The past month has been a little hectic (that's an understatement). Outstanding in the Field's 2009 North American tour schedule came out on March 20th, the first day of Spring. The weeks leading up were intense: confirming guest chefs and farm sites for the schedule, putting together the information for the website, setting up our new reservations system... This year we had our act together enough to pre-release the schedule for viewing for two days prior to when the tickets went on sale. That gave people the opportunity to look at the schedule, call their family/friends and make plans before the mad dash on March 20th. We had a list of the dinners on the schedule, but then I also updated our Dinner Map to include the upcoming 2009 dinners. It's a pretty amazing visual- we're going all over the place this summer! Jim and I sometimes joke that the whole point of Outstanding in the Field at this point is to make that map look really good. How cool is it that we added that Montana dot? And the Missouri dot! We put together 54 dinners all together, including 10 new states that we've never even been to before. AND we're going to Ontario! That's pretty exciting for me at least. Unfortunately Montreal never did come together (that chef likes to play hard to get with me!) But we'll definitely still be stopping in Montreal to say hello and show my American workmates La Banquisse poutine!
Anyways, so our reservations page went live at 9 am PST/12 noon EST on March 20th. There were so many people trying to access the site at once it was having a hard time handling it all. That and then the reservations system didn't function exactly as *ahem* planned. Let's just say it involved me barking out each reservation to Jim and Caleb who were tallying like madmen. This was reminiscent of last year for me, but last time I was by myself in my little apartment in Montreal.
It's a little small and maybe hard to make out, but that's the tally count for the tickets as they sold for the 2008 Outstanding in the Field season. Little did we know that we'd get slammed with reservations and 9 events would sell out in the first day.
We eventually found out it was a pretty silly little mistake to do with the taxes that caused the problem this year (ah taxes). The guy who installed the system on our website obviously felt horrible about the whole situation. Live and learn. Next year everything will run perfectly, I'm sure of it this time! We'll also be sure to upgrade the website so it will be able to handle 10,000 visiting the site all at once trying to make their reservations and/or just watching the fun (you know who you are).
So about tweeting. Not sure how many of you have heard of Twitter? It's the latest social networking craze. And I signed up. I know, shocking. Me being the one who is so anti-Facebook. But this is slightly different because I've sort of signed up for work purposes. Twitter is this service that allows you to send out your status message/thought of the moment to the world at any given point. The interface is very simple and you're really only supposed to answer the question "What are you doing?" in 140 characters (that characters, not words) or less. You can send your message through the website, from your phone as a text message, from an iPhone app, or from a desktop application. Of course there's also the whole aspect of "following" and "followers". So I wasted a good deal of time on Sunday perusing the online community of Twitter and finding food/farm-related people to "follow". I was actually surprised with how few people I came across. It is definitely in the process of catching on. Many of the "people" I ended up signing up to follow are actually blog sites, news sites or organizations that are using Twitter as a way to keep in constant touch with their followers. For example Eater, New York Times Dining, epicurious. Ultimately, this is what a lot of people are using it for though. Celebrities, chefs, farmers, organizations- it's like a cheap advertising tool. For example, Nate Appleman, a San Francisco chef tweets "Lamb burger is back at SPQR. Get it while you can. It goes great with a side of chix nuggets". It's really a simplified way to blog. I'm still not sure if it's going to take off as well as something like Facebook, but I kind of like it. It's much less involved too: tell them your name, a short "bio" (also only 160 characters), add a profile photo and if you're really into it you can change you background on your page. That's about it.
I think it'll be really great to keep the excitement around the farm dinners this season, as I know people are always interested to hear about our travels along the way. As much as we try to blog, this will be a lot more easy to keep up with. And of course if you don't hear from me here on this blog for another month you can always check out my Twitter page.
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