Malcolm: All I am listening to is the air conditioner, which, believe me, is awesome. Jillian can wax poetic all she wants; the truth is, writing for Dropped In just doesn’t make a lot of sense, anymore. Things have changed, and this portion of the story has, we think, come to a close, for now.

J: Malcolm and I have agreed that the story arc is ended, the narrative of an engaged couple in their late twenties taking a leap in faith and life has been told. We are married and that adventure will continue for (I hope) one thousand years. We are living in Mexico in a fairly contented situation; the horror stories of our present are mundane and much less humorous.

M: DroppedIn was always about the planning, and the newness. We were just two people making a leap, and recording how that felt. Looking back on the archives, it is amazing to see just how wide open our eyes were, and how excited we were to change our lives. Now that we have settled into our lives here, the writing we continue to do (and want to do) just seems inappropriate for this site.

J: There are surprises, complications, moments of awkwardness, sadness and hilarity, but unless we elect to adopt a smart mouth six year old to keep us on our toes or incongruously enter a water skiing competition I am afraid, friends, that the show may be over.

M: Jillian is right. Only a last-season surprise cast addition would recreate that sense of the new, as, for us, life in Mexico has normalized. We will never become experts at living here, and don’t want to present ourselves that way. We’ve Dropped In, and now it’s time for new projects.

J: It has been a blast to keep this public journal, photo album and record of some of the best events of our lives. We learned more about ourselves and the experience by shaping it into this website and interacting with you, our audience. What began as a place for comedy and complaints evolved into a portal into our world so friends and family could see us and say hello, and went on to become a source of information, a place to cry out, a way to check in and be kept in check, our window to the world that is not a panopticon or a scrapbook, but a thing greater than the sum of its parts. I just wanted to say thanks to all of you for listening, it has been one good journey.

M: Keeping this site going for the last three years has been incredibly rewarding, and we do appreciate everyone’s continued participation and feedback. So, what’s next? A few things:

1. Many of the more nuts-and-bolts articles will be edited, polished, and brought over to Yolisto, where both Jillian and I will continue contributing the occasional article about living in the Yucatan. We will also be continuing contributors to The Truth About Mexico, a country-wide, collaborative magazine authored by some of the brightest authors in Mexico.

2. We will leave this site archived and up, because we do think there is some good information in its pages, and just in case something radical happens that would be inappropriate to discuss elsewhere, though right now, we can’t imagine what that would be. For a quick guide, and to try and shape this project into a story, here are our favorite posts from the life of this blog:

