Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Is there anyway to remove my Blog from their site ?

Hi everybody !

Few months ago I've notice many of my posts are featured in this site in the Food category I've wrote the site owner several times and asked him to remove my (Blog) and posts from their site and not to archive them anymore.
I've got an answer this week again :.."... then you need to switch it off.(your RSS)
...You submitted your blog for inclusion and it is included, we do not then remove blogs.By submitting your blog, you gave permission for it to be included..."
I realy can't remember me submitting my blog to their site.
Is there any way out ?
Thank you .

This Post was written by chanit from My mom's recipes and more

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Feed updates with Bloglines...

So after reading this post on the feedburner site, I went ahead and followed the instructions to set up the "one-click redirection" of the feed on blogger last week. I use bloglines to as my feed reader and have my own included so we can see how it comes across. However, bloglines is (almost) constantly showing updates on older posts, even though I have not edited them or touched them for weeks.

Anyone know why this might be happening? I just wonder why those posts are showing as being updated/new, but I've not done anything to them. Sometimes it will show 10-15 posts have been updated!

This Post was written by Joe from Culinary in the Desert.

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Are you attending the BlogHer Conference?

I hope it's ok to post this. I'm going to be at the BlogHer Conference in Chicago (this Friday & Saturday) would love to meet folks from the Food Blog S'cool if you happen be attending.



There's a conference on photographing food that sounds interesting. Please email me at chiefeater at dailyeats dot com



here's a tip I've been using Flip Video to take videos, very inexpensive video recording device. I found using MovieMaker real easy. I actually like doing video more than writing.

Tery

This Post was written by Tery - chiefeater from Daily Eats


Tuesday, July 24, 2007

[Stats] Can I look at stats from the past?

I use (the free version of) Statcounter. Only I don't look at it with much frequency. Once in awhile I will check in and notice a day (in the past) with a huge spike in visits. Is there a way to look at that day and see where people were coming from? Im always curious.

Thanks.


This Post was written by Rachael from Fresh Approach

For those with career aspirations

Here's a link to a job writing for Chow.....

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/wri/378596971.html


This Post was written by Owen from Tomatilla!

Saturday, July 21, 2007

FeedBurner Integration for Blogger Blogs

A "By the way" for those of you who use Blogger as your blogging platform. Blogger is now integrated with Feedburner, so that if you want Feedburner to manage your feeds, it is now a very simple process to redirect your feed to Feedburner. See the details here .

Why bother with Feedburner? Feedburner gives you amazing stats on your feed - how many people actually subscribe to your feed, what feed services are pulling them (Bloglines vs MyYahoo vs Google Reader etc), how many people actually click-through your feed to your website, etc. Feedburner has an easy - "subscribe to feed using email" service, and many other services to help promote your feed.

This Post was written by Elise from Simply Recipes.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Print Option using Word Press

Hi,

Does anyone know how to set up a print option for recipes using Word Press?

Thanks!


This Post was written by Kelly from flavor a deux


Saturday, July 14, 2007

Cross Your T's and Dot Your I's: completing an image's alt and title info.

Without naming names, I surprised how many food blogs have incomplete image information within their code.

I'm not talking about the over-flogged need to have width and height dimensions specified, but instead the need to have the alt and title information for an image complete.

What's the difference between alt and title for an image?



Not much. The difference comes down to browser interpretation. Some are blind to titles, yet others are not. Filling them both out means your information will be picked up and displayed regardless.


Why bother filing out this info?



  • Mouse-over: hover your mouse over a photo. See the "pop up" that comes up on your screen? Those words are from your alt / title information for an image.


  • Better search results, aka Google Google Google: taging your image with information that describes its content gives you much better ranking in search results.

    Google search and Google image search are my site's #1 and #2 traffic referral, largely because I tag my information (post titles, using headings, and filing out my image data) appropriately.


  • Screen Readers for the Blind: I kid you not. I have received fan mail from visually impaired readers of my site thanking me for my clean code. Clean code means that their screen readers can make sense of what you are throwing up on a blog.

    My true motivation beyond Google to cross my t's and dot my I's is due to my screen reader audience. I want them to know what the images on a post are. Don't they deserve to be let in on the fun too?

    And yes, blind people cook. My visually impaired friend Randall would smack you upside the head with his frying pan (or his cane)if you were convinced otherwise. Besides, their sense of taste is probably more developed than ours anyway.


  • The icing on the cake / extra credit answer: Its all about context. Give me more of the story of your photo. This affords you another opportunity to give more information to your viewers.

    For example, my whisk image alt / title info tells you a bit more about the whisk image I included.

    Same with my coconut pie post. My alt / title info tells you that there is more to the image than meets the eye- hidden raspberries and chocolate.


If filing out this information seems fiddly at first, I assure you it becomes second nature over time. Having this information filled out for an image also says a little something extra about you. I'll leave the deciphering of that as an exercise for the reader. Try it out for yourself.

