[Taking Action] Please help save the South-Central Farm

.

IN THE MIDDLE OF INDUSTRIAL SOUTH-CENTRAL LOS ANGELES THERE IS A 14-ACRE COMMUNITY FARM. IT IS THOUGHT TO BE THE LARGEST URBAN FARM IN THE U.S.

THE FARM PROVIDES 350 LOW-INCOME, URBAN FAMILIES A SMALL PATCH OF GREEN FOR GROWING FOOD.

BUT NOW, THE CITY OF LOS ANGELES HAS SOLD THE PROPERTY AND THE NEW OWNERS WANT TO EVICT THE GARDENERS.

UNLESS, THEY CAN RAISE ENOUGH MONEY TO BUY THE FARM BACK.

PLEASE DONATE TODAY AND HELP SAVE THE SOUTH-CENTRAL COMMUNITY FARM. TIME IS RUNNING OUT.

This plea was re-printed by Rachael from Fresh Approach Cooking

UPDATE - The farmers lost and were evicted 6/13/06. Sigh.

Thanks for the invite Sam! This is my first post here. And it relates to making a banner for the top of my page. Something nice and purty.
1) How did you all make yours (photoshop i assume)?

2) How did you integrate it into the page html wise?

I am kinda new to all this html stuff but have been learning quickly. Please help!


This Post was written by Garrett from Vanilla Garlic

[About] First Blog Impressions

When I first visit visit a new food blog there are certain things I want to know immediately. Often new blogs do not give this information and I am not necessarily as hooked in as I might be if I had a better idea of what you are about.

Things I like to know about you when I start to read your blog:

- What is your name or screen name
- What is your sex? Male or female?
- Where do you live (preferably something a little more descriptive than USA - where in the USA)?
- What nationality are you?

What do other people think on this subject?
Is there really a good reason to hide this information. (You needn't give away your real identity by revealing these aspects of your personality)
I am I just being too needy by suggesting people share a little bit about themselves?


This Post was written by Sam from Becks & Posh

[FBS] New Pupils - Tomaahtoes to Umeboshi

Please give a very warm welcome to these new pupils...

Cuisine Quotidienne
Chez Becky et Liz
Culinary Hags
The Gourmandista
Ripe London
Nami-Nami
Must Cook Now
Vanilla Garlic
Chef On Call

Thinking of Joining Food Blog School?

Please have a little sympathy for my rsi problems and follow the joining instructions precisely. This means less clicking for me when I join up the pupils:

When you send a membership request, please include both the name of your blog and its url AND YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS in the main body of the email

thanks very much

this post was written by sam of becks & posh

[Network Neutrality] We Saved the Internet

The fight for Internet Freedom took a major step in the right direction yesterday.

A bipartisan majority on the House Judiciary Committee passed the "Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act" -- a good bill that would protect Network Neutrality and prohibit large phone and cable companies from turning the Internet into their private domain.

Yesterday's vote is a milestone in our campaign. It would have been unthinkable just four weeks ago -- when we lost a vote on Net Neutrality in the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

In the weeks since that first vote, we have ignited a prairie fire across America. And Washington is beginning to feel the heat:

* More than 700 groups from all 50 states are now a part of the SavetheInternet.com Coalition - a diverse list that includes MoveOn.org, the Christian Coalition, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Consumers Union and the American Library Association
* A-list musicians such as REM, Moby, The Roots and the Dixie Chicks have joined the coalition with many more to be announced soon.
* Major U.S. newspapers -- including the San Jose Mercury News, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times and Houston Chronicle -- have written editorials supporting our position.
* More than 5,000 bloggers have linked to the SavetheInternet.com Web site and blog -- urging their readers to take action on this issue.
* And yesterday, the Coalition's petition drive surpassed 750,000 signatures.

With little money and through the efforts of many, we have turned momentum against a handful of phone and cable giants that are spending untold millions of dollars to squash Internet freedom.

Through their high-priced lobbyists, slick ad campaigns and fake grassroots groups, companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast are trying to drown out genuine grassroots and consumer advocacy. Yesterday's vote proves, however, that our voices are being heard. But we're still far from saving Net Neutrality.

