About the Blog

I began this blog back in 2004, hosted on Blogger.com, under the name “Rabbit Power” (because I was born in the year of the rabbit), in order to keep in touch with friends back in the States. Due most likely to my frequent political rants, I had three readers for my first two years of blogging. In May of 2006, I got sick of the rabbit theme and changed the name to “An American Expat in Deutschland.” The World Cup came to Germany soon thereafter and suddenly I had strangers reading my blog. I started reading other expat blogs (somehow, it took 2 year for this idea to occur to me, I’m slow like that) and I was suddenly surrounded by a network of fellow expat bloggers.

In February 2008, I moved to the domain AmiExpat.com.  This isn’t because my name is Ami, it’s because Ami is a nickname Germans use for Americans, so Ami Expat is sort of German/English shorthand for American Expatriate.  This was, to some, a controversial decision, but it’s worked out well so far.  At the same time, I migrated the blog to Wordpress blogging software (and I shoulda done that a lot sooner, man).

What is An American Expat in Deutschland all about?

It’s about whatever I feel like writing about. This often has something to do with living in Germany, since that’s my life now. Also, as a research statistician by training, I am crazy happy about looking stuff up, investigating questions, and writing up my results. Somehow, I manage to be both easy-going and Type A+ (don’t ask me how that works). Anyways, I have quite a few posts that I hope fellow expats will find helpful. You can find these under the category Tips for Expats. Two of the most popular of these posts are What’s Good at Aldi? and American Foodstuff Substitutes (yes, I hate the title too, but couldn’t come up with a better one).

What’s with all the Thai recipes?

I’m half-Thai, and, if I may be so bold, a pretty good cook. I’m planning on putting up more recipes, but it’s pretty low on my priority list at the moment. As a side note, my mom has a Thai restaurant in Manassas, Virginia. Live nearby? It’s called Siam Classic.

How can I make sure I don’t miss a single post?

By subscribing to An American Expat in Deutschland.

Awards:

Technical Stuff:

What theme are you running?

This blog uses the fabulous Thesis theme from DIYthemes.  It was customized by Kristarella.  I highly recommend them both.

Where is your blog hosted?

I use nearlyfreespeech.net, and have been satisfied with the cost and service provided.

What plugins are you using?

CommentLuv - shows a link to the last post from the commenter’s blog

Feedburner Feedsmith - redirects all your Wordpress feeds to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber

FlickR Photo Album - retrieves your Flickr photos and allows you to easily add them to your posts

Homepage Excerpts - Creates excerpts of your posts for your homepage

Indoeuropean Translator Widget - Provides links to different automatic translations from the sidebar

Simple Tags - Extended tagging options

Smart Archives - A simple, clean, and future-proof way to present your archives

Spam Karma - Ultimate Spam Killer for WordPress - works great!

Subscribe to Comments - Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry

What Would Seth Godin Do - Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors and another to return visitors

Wordpress Database Backup - Better safe than sorry!

Related posts

• No related posts.