you can actually make grow.
I grew up in Colorado, so I have a binding contract to be a loyal Denver Broncos fan for life. I adore John Elway. When I was growing up there, the Colorado Rockies didn’t exist, and the first professional baseball game I saw was as a teenager on a traveling softball team and we went to Kansas City. I remember giggling with the girls as we worshiped George Brett’s butt from our seats so close to third base it probably made him uncomfortable. Personal connections aside, I will be in awe as I watch so many talented athletes I admire take on the Eagle Falls Golf Course in Palm Springs.
Okay, so maybe I won’t actually be golfing with them, but if all goes well with my schedule, I’ll be there. Unless some wise corporation needs a fourth in the pro-am, that is. *blink blink*
Other golf bloggers will be there as well, and you can read more about that and other details of the event in my post on Swing Thoughts at Golf For Women.
I’m trying to upgrade the software for this blog but I’m experiencing technical difficulties. If you can even see this, please pardon the interruption while I try to sort it all out.
Thanks for reading and for your patience!
-Kristen
Eat Golf is one of the biggest and possibly most frequented golf blogs in existence. There hasn’t been a new post there since April 2007, but it’s far from dormant.
The site is run by my good friend Rich, who has provided us with some great internet golf tools over the years. There’s the Eat Golf Price Shopper, which lets you type in any golf product name and it brings back prices from all over. Then you’ve got the Eat Golf Discussion Forums, which is a handy place to read and participate in multiple boards from across the web.
And don’t forget the Eat Golf Blogroll, which not only lists more golf blogs than I can keep track of, it also shows each site’s most recent headline. Just the headline, he’s not one of those content stealers. No way, there’s an enormous amount of original content on Eat Golf! Rich is one of the funniest guys I know. His sense of humor is all over his blog, so dig around! Oh let’s see, what else – you have Gear reviews, a photo blog (he has photographed TONS of golf courses and pros!), a golf dictionary, a golf news aggregator, and of course, the Golf Course searcher.
I’m telling you, this guy is brilliant. Lately he’s been so entrenched in other projects, he hasn’t put up anything new. Of course, he doesn’t really have to – his site just sits there running itself, getting loads of visitors anyway. But I miss him and want him to start posting again, and I can’t be the only one!
The sighting
Anyway, here’s the news: I hadn’t seen Rich in months and we’ve hardly even emailed each other, but on New Year’s Eve while Greg and I were out celebrating, Rich correctly guessed our location and stopped in to surprise us. What a terrific surprise it was! We caught up on one another’s lives and reminisced about old times. After all, he was the one who suggested I start this blog in the first place, back when there weren’t many golf blogs at all, let alone female golf bloggers. We were friends before I even took up golf but I was aware of his passion so he was one of the first people I played with when I started. Good times.
More Eat Golf!
In our excitement, Rich was re-energized about Eat Golf and said he would post something new soon, and (I hope) start to do it more regularly again.
So here I am calling him out and trying to hold him to it: Rich, you promised (I think)! If you know and like Eat Golf, let him know you want more!
P.S. Rich: Don’t forget to sign back up for our golf club. I hope to see you at Elkins Ranch!
Normally, the photo above would show a great view of the Channel Islands from Glen Annie. Since the photo wasn’t great anyway, I decided fireworks would be more appropriate for the occasion.
Glen Annie Golf Club, which we played today, is one of our favorite courses around here. Within a fifteen minute drive, there are probably 10 courses we could play. Extend that to an hour drive and it’s probably more like 30 or so. 1.5 – 2 hours? Holy cow… I don’t even want to try to count.
At a “good traffic” time, Glen Annie is exactly an hour away, in Santa Barbara, CA, and basically across the street (freeway) from the more celebrated Sandpiper Golf Course. Sure, Sandpiper has a couple beautiful ocean holes but other than that, it’s simply another beautifully groomed resort-like experience. Cross over to Glen Annie and you’ll find equally good conditioning, interesting golf holes, a challenging layout, great greens, friendly and professional service, fewer people, and… you’ll spend less than half what you would at Sandpiper. If you live in the tri-county area (that’s Santa Barbara, Ventura and San Luis Obispo counties), you’ll get even better rates.
All the tee markers are in the shape of frogs, which I find quite cute, and there are frog crossings on a couple of the holes from which you get a free drop. I haven’t found anyone who has actually seen a frog using the crossings because evidently it’s too warm for them to travel during the day and golfers aren’t out at night.
Watch out for those frogs!
You may not get the ocean holes, but you’ll get plenty of ocean views. Stunning ones at that. Today was so clear and calm we could see every single Channel Island (Greg – the frog – can point them all out by name) and that’s not an uncommon day at Glen Annie. It was a great way to end our 2007 year of golf. We played with two great guys who happen to belong to the men’s club there – Paul and Brian. (Paul lives right off the course and can hear the frogs at night, especially in mating season!) Actually, in all our rounds there, we’ve only ever been paired up with one annoying creature. He was harmless, he just talked too much and offered unwanted advice trying to show off his course knowledge. But we have good memories and enjoy making fun of some of his more memorable antics. He knew we’d played there before but he just kept it up. Not just shot-making advice, either. I happen to do a pretty good impression of him warning us to “be careful on this steep hill… gotta watch those speed bumps.” Yeah, even if we hadn’t been there before, we’d need that, right? We laugh about that every time we play that hole. So we’re simple – sue me. But I digress.
Back to Glen Annie
It was cold when we arrived at a little after 7:00 AM but after a couple holes, the sun had warmed everything up including us and it turned into a perfect day with perfect weather and we had a great time. There was hardly any wind to speak of until the last few holes and that was only a matter of determining direction and adjusting by one club maximum. When we got home, we were welcomed by the familiar Santa Ana winds that were (and still are) gusting at unpleasant levels for golf, to put it mildly.
We’re not playing tomorrow to swing in the new year. We did that today. I predict tomorrow will be a lazy day of recovery from the festivities tonight. Actually, I still need to clean my house after coming home to the disaster area I left when I went to visit my family for Christmas. More disaster than usual, that is. I’m not much of a housekeeper anyway – and I’m being kind to myself there – but now this place is strewn with holiday mess as well. Perhaps I’ll resolve to do better with that in 2008. Yeah, perhaps.
Speaking of plans
Thank you all for reading. I’m looking forward to more blogging next year. And I have some new ideas that should be fun, but they’re still in the planning stages so I don’t want to say much. I hope you’ll stay tuned and keep your comments and emails coming. I really enjoy doing this, especially when it includes interaction with you.
Crap – it’s getting late and I have to go get dolled up – or at least cleaned up – to go out and celebrate.
I hope you all swing in the new year in style and have a happy, healthy and prosperous 2008. See you next year!
Happy New Year!
May they all roll true in 2008.
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