The full House will take up the bipartisan Judiciary bill in June. The Senate is also considering legislation that currently fails to protect Net Neutrality, though a bipartisan group of Senators are lining up behind an excellent bipartisan bill sponsored by Senators Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota).

We need to continue to mobilize our resources, engage the public and put Congress on notice. I've added some links below to new information about the campaign. I'll be soon sharing some new ideas as we proceed. I welcome your feedback.

But for now, take a moment to savor this win.

Thank you,

Timothy Karr
Free Press Campaign Director
SavetheInternet.com Coalition
tkarr@freepress.net

1. For regular updates on the campaign, read the SavetheInternet.com blog: www.savetheinternet.com/blog

2. Read our new report debunking the telco propaganda: Why Consumers Demand Internet Freedom (PDF).

3. Also yesterday, Free Press Policy Director Ben Scott testified before the Senate Commerce Committee on behalf of the coalition. Read his statement (DOC).

4. Check out the pro-Net Neutrality ad sponsored by MoveOn and the Christian Coalition: hhttp://cdn.moveon.org/content/pdfs/MoveOnChristianCoalition.pdf

[Flickr] Posting a Flickr Slideshow on Your Blog

This morning I decided to try and add a flickr slideshow to my blog.
I just wanted to post the photos from one set (not all my flickr photos).
Following the excellent instructions I found here
I had the flash slideshow working in my post in under 5 minutes.

From the comments in that post, it would seem some people had problems, but if you follow the instructions exactly there is no need to fail. The fifth commentor down tells you how to specify a specific Flickr set, btw.

The only thing I had to do for myself was change the width of my blogger template, making it beigger to fit the slideshow because most blogger templates aren't wide enough by default to fit the slideshow.

Not sure if the same code would work with other blogging softwares???

Anyway - just thought I would point it out to people who might want to play with it.

This Post was written by Sam from Becks & Posh

[General] Introduction

Hi Everyone, I wanted to say hello and say how much I appreciate this s'cool. I just entered the blog world and had no idea how little I knew about it. I am blown away by the creativity and camraderie of the food blog world. I am slowly going through the archives which will help me get to know you all and unravel the mysteries of "the template". I am proud to say that I just added 2 colors to my background (can you say newbie?). Thank you for the help and hopefully one day I will actually be able to contribute something to the forum.


This Post was written by Callipygia from Foodchair

Experimenting with Podcasting: Tech Tip

I did some intense research on Podcasting technologies. There’s a small investment in equipment and education you’ll need to make. I’m a someone who hates to spend too much time reading manuals so I found a great tech source to create podcasts without the hassle of learning to podcast and buying the equipment. Over the past two months I’ve been experimenting with Gabcast.com for Daily Eats. So far it’s been awesome. While I’m on the road for my real job, I use Gabcast to create restaurant reviews. I have a choice to either upload them to Daily Eats or wait to add photos and post description. Gabcast does integrate with blogger.com and a couple of the other blog editors. If you have problems Gabcast tech support team is awesome. OH you’re going to love this you only need a phone any type of phone. I use my cell while I’m on the road. I did 29 episodes, and the audio quality is good.

This would be a great opportunity for chefs to talk about cooking, recipes, or give audio cooking lesson; or to do restaurant reviews on the road; or grocery reviews as I enjoy doing. Daily Eats tends to be more about social aspects to food so I like podcasting parties too.

The other great part of using Gabcast is I can interview over the phone and it creates a podcast. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of interviewing author Mark Jeffrey, while he was in Santa Monica from my office in Phoenix.

Your contributors can use Gabcast too.

I did a couple of videocasts. The short videocasts worked out really well. I'm still experimenting.

I’m starting a series of audio interviews of food bloggers would love to interview folks from the Food Blog S'cool. Please get in touch with me: chiefeater at dailyeats.com if you’re interest in being interviewed at Daily Eats. Also I would love to do some link exchanges.

