Back in those mid-1990s days of dial-up internet access, Rebecca Bollwitt created her first website while in high school. Several years later, when her tech job took her across the continent to Boston, she dialed herself in to something even more significant on a career path that has made one of the most popular bloggers in Metro Vancouver: a handle.

In the online world Bollwitt is known as Miss 604, originally a hotmail address she created to remain connected with B.C.

"Some people still don't get that it's the telephone area code, and I have to explain that," the Surrey-raised techie said with a laugh.

People certainly get her blog, though. Her posts at miss604.com, about everything from great restaurants to long-gone heritage sites, have made the site a repeat winner of readers' polls in urban weekly newspapers, and she was recently named among the Vancouver Sun's top 100 women of influence.

A sure sign of Bollwitt's reach is her Miss 604 account on Twitter, which boats more than 19,300 followers -- many more than Premier-elect Christy Clark's 3,362, for example, CTV anchor Tamara Taggart's 6,696 and ex-Canuck Trevor Linden's 11,869 (all numbers as of Monday, Feb. 28). She even bests the Vancouver Sun's 17,201 followers and the 11,504 claimed by local newsies' go-to radio station, CKNW.

She uses Twitter to effectively drive online traffic back to her Miss 604 blog site.

"There's no real strategy with it, and I don't ask people to follow me (on Twitter)," Bollwitt said. I don't do promotions where someone has to follow me to enter a contest, that kind of thing. I just do what I normally do, with re-Tweets and promoting other people and things I'm writing about. Like, one of my most popular Tweets lately was one saying how much I love my husband (John Bollwitt) -- soooo much feedback about that from people saying how sweet it was, like 'You're such a great news resource but it's nice to know you're human, too,' stuff like that."

Bollwitt has always been passionate about the online world, back to her days at Queen Elizabeth Secondary. She built her first website in 1997, one devoted to her favourite band (Florida ska-punkers Less Than Jake).

"I've been fascinated with the whole online world since then -- how to code and make things online, but also the interaction with people.

"It's funny," she continued, "because Les Than Jake played the Commodore a couple years ago and I got to interview them, so it was like my digital world coming full-circle, which was exciting for me."

Bollwitt's Miss 604 blog came to life in 2004 with relatively few posts, mostly about life in Surrey -- "news" of a coyote on her driveway, maybe -- and tidbits about a Canucks game or episode of The Amazing Race. By 2006, she began taking it seriously, studying the craft of blogging at conferences and writing about events, food and other things of greater interest to her and, strategically, her readers.

"The food stuff just happened," she related, "because there's just so much going on in that scene, especially downtown (Vancouver).... It's fun to go out and eat and take really cool photos with my great new camera and post those images. I like to post those just before lunch, too, just to make people hungry."

A cute caricature of Bollwitt graces Miss604.com, and her bio is detailed there. As for her posts, they used to be much more personal.

"I try to keep a balance with that, because being online you need to have that interaction with people and be a human being, but there is a barrier you have to put up to not let the online world get too close. You know, I say I live downtown, the West End, but I never say exactly where. And my family members and parents, they aren't named either. When we go away, because we do post that we are going somewhere, I always get a house-sitter, just in case. You're putting it out there."

Just last week, Bollwitt was in Ghana to blog about The Bicycle Factory, a campaign by Cadbury to deliver more than 4,500 bikes to communities in the African nation this year. The chocolate maker invited her there, perhaps realizing the kind of pull Miss 604 has here in Metro Vancouver.

Most people don't know Bollwitt's day job is building Wordpress-created websites with Sixty4media, a company she launched with her husband. "That's my career," she said. "It pays the rent and puts food on the table, so it's my top priority.... But I wouldn't have Sixty4media without Miss 604. People know they can come to me to get a website built because they heard about it through Miss604, so they really work hand in hand."

Banner ads on Miss604.com mean the blog site "does pretty well" for Bollwitt.

"It pays my car payment, let's put it that way -- it can't pay the rent yet," she said. "The thing is, I don't write the site as though it's a business, I write it as though it's still a blog -- a professional, responsible one. If it were a true business, I'd have more content, maybe more writers, and it'd look a little different, with ads wrapped around the words and all kinds of things to make money. I haven't fully committed to that, and I'm not sure I ever will."