• July 4, 2006: Record/Record
• July 27, 2006: A Day of Lasts (Reflections on our last day in America.)
• August 8, 2006: Entrada (First impressions.)
• August 19, 2006: Sabado Gigante: We Nail Down an Apartment (Breaking out of the hotel, and into the city.)
• August 25, 2006: Gauging the True Cost of Living
• August 27, 2006: House Hunting Along the Gulf of Mexico
• September 6, 2006: We Put an Offer on a House
• October 3, 2006: First Trip to Progreso
• October 15, 2006: Celebrating One Year of Dropping In (First-year website anniversary.)
• October 23, 2006: Vivo en Merida (More first impressions)
• October 28, 2006: Malcolm & Jillian Interviewed on Yucatan Living (This was significant because, for the first time, we were becoming a part of the resources that we had previously spent years reading and dreaming about.)
• October 31, 2006: Food for You Animate Them (Jillian’s Day of the Dead photos.)
• January 4, 2007: San Crisanto: The House that Wasn’t (The details of our first offer falling through)
• January 10,2007: Continuing to Nail Down a Life in Mexico
• January 23, 2007: Progreso Street Scenes, Vol 1 (Photos from our first real rental house, in Progreso.)
• January 24, 2007: Merida Costco Invaded by Gringo Marauders (Wherein we learn that living here is, actually, pretty easy.)
• March 13, 2007: Daytrippers (If anyone tells you to go to Belize to renew your tourist visa, stop being friends with them immediately.)
• March 29, 2007: Look What We Bought (After seven months, we close on a property.)
• April 16, 2007: Here are Your “Before” Photos (Or house, as purchased.)
• May 10, 2007: More Progress in Chelem
• May 20, 2007: Gaining Entry into the Mexican Credit System (Afterword: Never, ever buy a car from this dealership.)
• May 27, 2007: Turning 29 at the End of the World
• June 28, 2007: Been a While Since I Rapped at Ya (With Jillian in America, I move into our wildly unfinished new house, and sleep in a hammock.)
• September 18, 2007: Whatever Dude, We’ve Got Crabs (Our new home has some unexpected pests.)
• October 31, 2007: Celebrating Two Years of Dropping In (Our two-year anniversary.)
• Novemeber 7, 2007: I Give My Left Arm to the Maya (Now I’m committed.)
• Novemeber 9, 2007: The Protean Waters of Yucatan
• November 13, 2007: Wedding Photos: User Contributed Edition (Our wedding in Merida.)
• November 30, 2007: Renovating Our Beach House, Volume 2
• February 12, 2008: La Tratto, Dehydration, Star Medica, and You: A Cautionary Tale
• March 4, 2008: Building Community with the New Yolisto (Yolisto re-launches)
• April 14, 2008: Expatriation is Freedom (But Not the Way You Think)
• April 25, 2008: Welcome to the Gringo House
• May 29, 2008: Photo Notes from a 30th Birthday in Cancun
• July 1, 2008: The Dark Lady
• July 2, 2008: Did I Tell You About the Time We Didn’t Get Robbed? (The police in Merida are fantastic.)
• July 31, 2008: Renovating Our Beach House: Volume 2.1
• September 4, 2008: Renovating Our Beach House: Volume 3
• October 13, 2008: Anniversary Anticipation (The Third Anniversary of Dropped In)
• October 14, 2008: Remodeling the Guest House: Take 1
• November 10, 2008: Becoming 30 on the Mayan Riviera
• November 14, 2008: The Accidental Gringa
• December 8, 2008: Renovating Our Beach House: Volume 4
• January 28, 2008: It’s Not All Margaritas and Monkeyshines
• March 11, 2008: Loading Up the New Living Room
• This is just the brief overview. There is much, much more to read. As you browse through the posts above, be sure to check out the automatically-generated links to related posts below the body of each article.

3. Finally, we have launched a completely new site, called “dinnercraft.” The bulk of our new writing will appear there. Check it out, and be sure to read the “about” page for a quick overview. This blog will have multiple authors and contributors, and should be a lot of fun.

M: Thank you again for listening to us for the last three years. I’m sure we’ll talk again, soon.

J: And…we’re out.

Speaking of 2002, I used to work for a certain charismatic lunatic who spent something like 40 grand on a domain name for an imaginary site that would compete with Friendster. He never developed the site, though he did get a baseball hat with a pretty sweet logo on it. The point being: it’s not the domain that matters, it’s the content. I don’t write this as though it’s some sort of new revelation…the revelation is that it still doesn’t seem obvious to everyone.

Yesterday, I had this idea that I wanted to buy the domain, “MaketheLogoBigger.com,” and start a site that would combine the best elements of Smashing Magazine, Lifehacker, and DeviantArt. Since then, I realized that about 30,000 bloggers are already doing the same thing, so I kind of scrapped the idea as soon as I had it. But not before I had this ridiculous exchange:

————–

jacob wrote:

What is your offer for makethelogobigger.com? Let me know.

Best Regards,
*Jacob* | *AcquireThisName.com*
AcquireThisName.com

————–

From: Malcolm
Sent: Friday, January 23, 2009 12:41 PM
To: jacob
Subject: Re: Offer on makethelogobigger.com

$100

————–

jacob wrote:
Hello Malcolm,

The seller is asking $5,000 USD for makethelogobigger.com. Let me know.

Best Regards,
Jacob
AcquireThisName.com

————–

From: Malcolm
Sent: Friday, January 23, 2009 1:17 PM
To: jacob
Subject: Re: Offer on makethelogobigger.com

All set. Thanks.

