I am not, by nature, a tidy person. Sure, I’m organized in that I know where everything is, but that’s only because I have a very good visual memory. So since I’m not naturally tidy, I have to develop certain systems, like every time I do laundry, I wipe the floor with the bathroom-floor towel (the washing machine is in the bathroom, so this really does make sense, and I do laundry obsessively, so the bathroom floor may be one of the cleanest in my whole apartment).

But in general, housecleaning does not come naturally to me, and this frustrates me into action periodically, and lucky you if you come over when that has happened recently.

So what does that have to do with this blog? The blog is like a house, in that I kind of live here, and you kind of come over. So if you’ll forgive me this navel-gazing, let me say I’ve had this giant, cumbersome piece of furniture over in my sidebar that hasn’t brought me much joy in a long time. And like many things that are excess, I have decided to ditch it, and to get some smaller, quirkier piece of furniture that more accurately represent who I am, and what I do.

So what I’m saying is, Buh-bye Blogher, with your insistence that you be above-the-fold, and requirement that I change the code because something changed on your end and your pocket change that you eventually deposit into my paypal account, but which annoys me more than several cups of coffee worth (which is really all it added up to) because you take up too much darn space.

If only I’d had a blog laundry to do, I’d have wiped that space clean a lot longer ago.

So farewell, Blogher and the periodic bump in traffic I got when someone (I’m pretty sure this is done by hand) liked what I wrote, and by to your weird pictures and your control of what’s going on on the right hand side of my blog (which I constantly promise myself, like with my apartment, will change locations sometime, except in the case of my apartment, it will stay here and I will shimmy off elsewhere). I wish I had a long missive written like the one Pam Mandel wrote on Nerd’s Eye View, and which I couldn’t find but now have because she found it for me, in her case about why she was hanging up her Blogher hat, not just kicking them off of her blog.

Replaced with people and stuff I actually do/care about, like Nileguide, where I write about Santiago, Santiago and more Santiago, I swear I have learned and distilled more about this city in the past three months than I would have guessed, even with six years of living here. Come visit! Check out the guides! Tell me I’m fabulous (I snuck that one in there), etc. They pay me, but I wouldn’t work there if I didn’t like them and didn’t think they put out a good product. It’s regional, so the info largely depends on the local expert, but I can tell you for sure the local expert on Santiago knows quite a bit, and is always on the lookout for more.

And MatadorNetwork. I cannot say enough good about these people and the dialogue they generate and the stuff they do. I work as a peon there, but it’s a flat structure, so I still get to play with the big kids, and I do mostly behind-the-scenes stuff but do sometimes write articles, and sometime soon will be curating a giant set of photos, and if you want yours in the photo essays, then get in touch with me here or on my Matador profile and I’ll check you out. And please check out the “breaking free” trailer they put together for a new show, and ask yourself the question of the year “Would I rather meet or be this person?” and act accordingly.

And Lonely Planet. I know they don’t need me hyping them, but they run this project called blogsherpa and all these bloggers from all over the world tag our blogs so that relevant content goes up on the LP website, and great happiness (and traffic, and some small amount of change) is achieved. I like it, because you can get on-the-ground info about where you’re going. Of course, I’d like it alot more if they paid me mad dukats, but I like the project, and I like my fellow blogsherpas, and one day I’ll even put up a list of all of them and you can wile away the hours reading about all kinds of places, and again, ask yourself “want to be? want to meet?” and act accordingly. I mostly write about Santiago or Chile, but have occasional posts up there about Uruguay or other places I’ve been. It’s nothing new to my blog readers, but it’s presented in a slightly different format, and I don’t tag all the blabla, so it’s not all there. Also, you can catch other blogsherpa reflections on Chile, which are sure to be different from mine.

And that’s all I’ve got to tell you for the moment. Out with the old, in with the new. If I can’t change apartments, at least I can move my virtual furniture around. The virtual world is the only one in which I don’t have storage space problems!