I thank Sam and Food Blog S'cool for having me. Just a little background on me by night I’m a food lover and blogger; by day I’m a marketer working to saving the world from the mundane; and a silicon alley tech veteran.

This Post was written by Tery Spataro from Daily Eats.

[General] Links Lists

Can anyone more knowledgeable than I comment on the pros and cons of having long lists of links in your sidebar?

The sidebar at my tea site has a long list of merchants I've mentioned, a slightly less long list of other tea blogs and a few shorter lists. I was thinking of giving each of these lists their own page and just linking to them from the sidebar.

This Post was written by Bill from Tea Guy Speaks.

Finally bit the bullet...

So - I've finally summoned up the courage to migrate Gastronomy Domine to my own domain - the new address is www.gastronomydomine.com. (If you are one of those who is kind enough to link to me in your blogrolls, I'd be really grateful if you could update the link.)

I've a few questions for people who've been through this process before. First of all - am I still doomed to use Blogger for all time now, or is there any way to keep my existing posts and start using a different tool? (I'm a bit sick of the outages and problems uploading photos with Blogger, which seem to be becoming more frequent). How long did you leave it before you removed all the content from your blogspot.com address, or did you leave the content there permanently? And is it worth uploading all my old pictures (there are more than a thousand) to the new server, or should I just leave them hosted at photos.blogger.com?


This post was written by Liz (Squeezeweasel) from Gastronomy Domine.

[Save Internet] Take action Today

Dear SavetheInternet Blogger,

Tim Karr of Free Press and the SavetheInternet Coalition here. A critical vote is going down in Congress right now and we need you and your readers to get phones ringing off the hook on Capitol Hill.

The House Judiciary Committee is beginning to "mark up" a good Net Neutrality bill at around 11am (EST) this morning. Then they're going to vote on whether to bring it to the full floor. Many in the Committee are being pressured by AT&T, Verizon and other major telcos to vote down the net neutrality provisions in this bipartisan bill.

Below are the members who need to hear from you and your readers to support this important bill. Urge them to support the Sensenbrenner-Conyers "Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2006" (HR 5417) in the Judiciary Committee -- and to support it without amendment. (Saying without amendment is key as the telcos want to re-write it in a way that guts Internet freedom).

Here are the members who need to hear from you and your readers right now:

Marty Meehan (D-Mass. 5th)
Phone: (202) 225-3411
Fax: (202) 226-0771
http://www.house.gov/writerep
martin.meehan@mail.house.gov

Howard Berman (D-Calif. 28th)
Phone: 202-225-4695
Fax: 202-225-3196
http://www.house.gov/writerep/

William Delahunt (D-Mass. 10th)
Phone: (202) 225-3111
Fax: (202) 225-5658
William.Delahunt@mail.house.gov

Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas 18th)
Phone: (202) 225-3816
Fax: (202) 225-3317
http://www.jacksonlee.house.gov/feedback.cfm?campaign=jacksonlee&type=Let%27s%20Talk

Bobby Scott (D-Va. 3rd)
Phone: (202) 225-8351
Fax: (202) 225-8354
http://www.house.gov/writerep/

Chris Van Hollen (D-Md. 8th)
Phone: (202) 225-5341
Fax: (202) 225-0375
http://www.house.gov/writerep/

Maxine Waters (D-Calif. 35th)
Phone: (202) 225-2201
Fax: (202) 225-7854
http://www.house.gov/waters/IMA/issue.htm

Mel Watt (D-N.C. 12th)
Tel. (202) 225-1510
Fax (202) 225-1512
http://www.house.gov/writerep/

Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y. 9th)
Phone: (202) 225-6616
Fax: (202) 226-7253
weiner@mail.house.gov

Robert Wexler (D-Fla. 19th)
phone: (202) 225-3001
fax: (202) 225-5974
http://www.house.gov/writerep/

Howard Coble (R-NC 6th)
phone: (202) 225-3065
fax: (202) 225-8611
howard.coble@mail.house.gov

Elton Gallegly (R-CA 24th)
phone: (202) 225-5811
fax: (202) 225-1100
http://www.house.gov/writerep/

