I'm way behind on blog reviews. I think "California 2 Puerto Rico" is the perfect blog to get my reviews jump-started again.

What is "California 2 Puerto Rico" all about?

Summer Hogan and Stefan Rest moved from California (San Diego, I think) to Rincón, Puerto Rico and have been chronicling their adventures. They've been reteaching themselves how to speak Spanish, although Puerto Rican Spanish is a bit different than the Spanish spoken in California. Puerto Rico is another tropical location, just like here in the Philippines.

Site Design

The overall design is great and I really love that header image. All the navigation items I expect are in place, albeit in the sidebar instead of in the header area. The blog has a few minor problems I think they could iron out if they take the time to do so.

One thing I noticed immediately is that you can access any page with or without the "www." in front of the URL. While Google no longer penalizes blogs for having both, other search engines aren't so forgiving. I recommend any number of plugins to make the URLs redirect to one or the other. I don't have their information handy, but a quick search via Google will return the results. I use a redirection in my .htaccess file.

Some of the pages are slow loading due to all the images. I recommend using thumbnails and a lightbox-type plugin for people who want to see the larger pictures. A caching plugin would also help to speed things up a bit. I use Hyper Cache.

Article Content

Where do I begin? They've written so much about Rincón, Puerto Rico over the past 13-14 months that it wouldn't even be fair for me to try to pick out the best of the best. I'll pick the latest article and be done with it. I don't want to spend too much time looking around — I have a lot of other things that need to get done.

Stefan wrote "Hurricane Bertha Misses Puerto Rico", obviously worried about the hurricane until it left the Puerto Rico area of responsibility. Hurricanes can do a lot of damage in a short period of time, something I've seen here in the Philippines.

My Overall Opinion

If you're interested in Puerto Rico, for vacation or for living, this blog should be of interest. It's being written from an outsider's perspective, naturally, since neither Stefan nor Summer were born or raised there. As a territory of the US, you don't even need a visa to go to and from Puerto Rico.

I try to subscribe to RSS feeds by email for the blogs I enjoy reading and especially if I enjoyed reviewing them. I just did that with this blog.

Would you like a Review?

My reviews aren't great. They're far from it. They're absolutely free, however, and you can't beat that with a stick. Make sure your blog is ready to be reviewed and then submit it on my "Request A Blog Review" page and I'll try to do my best to give you a fair review. The key word is "try".