————–

jacob wrote:

You are welcome to make a counter offer. Let me know.

Best Regards,
Jacob | AcquireThisName.com
AcquireThisName.com

————–

From: Malcolm
Sent: Friday, January 23, 2009 2:47 PM
To: jacob
Subject: Re: Offer on makethelogobigger.com

$150

————–

jacob wrote:
The seller’s counter offer is $2,500.

Best Regards,

Jacob | AcquireThisName.com
AcquireThisName.com

————–

From: Malcolm
Sent: Friday, January 23, 2009 3:59 PM
To: jacob
Subject: Re: Offer on makethelogobigger.com

$160, and that’s my final offer.

————–

jacob wrote:
I’m sorry the seller won’t agree to that.

Best Regards,
Jacob | AcquireThisName.com
AcquireThisName.com

————–

From: Malcolm
Sent: Friday, January 23, 2009 5:40 PM
To: jacob
Subject: Re: Offer on makethelogobigger.com

Fair enough. Thanks.

————–

Based on him slashing his asking price in half, I almost expected the seller to go ahead and accept my “final offer.” I also expected “Jacob” would suspect that I was having a little bit of fun with him. But the point is, I can think of very few reasons to buy a $5,000 domain. I can just as easily start my new site on “BorkNack.com” and have it be just as successful, that is, if the content was killer and the idea wasn’t already done to death by a ton of people more qualified than I. The domain aftermarket is dumb, and it’s time for this “business” to go away.

With Jillian taking over most of the heavy lifting here on the blog, and most of my attention being spent over on Yolisto, I have been looking for a way, for a long time, to get myself back in the game over here on Dropped In. Coincidentally, I also read that the “Web 2.0″ (::shudder::) company Twitter is one of the fastest growing sites online today. At first, I had always assumed Twitter was like MySpace or Facebook: great for 13 year old girls (and the men who love them), but fairly useless to the rest of us.

Who on Earth needs that much running information about someone else’s life? Who, with the exception of maybe my mom, has any interest in knowing exactly what I am doing at all times? Well, likely, nobody. The ONLY redeeming thing I can imagine regarding starting my own steady stream of “Tweets” is that it does provide a (hopefully) interesting slice-of-life here in the Yucatan. There is a ton of stuff, in the course of a day, that has become quite normal for us, that doesn’t warrant a full blog post, and that may provide more of an insight on how it feels to live here, than we could possibly hope for by writing longer posts.

Once you actually start writing Tweets, however, you also see what a fun and addicting form it is to write under. Answering the simple question, “What are you doing,” in under 140 characters of type, forces you into a kind of open-ended haiku, where you must make the reader laugh, be clever, and make the mundane interesting, without asking your reader to follow you through the verbal obstacle-course that many have become accustomed to on this site.

If you are a reader who happens to like Twitter, sign up for your own account and follow me with Tweets of your own. You can also see a summary of all my Tweets here. If you are a reader who thinks the whole idea is stupid, drop a note in the comments and let us know why. The possibility definitely exists that I will lose interest in the whole idea of micro-updates, and your feedback will help me decide whether it stays or goes. And if you are a reader who is my mom, well, you’re probably pretty stoked right now. Enjoy!

During the down time, we started to think a lot about the influence of online communities as they relate to living here in Yucatan. The original Yolisto served a need, but ended up feeling like a tiny stone thrown down a long hallway. In the nearly two years since we have been here, the online community of bloggers, discussion forum experts, and other people sharing their experiences and their lives here has grown significantly. There are tons of expat-friendly destinations scattered around the web, including the consistently amazing Yucatan Living blog, our own magazine (which you are feasting your eyes on right this minute), and the awe-inspiring Merida Insider, whose volumes upon volumes of information can’t be matched anywhere online.

But what was missing was one central place for everyone who finds themselves in the fortunate position of “living here” and “speaking English” to congregate, share ideas, tips for living here, photos, videos, and more. It seemed like the time was ripe for a true Yucatan Community website. We decided to leave the original Yolisto down, and take some time to build that very site.

