Who, Me?
I’m Pete Johnson, a retired editor/writer living with my wife, Suzette, in San Jose, CA. In former lives, I worked at the Los Angeles Times, Warner Bros. Records, Apple and a few other places.
Most weekdays, I fly electric-powered radio control planes at Baylands, a public park in San Jose, CA. I sometimes fly at the PCC field in Half Moon Bay and occasionally at Rancho San Antonio, another local park.
In addition to flying, I love listening to music, web publishing and walking my great dane, Sadie.
You can contact me by sending email to petej@petej.com.
About this Site
Ups & Downs was launched in December, 2006. I started it because I enjoy web publishing and I wanted to better understand blogs.
In the beginning, I thought that a blog was mostly about the periodic text entries from the person running the site.
I no longer believe that.
When people started to reply to blog entries, the site became much more interesting.
I changed the site from iWeb to WordPress in July, 2006. The new software gave me more control over look & feel and strengthened the comment functions. I could now edit comments and I was notified when people posted new comments.
WordPress also allowed me to monitor how people used the site. I quickly noticed that more people were looking at photographs than reading the blog entries.
That’s fine with me. I began publishing photos more often.
Some of My Flying Buddies: Doug Traub, Bruce Crawford, Gary Morgan, Mike Nadler & me.
One of the site’s useful features is the Faces section, where I’ve posted more than 250 passport-size photos of Northern California flyers.
As the site has grown in content and in popularity, it’s inspired me to constantly tweak the interface and features. If you’ve got an idea for how to make it better, I’d like to hear your thoughts.
My current update schedule is to post a new blog entry at least once a week, often Sunday evening. I add photos to the site at least three times during the week. Occasionally I fall off that schedule, but I try hard to respect it.
Over time, I hope to make Ups & Downs a useful adjunct to this area’s best flying community website, BayRC.
