[Calender] Entertain MeMe

Save the second week of November for entertaining. Well, really, I'm just counting on you to entertain me!

I have a gift certificate to Williams-Sonoma and I need my food blogging friends to help me spend it. Sound familiar? Please write about your entertaining must haves and email a link to your blog sometime between November 7 and November 11. I'll post a wrap up by Sunday evening.

For all the details on the EntertainMeMe visit Taste Everything Once.

This post was written by Jennifer from Taste Everything Once

Culinary Confessions

David Lebovitz started it but I happily stole it. Rather than make it a meme, I'm offering it up to any and all food bloggers who care to participate. All you have to do is post your own confessions. Post whenever you want, there is no date for this.

I'm posting the image I used here, feel free to snag it, manipulate it to your liking, use your own or none at all:

Enjoy and remember, a little confession is good for the soul!

This post was written by Amy from Cooking with Amy

[Hosting] [Typepad] Hosting problem & moving to Movable Type

When I eagerly bought my domain name (from Go Daddy) I also signed up for a hosting package.

I'm now thinking it might have been the wrong thing to do. Firstly, am I correct that if I'm still using Typepad, I don't actually need to host the website, I can simply redirect the DNS settings at www.silverbrowonfood.com to silverbrowonfood.typepad.com ?

Second, I really want to upgrade Movable Type. My problem is that it looks a tad confusing installing it, so ideally I'd like to go with a host where it comes installed as part of a package - Go Daddy is not currently one of those companies. However, I'm concerned that if I try to move host, my site will collapse - is this unfounded?

So my questions are these
If I stick with Typepad, and don't do the MT option, do I need a host or can I redirect my DNS settings?
Has anyone tried installing MT themselves? How tricky is it?
Should I move hosts away from Go Daddy to another host that has MT installed as part of a package? Or, should I stick with Go Daddy and try to install MT myself or get MT to do it?

Silverbrow from Silverbrow on Food

[General] Posting recipes

My food blog mainly exists for me. I started it because I would make something really yummy, but when I wanted to make it again I could never remember where I got the recipe. Having a blog gives me a searchable, indexable place to make notes about what I make when and for who.

Now I have friends who read my blog, and sometimes they ask for recipes. Generally, I just scan the recipe into a PDF and keep it in a separate section of my site, then I pass on the URL to whoever asked for the recipe. I didn't start the site to post recipes, but I don't mind sharing, especially when it's something really good.

I'm nervous about copyright issues so I don't post recipes directly to my blog. If I wanted to post a recipe from a cookbook, magazine, or other site, what steps do I need to take?

This post was written by Sheri from Pork Cracklins

knives?

Hey y'all:

Okay, this isn't technically a blogging question, although I'm sure it will show up on my blog.

I want to buy a good knife. A really good knife. Believe it or not, all the meals I've cooked and posted on my blog have been with a flimsy Fred Meyer set I bought five years ago. And I've been meaning to buy a better one. But money, you know.

Now, since I couldn't go on my vacation to New York because of my stupid sprained ankle, I decided it's time to treat myself.

I'd like a good, solid knife, for chopping and slicing, etc. I don't care what country it comes from. I don't want to spend more than $200. (Even that...) I want it to last.

So, since this is the most food-savvy group of people I know, does anyone have suggestions? Fire away.


Shauna from Gluten-free Girl

(Event)Hay Hay It's Donna Day

Everyone is invited to participate in the Donna Hay cooking day on 19th November. Details of the event, with Donna's Self Frosting Cupcakes recipe, have been posted at Winosandfoodies.

This post was written by Barbara from Winos and Foodies

[Wordpress] gurus, please help

Howdy WordPress users (and maybe Movable Type folks, too):

I've got one niggling problem on my new Wordpress site: the background images intermittently don't show up. That is, I have a white space where the masthead photo should be, and a red background where my tiled .gif image should appear. I can force the error if you click on this URL with an extra dot and slash after the domain:

http://professorsalt.com./

Problem is, this error can also happen when the URL is typed in correctly. I have no idea why. Try again, with this link:

http://professorsalt.com

Any clues?

