8.94% of the traffic to The MKX® comes from the city of Monterrey (mom? is that you?), so this post is relevant.

• Are you hungry?
• Do you want to eat out?
• Do you want to try a new place?
• Do you have internet access (yes you do, you’re reading this)?
• Are you in Monterrey, México?

If you answered “yes” to all of the questions above, then head over to the redesigned and completely overhauled Qué Comer (by Moi). It’s now geared towards user-generated content, so people can vote and rate and review restaurants. Before, it was more of a “restaurants pay to be here” kind of deal. Which means that places that suck now have bad reviews.

The new Que comer is a very clean, very well designed, and very friendly. What’s impressive is that the whole site is done completely on top of a modified installation of WordPress (our blogging system of choice). This is a testament of the flexibility of WordPress. Really cool. Head over there and flame your least favorite restaurant.

I assume most of you have used the website Evite.com. If you haven’t, allow me to summarize it for you: It’s a website in which you create an event invitation and you send it to a list of guests. The guests then RSVP (Yes, Maybe, No) on an event page within their site. The text of the invitation can include anything, including maps, event info, list of things for guests to bring, surveys, etc. It’s extremely handy for both the host and the guests.

While the website is not exactly an example of best design practices, navigation, usability, buzzword-iness, etc., they are quite good about not spamming you or (so far) sharing your email with third parties (so they can spam you instead). For that reason alone they have my respect.

Evite tips:

I’ve been using Evite.com for some time now and have it down to a science by now. There are many subtleties that you should be aware of. It takes years of honing your skills. I’m going to share some of the wisdom with you:

• Do create a user account so…
  • You can create evites.
  • You can see your event history (i.e. you click on someone else and you can see past shared events).
  • You can delete the emails with the link to the event. To get to the event page just log in.
• When writing an evite, make it either funny or brief. Otherwise no one reads the whole thing.
• Add your guests in this format: Name Lastname <user@somedomain.com>, … This way the guest list shows them as Name Lastname instead of some retarded hotmail-esque username no one can relate to an actual human being, like “rizos65” or “misstexas2001” (seriously, what idiot came up with those?).
• For large events, send your invitation a month early in case someone else was planning to throw a party on the same day. They won’t want to compete, no one steals guests from each other, we all remain BFFs. When my parties play chicken with other parties, mine always win.
• If you receive an evite, don’t play the wait-and-see game: “I’ll go if nothing better comes up“, “I’ll go if this person goes/doesn’t go“, and so on. The host can see when it was that you last checked out the site. The host gets annoyed if you checked it but didn’t dignify his efforts with a simple reply. The host knows you’re opening the evite every day. My advice: reply with a Maybe right away, this way the host can’t know you still check out the evite every 2 hours anymore. You can go back and change it to Yes or No whenever.
• Verify that emails from evite.com are not being redirected to your Junk mail folder (Hotmail users take note).

I must confess: I put a lot of effort into my evites. I have a multi-step system for creating them and it’s not a simple one. I will not post the details here, mostly out of embarrassment. But I’ve put together some fine evites and I will publish the text to some of them sometime in future posts. For now, if you have a pending evite from me and haven’t replied, go do it right now.