Bob Goodlatte (R-VA 6th)
phone: (202) 225-5431
fax: (202) 225-9681
http://www.house.gov/goodlatte/emailbob.htm

Steve Chabot (R-OH 5th)
phone: (202) 225-2216
fax: (202) 225-3012 (fax)
http://www.house.gov/chabot/email.html

Dan Lungren (R-CA 3rd)
phone: (202) 225-5716
fax: (202) 226-1298
http://www.house.gov/lungren/feedback.shtml

William Jenkins (R-TN 1st)
phone: (202) 225-6356
fax: (202) 225-5714
http://www.house.gov/writerep/

John Hostettler (R-IN 8th)
phone: (202) 225-4636
fax: (202) 225-3284
john.hostettler@mail.house.gov

Mark Green (R-WI 8th)
phone: (202) 225-5665
fax: (202) 225-5729
mark.green@mail.house.gov

Ric Keller (R-FL 8th)
phone: (202) 225-2176
fax: (202) 225-0999
http://www.house.gov/writerep/

Your help on this is critical. Please call now.

Thank you,

Tim Karr
Campaign Director
Free Press
SavetheInternet.com

P.S. - For updates throughout the day, visit www.SavetheInternet.com. Also, you & your readers can watch the hearings live at http://judiciary.house.gov/ (scroll down below the calendar to live webcast link).


FYI SKYPE currently offers FREE long distance calls in the USA.


this post from sam at Becks & Posh

Link line under title in Blogger

Can anyone tell me what the link line under the title in blogger is for? Could it be used as a "category" link to the type of post you are making, such as 'this post should be added to my "Bread" category link, because I am making batter bread or French bread or corn bread?


This Post was written by Carolyn from 18thC Cuisine

[blogger template] removing space from top

** UPDATE: sorry - i bumped this back up to the top - because i am still trying to tweak my template, and i can't seem to get paul's code suggestion to work. the foodblogscool template is bumped up right aganist the navbar (which is sort of what i am after, but not quite touching), but when i view its source code, it doesn't look all that different (header, content, etc.) from mine. is there a setting somewhere in blogger that tells the navbar to stop pushing my page down? **


someone had posted about the same topic, but for some reason, i can't find it, so please excuse me for double-posting.

how do i remove the little bit of space between the blogger bar across the top and the beginning of my template? (sorry about the horrible diagram!)

i have spent the last two days tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to manipulate my blogger template and nothing is working. it looks exactly the same.

any help would be so very much appreciated!

This Post was written by sarah from the delicious life

[RSS] The long and short of it.

In the last year, the way I read the internet has changed dramatically. Before I used to click through links from my own blog to every site I follow, but now I have an RSS reader [I use google, myself]. This way I can read hundreds of blogs very quickly [more blogs than I used to read before] homing in on the ones that catch my eye.

So, whilst before it wasnt much of an issue for me, now the length of the feed you provide for me in my reader does have a bearing on whether I read you or not. Personally, because I have no ads on my blog, whether you read me in your rss reader or whether you read me on my actual blog page isn't an issue to me. So I provide a full or 'long' feed and my pictures are included. I feel no need to entrap you on the pages of my actual blog and am quite happy if you are reading me elsewhere without ever visiting me [although, of course, i do, like most people I imagine, love getting comments!].

But some people only provide a short feed to rss readers. Sometimes only a sentence. Of course, I would prefer to have the whole post in my feed but understand that some people need traffic to their site for Advertising purposes or because they don't like to be syndicated (totally understand that).

If you are one of those short feed writers then let me just say one thing. You better make your headline and the first line of your post both interesting and compelling if you are going to tempt me to click right through to your blog. You are going to have to work just a little bit harder then those who provide a full feed in order to draw me in. If the ad or the syndication issues don't bother you (are there any other downsides I am forgetting?) then I would even suggest you give your feed as full. I know I certainly prefer to read that way. What do other people think on this issue?