This post was written by Professor Salt from You gonna eat that?

(Blogger) Sidebar Issues

Today, yet again, my sidebar is not only dropped, it's centered after it's dropped. I know sometimes the size of pictures can cause this, but yesterday it was fine before I posted, and then after I posted last night (with no pictures added), it dropped. Anyone have any ideas on something I might be missing?


This post was written by Sweetnicks from Sweetnicks

[Typepad] Problems with typelists - I think

I've recently bought a url and went through the process of mapping my domain from typepad. My blog address at typepad was. So far so good.

However, tonight I was trying to add in a new typelist and something odd happened. When I looked at www.silverbrowonfood.com it was different to silverbrowonfood.typepad.com, with the former not reflecting the changes I made to the typelist. Whereas when I looked at www.silverbrownfood.com/silverbrow_on_food/ it mirrored the typepad address. This had all been happening in Firefox so I shifted over to IE to see what happened there.

It gets even more confusing. In IE, the typepad address looks as I want it - that is, with the tag cloud. However when I look at www.silverbrowonfood.com and www.silverbrownfood.com/silverbrow_on_food/ neither reflect the changes I made to the Typelists.

It's 12.50am and I'm doing my head in.

Can't figure out template to suit Firefox/Internet Explorer

I'm going bonkers, I can't seem to get the formatting down to suit both firefox and internet explorer. Whenever I change template to look good on IE ( what I use), it looks bad on firefox. And when I go to change something on FF (only can do this on bf's computer, can't download on computers at work) makes it look crappy on IE. Friends have been nice enough to mention to me when posts are all the way to the left in firefox. Please help! I'm losing my mind over this!
M of Mona's Apple.

[Search Engine] Allowing spiders on archive pages

Just a quick question...

I get a lot of traffic from search engines piping people to my archive pages. In the past, I've let search spiders scan my archives.

The problem is that that's not how I want people browsing my page. I'd prefer they read the individual posts. I'd like to "drive" traffic a little more, but I'm hesitant to lose readers and others discovering my page from search engines.

Your thoughts?

This post was written by William from Never Trust a Skinny Chef...

How Much is Your Blog Worth?

Food Blog S'cool is worth $57,018.54.
How much is your blog worth?

This post was written by Sam from Becks & Posh

Food Blog S'cool in the News

Food Blog S'cool, Moveable Feast, Chez Pim, Man Who Cooks, She Who Eats, The Food Palate, What I Cooked Last Night, Esurientes, The Scent of Green Bananas, Chocolate and Zucchini, Food Porn Watch, Words to Eat by, Il Forno, Is My Blog Burning, Kitchenhand, and Cook Sister have all been written up in The Age, theage.com.au, in an article called, "Blog in, don't wait".

Congratulations to all! It's a great article.


This post was written by Elise from Simply Recipes

Mac to PC blogger issues---arrgh.

Hey, can anyone tell me if my website is showing up strange on a PC? It's fine here on my trusty Mac, with Firefox. But when I checked it at work today, all the links, my profile, and the extra stuff was shoved down to the bottom. We've been having issues at work, so it could be that. But if not,

then can someone tell me why?!

Thanks, y'all.

This post was written by Shauna from Gluten-free Girl

(for all food bloggers) Mealme.com

I noticed something that I thought was kind of fun on Food Porn Watch and thought others might like to do it too. (After all, you great food photographers have all those shots stored on your computers.) It's called Mealme.com and it's a site for anyone (worldwide) to submit a restaurant photo and review of that restaurant. You can tag it with whatever you want so other like minded people can find it. They only accept submissions of restaurant foods (no home cooked food), (and don't publish urls so it's not a way to publicize your blog,) but I thought it was fun. I submitted a photo yesterday (my very first ever restaurant photo, by the way) and they published it today.

