When she arrived in San Francisco, Heeter started a series of "West Portal Reflections" web pages with the following mission statement:

West Portal Reflections document my experiences as I try to open a portal to Northern California for Michigan State University. They are targeted to my teams in the Comm Tech Lab and Virtual University, to my close colleagues and bosses throughout Michigan State University, and to close friends and family. These pages serve as ethnographic documentation of my participant-observation research on TeleRelating ("using technology to sustain and enhance close personal relationships"). The contents mix professional and personal life because I am reaching out 2500 miles to people I care about and work with. I hope my reflections help you to keep me in your hearts and make San Francisco a place that is yours. Thanks for journeying with me as I think, learn and experiment.

As the mission statement says, these portal reports intertwined personal experiences with professional. After six months, the newness of telecommuting and of living in San Francisco had begun to transform into real life. At that point, Heeter felt the need to begin to separate personal and professional. The web pages and reports she posted professionally took the form of lecture-discussions, reports on conferences and San Francisco Bay Area speakers she attended, and her own research and designs. She also posted personal stories, often via email, mass mailed to close friends and colleagues. Heeter found that sending personal stories was important to helping her remote relationships stay intimate. She is the only remote person, dependent upon her East Lansing colleagues for personal and professional connectedness. So it seems more necessary for her to remind those in East Lansing of her human side. Reverse personal stories are welcome, but do not occur often.

Some of the personal stories appear in the final Telerelating section. Conference and speaker reports are under "Northern California Connections."