This Post was written by Sam from B&P

New Zealand Bound

Hello everyone,

I'm traveling to New Zealand in mid June (business trip) and would love to meet up with food bloggers who might be in Auckland the weekend of June 16th. I'm also curious to know if there are any "must do or see"s in the Auckland area for a foodie like myself. Please drop me an email at elise [AT] elise {DOT} com if you are in NZ and would like to meet up, or if you have suggestions of what to do while I'm there. And if you know of some good NZ blogs to recommend - food, travel, or photography, please let me know. Thanks so much!

This Post was written by Elise from Simply Recipes

[FBS] New Pupils

Please give a warm to our newest pupils, more Swedes and some Tomaaahtoes:

Swedes
2 Tasty Ladies
Lucy's Kitchen Notebook
My Favourite Plum
Home Recipes
Dessert First
Saffron Trail
Yulinka Cooks
Food Chair
Copper Pots
Daily Eats

Tomaaaahtoes
Cucina Rebecca
Tea and Cookies
Electric Stove
Mary Ladd's Food Finds
Peanut Butter Etouffee
Chef Tami
$10/hr Foodie
Sorry Fugu

[Blogger] Adsense in Posts

I'd like to experiment with putting a small, unobtrusive Adsense ad in some of my posts, but Blogger freaks out on the javascript. Does anyone know if such a thing is possible?

This post was written by Bill from Tea Guy Speaks.

Trouble Uploading Photos

Since yesterday I've been having problems uploading photos to my blog posts. I usually use hello from Picasa and even tried using the little icon for uploading right on blogger - all to no avail. Is anyone else having this problem? Could it be that I have too many posts (200+) most with photos?

I also notice that a number of bloggers have a separate site for their recipes that link from their main site. Would this help me?

Thanks in advance!

This Post was written by Ruth from Once Upon a Feast

[General] What are your culinary plans?

Hi ev'body!

I really do hope you all can help me out! I am writing a business plan for a new venture and am hoping to get some input from all of you...so here goes...

Have any of you ever thought about marketing your culinary creations? Whipping up an industrial sized batch of your mothers brownie recipe or bottling your top-secret hot sauce and getting it out to the public?

If so...what steps have you taken? What were the obstacles? And in the end, did it work? Did it not work?

Answers here would be great, but if you have a longer story, I would love to chat (email, whatever) further offline.

This will be a huge help to me, and in advance, thank you all SO MUCH for putting in your two cents.

This Post was written by Rachael from Fresh Approach Cooking

Chocolate Lady is in Town!

Eve, the Chocolate Lady, from the NYC based blog In Mol Araan will be in San Francisco the end of this week. We are planning to go to lunch, probably on Friday (although that could change), at Greens (her pick.)

Would you like to join us? Email me through my Blog Appetit profile and let me know how to get in touch with you to confirm things.

Faith

A Day without Food Blogs, May 16 2006

Have you heard? The democracy of the internet is being threatened. I hadn't even realized that it was possible to threaten the very foundation of this place we use so freely, until I heard about what's going on in the US Congress right now.

Big service providers -or the Pipes as called in the Telecom jargon- such as AT&T, Comcast, and others, are lobbying Congress and the Senate to allow them to create two tiers internet, essentially a fast and slow one. The fast one will be used by companies who are willing to pay for the über speed, while the rest of the little guys can move at a snail's pace on the slow lane.

This is not the same as the varying types of Internet access that people have. Currently, consumers can pay at their end for different connection types at varying speed, DSL, dial-up, etc. Once they are connected to the internet, reaching a little blogs or the big Food magazine sites will be just as easy. But this new law, when passed, will change things completely. It will allow the Pipes to dole out different sites at different speed. It will even allow these Pipes to exclude sites or blogs that they don't like out of their services altogether.

This change in the very foundation of the internet will affect us all, regardless of country we are in. I ask you to please, together, as a strong community of food bloggers, to act in unison this coming Tuesday, May 16.

Even if your blog normally steers away from all political discussions, I would still urge you to get involved JUST THIS ONCE. I'm out of words to describe how important this is. If the internet is allowed to change, it will spell doom to our beloved blogs and to this very community that we've built together.