This post submitted by Kalyn of Kalyns Kitchen.

[Photography] After Dark

The weather's turning in these parts and I'm really struggling to get decent pictures without natural light. Any quick and dirty tips on taking successful photos after dark?

I've tried overhead light and things turn out yellow. With a flash things are just scary. Any ideas from the pros out there?

This post was written by Jennifer from Taste Everything Once

Using Flikr account photos on Type Pad blog?

Hello. I have recently signed up for FLIKR but I don't know how to lead people there. Or how to put it on the right so that people can visit my photos when they're lonely.

Also sometimes people make a square collage of a number of photos...how is that done?

I am not really very computer literate, hopefully your answers can be really plain, Thanks!!

[calendar] upcoming, mid to end october...

hey hey all! just thought i'd pop in with some upcoming virtual food blog events as a reminder...the past few months, events have slipped right past me, and now with all this time on my hands, i have no excuse, LOL!

and of course, dine and dish shall be back up and eating very shortly as well (but will it be as fun as celebrity host sam's rachael ray for a day?!?!) . :)

THU OCT 20 blog party - the big game

FRI OCT 21 sugar high friday no. 13 dark chocolate

SAT OCT 22 cooking the old fashioned way

SUN OCT 23 is my blog burning? no. 20 souffle

MON OCT 24 slashfood the great pumpkin

TUE OCT 25 does my blog look good in this? no. 10 at chubbyhubby

MON OCT 31 end of the month eggs on toast extravaganza

MON OCT 31 the great pumpkin carve/cook-off

*phew* so much fun! so little flour! got to get to the market! ;)


:: this post was deliciously brought to you by sarah from the delicious life ::

Adding "Read More"

Your blogger template should already have most of what you need. But the key element is likely missing or commented out.

Add this bit of code in the <head> section in the top portion of your template:

<head>
... some stuff ...

<MainOrArchivePage>
span.fullpost {display:none;}
</MainOrArchivePage>

... more stuff ...

</head>

That should enable the read-more capability.

Then, in each post, you'll need to add two snippits of code. The first snippit goes where you want the break to occur and the second at the end of the post:

This sentence appears in main blog.
<span class="fullpost">
This and all following sentences appear in the archive until this appears:
</span>

I can't guarantee this will work because your template may be different from what I've worked with, but this did it for me.

This post was written by Kevin from Seriously Good

Redesign?

Has anyone had an entire site redesign? Green is my color, and I designed my green-themed site with a modified Typepad template, and then discovered Pim, who uses nearly the same template. Now that my readership is increasing, I want something that is a little more unique, but I still want people to feel comfortable when they return; we are so visually driven. I usually remember a site as soon as I go back, even if I can't remember the name. I was just wondering if anyone has been through this and can offer suggestions. Also, for anyone using Typepad, if you could offer some advice for a nice photo montage banner, I would love the help; I'd like to keep the site name there, but have the background a photo or series of photos; I think this would be a good place to start.

This post was written by Lisa from Restaurant Widow

[site design] a few guidelines about usability

hey all...someone just tipped me off to a few usability guidelines when it comes to site design for blogs. a lot of it is pretty standard, for example, it highly recommends having an "About Me" section, a photo, etc. but these may serve as a tasty little reminder...my favorite line is "The web is not high school." LOL!

blog usability guidelines

This post was written by sarah from the delicious life

Adding the "read more" option to posts

Hey folks, I was trying to figure this out on my own, and please excuse if this is a repeat, I looked through recent posts and didn't find anyone asking about this ...
So!
Here it goes.
I'm thinking of adding the "read more" option to my posts. With hopes of keeping what you see on the main page brief and shorter than my longer posts. I've seen posts with links to read the entire article and I was hoping to add this nifty feature to my blog.
I looked it up on blogger help but it didn't do me much good :(
Thanks all, happy Monday!

syndication and blogger

Is anyone else out there using blogger and if so, can anyone tell me how to get my atom feed to validate? Apparently blogger is using atom version 0.3 and now there is a version 1.0 so the validators I have tried do not recognize my site feed...Has anyone else encountered a similar issue?