After almost a solid month of making the final preparations, I am very excited to announce that we are ready to open our doors to the all new Yolisto version 2.0 software…at least a crack, that is.

The new Yolisto offers a much more complete community experience, with well-organized forums, video uploading, photo sharing and commenting, blog-like article publishing, event scheduling and planning, and the Yolisto 1.0-era Craigslist-like classified advertising, as well as searchable individual user profiles, a dedicated instant messaging client, live chat, and much, much more. We have assembled all the tools you need to meet and stay in touch with other members in the community.

Though the new Yolisto is decidedly Yucatan-centric, you don’t have to live here to use the site. If you are still in the States, in Canada, or are one of our neighbors in Cancun or elsewhere, you will find lots to like about the site. During this soft-launch period of the site, I invite all of our readers to check out the site, and, if you have the time, begin using it. This will give us time to sort out the inevitable bugs before we begin our marketing campaign, which has just one goal: Become the go-to community website for Americans and Canadians living in Yucatan.

All guests are welcomed with open arms in the Yucatan, and so it will be on Yolisto. There is no question too complex or too basic, and even if we’ve heard it a thousand times, we’ll give you the answer. Check it out, and I think you’ll find our online community to be one of the friendliest around.

I also started to have a few issues about the very notion of a blog, in general. When I think about what I would like to see the site become, it seems like chronologically-ordered, only half-formed mutterings about the day’s minor mishaps isn’t what we’re after. Of course, there will always be a place for that, but we want to also include some vital information for those that may find themselves suddenly expatriated or retired here, and for those that are planning to make the leap into Mexico. It seemed like we needed a way to separate our featured articles from our daily fluff, and I am hoping our new magazine-style format will allow us to do just that.

We also want to open the site up to guest writers and reviewers, introduce more multimedia content, and in short, become the number one (okay, number two) resource for anyone wanting to learn more about life in the Yucatan. We will be continuing to add new features over the next several days, but for now, take a poke around, leave us a comment or two, and we hope you enjoy our new look!

First, with over 500 entries and over 1000 comments, the blog was not performing well at all. With WordPress, there is no publishing to be done, which means articles are posted instantly, comments are updated immediately, and you’re going to see a lot less server timeouts.

Second, WordPress has gotten good. REALLY good. With tons of plugins, great community and support, and an unbeatable feature set, this software will allow us to take this blog even further. Its editor is Jillian-friendly, as well.

Of course, we couldn’t just update the software without sprucing things up a little bit visually, as well. We even managed to successfully port over all of the old entries and comments. I hope you dig the new design and features, and of course, please let us know if anything goes belly-up.

1. In my junk-deleting frenzy, I accidentally deleted about a month’s worth of comments yesterday. If you posted something that I didn’t respond to, I apologize.
2. We have been nominated (okay, I nominated us) for a Blogger’s Choice Award. If you like our site, please consider voting for us!

When we started, I had just come off a five year stint in NYC, and was reuniting with Jillian in our apartment in New Haven after a year spent commuting to each other’s houses on weekends. Jillian was teaching as a substitute in the Hamden public school system, and I was working by myself from our apartment. We started the blog purely out of vain self-indulgence, not really sure where it was going to end up. Okay, maybe it hasn’t evolved much beyond that. But we hope that in the middle of our echo-chamber mumblings, we have given some people at least a tiny amount of guidance or entertainment. Mexico is an incredible place to live, and we hope we have inspired some people to make the leap.

The future of Dropped In is somewhat uncertain. As life here becomes normal, it is harder to write with freshness and energy about the things we are experiencing every day. In a way, having an audience has become kind of intimidating. It’s harder to write when people are actually listening, we know the people behind some of the products or services that we might otherwise slag off, and our commitment to daily updates has definitely not been followed through on. Right now, we are kind of torn. Either we spend a significant amount of time switching the blog over to some new software, doing a redesign, and pushing on with somewhat irregular, personal-flavor updates, or we start over. We are currently working on a new project (which we will make an announcement about soon), which would offer us the opportunity to comment on life here in a more “official” way, and provide some real guidance and how-tos for living here. Frankly, I’m not sure which way we want to go. Rest assured, though, either way, we will continue writing on the Internet forever.