Even if you blog isn't in the US, if you think you have any US reader at all, please urge them to write their Congressperson AND Senator. And if you are not a US citizen, then please go to Savetheinternet.com and sign the petition to support Net-neutrality.

Let's all do this together. We can easily afford to lend the front page of our blog forhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif a day for a cause THIS important.

Let's write a blog post about this Tuesday. Let it be a day without food blogs. Instead, all visitors to our blogs will learn about this menacing threat to the internet instead.

Will you join us? Will you?


This Post was written on behalf of the democratic Internet we all know and love.

More information:
NY Time's editorial, May 02 2006

Will the Internet Stay Fast and Cheap? From Amercian Public Media, May 11, 2006, by Robert Reich

Printing recipes

I would like to know if it is possible to print recipes and how. I've read explainations here

http://foodblogscool.blogspot.com/2005/04/printing-recipes.html

but I can't create a printer-friendly archive template. Or I don't see where ? And moreover, I don't use FTP to publish.

Do tou know how to do ? thks !

This Post was written by Anne from Papilles et Pupilles

Aussie Beta Blog Search [blog search]

There is a new blog search engine being created and it is specifically targeting aussie blogs . If you would like to be included in there beta testing then you need to receive a beta testing invite. Email me at eatstuff at gmail dot com and I will forward your email to Ben.


This Post was written by Clare Eats from eatstuff.net

(Misc) Tracking Links

There are codes that you can put on your blog and as you roll your mouse over your links, it will show you the popularity of that particular link, i.e., "3rd most popular link," etc. I used to use to code from MyBlogLog, and put it back on today, but it doesn't seem to be working. Any other sites you guys can recommend to see link popularity?

This was written by Cate from Sweetnicks.

Continuing IE conflicts

Back in April I wrote a post about IE conflicts with my blog. I got several responses, all of which were wise but none of which resolved the problem. I have just edited quite a bit of the template to make it more flexible within different screen-sizes and browsers, and it displays pretty much perfectly in everything (as far as I know) other than in IE, regardless of screen size. However, it looks ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENT in IE.

Please help, this is driving me insane, the most MASSIVE changes in my template have no effect on IE whatsoever, does anyone know of a bug in IE?

All the image/box widths have been fixed for a very long time, and were displaying 100% ok in all browsers until this problem first surfaced in April.

Please help!

This Post was written by FAHARA from Souperior

[Posting Photos] Is a slide show possible without flikr?

As I'm sure has happened to us all sometimes, today I find I have more than one picture that I want to share. In the interest of not having four pics of the same dish scattered throughout the post, I am wondering about alternatives.

I don't use flikr and am wondering if anyone knows a way to have add a"click here for a slide show," or if there is a way to just have the images changing on my page, like a mini slide show, without any clicking or whatnot. (did that make sense? gee, I hope so.)

I've seen Stickam on myspace and think it might work...does anyone use that?

If this has been covered before, please just send me the link, I couldn't find anything...otherwise, thanks, can't wait to hear what people think/know.





This post was written with love by Rachael from Fresh Approach Cooking

Congrats to Pim on NY Times Style Magazine article

Don't miss this article in today's NY Times Style Magazine on Pim of Chez Pim.

Congrats!


Catherine of Albion Cooks

new blog farmer misusing our posts

there is a new blog farmer out there capturing recipes that include the words fat and burner. It links back to our sites and must be totally automated because the recipes don't make sense for the site. Some of the posts just talk about adding the fat and then sentences later say lower the heat on the burner. Our real posts are interspersed with their "fat burner" info posts. It is just a shill to sell fat burner pills.

I can't seem to find a way to tell these guys to cease and desist, so my recommendation is that you check your Technorati account and see if these guys have linked to you. If so, maybe write a post about how harmful the whole fat burning pill industry is. Let them pick that up!

Anyone have contact with these guys? If so please post a email for them so those of us affected can tell them to cut it out.

I especially like the line at the bottom of their page that says "reproduction without permission is prohibited." Nice touch.

Here's the website http://fat-burner-recipe.skncre.com/