I've search the Food Blog S'cool archives but haven't turned up anything on this...

Also - given the feedback on my last post, too, it sounds like Moveable Type or Wordpad would be good options for moving my blog - is it possible to move what I have already done to one of those programs?

thanks everyone -
emma (modern girls kitchen)

[Blogger] [Uploading & Posting Photos]

Is anyone having as much trouble as I am uploading photos to Blogger this weekend? I just spent over an hour trying to upload 3 photos. Got 2 up. I usually use picasa/hello/bloggerbot, but it seems to have stopped working properly (this happened once before a month or two ago). It says it's uploading your image and then never does anything else. (I've tried restarting my computer.)

So, like I did last time, I switched and uploaded photos using the picture icon in Blogger. That has worked for me before (though you have to add in your own black outline around the photos if you want it). Now this isn't working right either. For about 10 minutes it says it is uploading your image, then it says "done" at the bottom left but the screen is blank and my photo is nowhere to be found.

I can't even get the Blogger Help page to open up.

I haven't posted a question in a while, so this ready-made format is new to me. Why does the text look so humongous when I'm typing it in?

Thanks for your help!



This post was written by Farmgirl from Farmgirl Fare

Blogads and layouts

Just to reveal how "newbie-ish" I am...I'm hoping someone can help me with two questions...first of all, I've noticed that most food blogs have a much nicer layout than mine - or at least has a proper masthead (as opposed to the standard blogger masthead). They're also able to organize topics in more detail (beyond simply archiving them by month or listing "recent posts"). I've been messing around with my template on blogger but the results vary from pure disruption to chaos and I have to put it all back. I know part of this will resolve itself as I learn more html but can anyone make suggestions? I built my own work website using Frontpage and Dreamweaver - is there any way to build something for my blog and then transfer it (and still have all the archiving etc. from blogger work properly)?
Second, I've also noticed several blogs running blogads on their sites - how does one acquire blogads and how do you get that set up? Do you have to reach a certain number of hits to make that happen?
Thanks very much everyone - I would appreciate any help at all!
Emma

Event: The Great Pumpkin Carve Up Cook Off

It's pumpkin carving time!

From now through October 31st, I invite fellow food bloggers to save your pumpkin cast-offs from carving and make something yummy to eat with them. Write about it on your blog and post of photo of your Jack-o-lantern with the pumpkin (squash) dish and email me the URL (email to recipes {at} elise.com).

Details here.

If you would like to be a judge, please let me know!

This post was written by Elise from Simply Recipes.

(Misc) Those Who Post Daily...

For those who post to their blog daily, do you feel obligated to? For example, my regular visitors know I post daily, and I know they come daily. If one day, I don't post, I worry that they might not come back the next day, they might forget. I don't want to lose anybody. As much as I love blogging, sometimes life gets in the way too and occasionally there's a night where I just don't feel like it, but do because I feel like I've set myself up as a daily blogger. Probably not explaining it the best I can, but those who post daily probably get the gist of what I'm saying/asking. Was thinking one way to combat this might be to have a regular "Sweetnicks Closed Tuesdays" or something similar, so then I can have a regular night off, and regular visitors would know ahead of time. Thoughts? Opinions?

Separately, but somewhat related, I pitched an article idea to a national cooking magazine and it was favorably received. It will likely either appear in the magazine, if not, the web site contact said she wants the article. Once picked up, it means lots more traffic for me and others referenced in the article. That said, I figure I should decide how to handle the above dilemma first, you know?

This post was written by Sweetnicks from Sweetnicks

Blogger issues, again

Hey, is anyone else (once again) having problems with Blogger tonight? I was able to put up a new post from my flickr photo, and luckily, I pasted the text in. But I did this only because Blogger wouldn't let me add text to the draft I put up last night. When I tried to make changes, it read "The blog you are looking for cannot be found." What? So I re-posted it. Fine. It posted from Flickr. But now, when I try to add in some photographs, or add links, or even a word, then publish, it just keeps going to the "cannot be found screen."