But enough of that. This entry is about celebrating. Here are a few fast facts about Dropped In as we turn two years old:

Our Favorite Entries from Year Two:

• Steven Stiffler is My Homeboy (October 13th, 2006)
  My encounter with Seann William Scott during a trip to Los Angeles.
• We´ll Always Have Pot Roast (Novemeber 2, 2006)
  In honor of the Day of the Dead, Jillian reflects on her late grandfather.
• Ode to Illicit Mayonnaise (November 5, 2006)
  A poem written about mayonnaise, before I discovered its availability locally.
• Weekend Trip to X’Matkuil (November 14, 2006)
  Commentary and coverage of the fair in X’Matkuil (beginning again soon!)
• Good Artists Copy (November 21, 2006)
  Jillian’s likes and dislikes, after just a few months in Mexico.
• Dentista (Novemeber 28, 2006)
  Malcolm’s first trip to a Mexican dentist.
• Christmas in Merida: A Photostory (December 25, 2006)
  A photo essay covering our first Christmas in Merida.
• San Crisanto: The House That Wasn’t (January 04, 2007)
  Details on the fall-through of the first house we tried to buy.
• Merida Costco Invaded by Gringo Marauders (January 24, 2007)
  We acquire a Costco membership, and tuna is the star of the show.
• crAsh Wednesday (February 21, 2007)
  Coverage of last year’s carnival celebrations.
• At Trotter’s, Merida Cuisine Finds Complexity (March 07, 2007)
  Our review of Trotter’s restaurant in Merida.
• Nine Things from Our Trip to Belize Which, Had They Not Happened, Would Have Made the Trip an Awful Lot Cooler (March 16, 2007)
  Ugh. Belize. Re-reading this entry made me angry all over again.
• Are There Scorpions in the Yucatan? (April 03, 2007)
  After months of speculation, we encounter our first scorpion. And boy, was he a doozie.
• Gaining Entry Into the Mexican Credit System (May 20, 2007)
  We buy our first car. An addendum to this entry is that Autos Cetina is owned and run by a man who is at the very least a criminal, and who probably also abuses small animals, children, and illegally stores medical waste in the trunks of his used automobiles. Avoid this place.
• Turning 29 at the End of the World (May 27, 2007)
  My birthday in Dzilam Bravo.
• Been a While Since I Rapped At Ya (June 28, 2007)
  My first few days alone at our new house in Chelem.

And if that’s not enough, here’s some fast facts about the blog after two years:

• Number of Unique Readers per Day: 800-900
• Unique Readers per Month: 30,000+
• Top Search Terms from this Month, Proving the Internet is Stupid:
  1. gene simmons pumpkin stencil
  2. jillian raucci
  3. cruisin cooler
  4. michelle+pfieffer
  5. washing+feet
  6. bill+cosby
  7. dropped in
  8. altares+mayas+(hanal+pixal)
  9. video+game+tattoos
  10. gastronomique new haven
• Google Pagerank: 3 (We lost a point!)
• Alexa Rank: 1,09,624
• Total Incoming Unique Links: 5,851
• Number of entries written: 505
• Number of comments received: 1,381

Once again, a big thanks for your support. Keep reading, and we’ll keep writing. Let’s see what happens in year three.

This morning, we went through and deleted them all, and changed the way these comments get handled…so we should be firmly back in the saddle now, with the blog performing better than ever. There’s a lot to report, and you may notice a few older entries pop up and have their comments updated, so be sure to have a poke around. (Thanks Nancy!)

We learned a lot while we were developing this one, and have already started putting together our feature wish list for version 2.0, which we are working on now. In the meantime, please help us bug test by joining, playing the game, and reporting any bugs you find in the Hallway Wars forums. Thanks, and enjoy!