Redmond / Sammamish Real Estate Blog

I’ve been encouraging my wife Carmen to set up a blog as part of her real estate practice. At first she wasn’t sure that she had enough to say or if she would be good at getting her thoughts into written form.

A couple of weeks ago I had a breakfast meeting with the founders of Sampa, a new hosted blogging and publishing tool. Sampa looked interesting and powerful (if a bit more complex than Typepad which I use for my Amazon Web Services blog, or WordPress, which runs this blog) and I thought it would be perfect for her.

Last week she registered on the site and last night she sat down and wrote out her first couple of entries in the Redmond/Sammamish Blog. As she was writing she kept coming up with ideas for more posts and I had to stop her from writing an entire book as her first entry. Take a look and leave her a comment.

Sampa is a really nice tool, with a slightly steeper learning curve than the other tools. A single Sampa site can incorporate any number of blogs, photo albums, and static pages and this adds some complexity to the user interface. It has some really neat features, including the ability to upload an image from another site by simply referencing the image’s URL. Formatting the page using the high-level template system was easy (we removed the entire right-hand column and switched to a two-column layout in a matter of minutes).

There are lots of customization options. For example, there’s an entire page of options for the RSS and Atom feeds generated by the site.

All in all, she’s off to a great start, made possible in part by Samba.