And why can I make changes to this post, but not my gluten-free one? ACK!

I'm trying to not hate Blogger....


This post was written by Shauna from Gluten-free Girl

Considering Changing to Typepad?

I signed up for a 30 day trial for the expert version of Typepad. Has anyone changed from Blogger to Typepad? Was it worth it?

One of my main concerns is having photo albums, and also having several columns on the main page, as compared to the 2 on my current page. As well as easier manipulation of photo's and how they are displayed on posts. (As far as I can tell, with blogger you can't do side by side photo's unless you alter them with a picture editing program - My photos always display one ontop of each other)

Does anyone have any tips, advice or to advise on a different but great hosting program?
This post was written by Alicat from Something So Clever

(Misc) Canon Powershot A400 Help

I know a few bloggers have this camera, so maybe you can help. I keep getting an E18 message and, of course, can't find the book that came with the camera anywhere. I've replaced the batteries and the memory card is empty, so I know it's neither of those solutions. It won't let me take any pictures and turns off right after showing the error message. Anyone know what it means? It's my favorite camera (admittedly mostly because I haven't learned to use my new one yet). Help?!


This post was written by Sweetnicks from Sweetnicks

Join the Movement

Remember Alice's Restaurant? Remember: "...can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day walking in singin' a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may think it's a movement."

Monday Miz D at Belly Timber posted photos of her kitchen, which prompted me, on Tuesday, to post pictures of mine, which prompted Kalyn to post pictures of hers.

Friends, it's the beginning of a movement. You don't have to know the words or carry a tune, you just have to show your's. And tag it with:

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/kitchen+photos" rel="tag">kitchen photos</a>

so others can find it.

This post was written by Kevin from Seriously Good

Wordpress.com invite

I just received an invite to Wordpress.com, the stripped down, free hosted version of Wordpress. I'm not going to use it, and am offering to pass it along to someone from FBS who's sincerely going to use it.

Please email me a compelling, and brief reason why you should be the lucky one, by October 6 11:59pm. I'll choose someone by Friday, and this invite needs to be used by Sunday night. Send to professorsaltATgmailDOTcom

Thanks to those of you who convinced me to go ahead and upgrade from Blogger to the full blown, host it yourself version of WordPress. I've made the leap and am in the middle of tweaking the software. That's why I'm not going to need the invite myself.

This post was written by Professor Salt from You gonna eat that?

Reminder

Stephen of What's for Dinner is hosting (and judging) this month's Paper Chef competition. He's looking for ingredient nominations and another judge. The event begins around noon on Friday 10/07.

This post was written by Kevin from Seriously Good

I might be dreaming here, but wouldn't it be good if blogger let you mark certain people as spammers? And not be continually bothered by the same people continuously?

I have noticed something interesting, I didn't have any spam since I put the blogger comment hack on eatstuff, until yesterday. Since then I have had heaps. But they are not going through the comment hack for the spam, because when I get an email it is from their name and not anonymous like everyone else. GRRR!

Has anyone else noticed this?

I tried turning word verification on, but it is really annoying. You have to enter the word verification after the comment has been made and you have submitted it. Do you think this is too much for commenters? Can anyone help?


This post was written by Clare Eats from Eat stuff

Business Cards for your blog?

I'm just curious - how many of you have business cards for your food blog? I just got mine - and I'm soooo excited about it. I made them myself, using VistaPrint (they have free options, but they also have cheap ones where you can upload your own pictures) and the same design as in the header on my blog. They came out really well, and I look forward to being able to hand them out. I've noticed that often when I talk to people and the blog comes up - well, everyone wants the address, so I thought it would be a bit handy to have cards. Anyone else?


This post was written by Anne from Food Blog Scool