This Post was written by McAuliflower from Brownie Points Blog.

Feed Reader

I wasn't sure if this was already asked in the archives. I'd like to start using a feed reader to organize the blogs I read. There are so many different clients (Google reader, Bloglines, etc.) out there, I'm curious as to which ones everyone uses.

This Post was written by Amy from Nook & Pantry

Friday, July 13, 2007

[Blogger] A few geeky questions on blogging

Hi Blogger experts out there,

I have not dealt with templates, CSS and HTML for close to two years now and I’m just starting to delve into this as I’m giving my bog a major facelift.

Here are some of the obstacles I’m running into. I hope someone could give me a pointer or two.
1. How do I eliminate the space/gap between the header and the content body of my blog right now?

2. If I continue using the old template in Blogger, would I still be able to use the new sidebar features such as categorizing my previous posts by tags, inverted archives with the latest dates on top etc. If this is possible, how do I go about doing it? Any existing examples or resources that I can check out?

3. Lastly, should there be any reason I should switch to the new template even though I’m happy with the old one right now?

Merci mille fois guys!

This Post was written by *kel from Green Olive Tree

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

[Linking] My URL and Blog Name Are Different

For no logical reason, (other than its just too late to fix it) the URL of my site is different than the name of my site. The NAME is Fresh Approach Cooking. The URL (sadly) is http://www.freshcatering.blogspot.com/



I notice some people who (KINDLY) link to me from their sites, title the link Fresh Catering.



Since I'm not a caterer (thank goodness) and deeply regret (okay, maybe not deeply, but I do regret it) the choice of URLs before I realized what I was doing, I feel compelled to set this straight. I mean, I want people to know my blog as Fresh Approach Cooking, not the other title...



That said, is it rude to point that out to people who have linked to me incorrectly to please change it? Can I say something or should I just be happy anyone links to me in the first place.



Has this happened to anyone else? (Sam? Your URL is Becks Posh Nosh, right? Do people title links as such?)




This Post was written by Rachael from Fresh Approach

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

(photos) open question to headmistress Sam

Sam,

I have noticed recently that your images have become HUGE (~200-250k) compared to what they were a while back. My guess is that this is tactical (anti-scrapers or such) but I figured I'd ask why you are going for this kind of file size. I was going to send mail but I also thought that others might be interested in your answer and reasoning. Because you always have good reasons for such.

Thanks for enlightening me!

This Post was written by kitchenMage from kitchenMage

(Blogger) Things I've Discovered

There are a couple of things I've discovered recently with Blogger that I didn't realize, and (although I may be less techie than most!) I thought maybe other people also might not know about these options.

1. I wanted to add a copyright line to my feed, but I didn't want it to show on every post on my blog, just in the feed. Under SETTINGS/SITE FEED there is a box called Feed Item Footer. You can enter any text or html there that you'd like and it shows up in your feed, but doesn't show on posts. I put this notice in my feed because a site was stealing my entire feed and not only re-posting it, but listing me as an "author" for their site:

This feed contains copyrighted photos and text from Kalyn's Kitchen. If you are not reading this material in a feeds aggregator or by e-mail subscription, the site you are viewing may be guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact kalynskitchen (at) comcast (dot) net.

(Possibly everyone but me knew about this, but I loved the way it worked.)


2. Quite by accident I discovered that in new Blogger, once you post something it immediately assigns that page a permanent url (permalink). You can change the date, time, and even the title of the post, but making any of those changes doesn't change the permalink the way it did with old Blogger. This is something I thought other Blogger users might find it nice to know. This could be very useful for some people.

This post was written by Kalyn from Kalyn's Kitchen.

Blogger Glitch=I can't type in titles to my posts
Someone recently asked me to reset my Blogger RSS settings to the "long" form and suddenly I couldn't post titles to my posts.
I reset back to the "short" form but today I can no longer put anything in the Title window!
Anyone have a solution to this or experienced this Blogger glitch?
PROBLEM SOLVED!!!
It's a work-around
Simply go into Edit HTML mode and type in your TITLE.
The title window IS accessible there for whatever reason??!

This Post was written by Carolg from http://www.parisbreakfast.com/



Wednesday, July 04, 2007

[categorisation] Food Blogs

Some of you will know about the time Mario Batali declared

'I hate food Blogs'

This kind of upset me, because most of the food bloggers I know love him. Anyway - that's not the point of the post. The point is the blanket description "Food Blog".

What does that mean exactly?

Mario's gripe was mostly with some kind of restaurant gossip site as far as I can tell but the term food blog is such a large umbrella.

Now, as far as I can tell - my own blog is a pretty generic food blog because it contains a mix of everything. But other people might not like be banded with that name. What other names could we choose to call ourselves? I think we all chose food blog in the first place, so if it becomes a problem we have to be part of the solution.

Restaurant Review Blogs
Recipe Blogs
City Food Purveyor Blogs(I like this one for me - in fact I have a Bay Purvey section on my site already)
Food Style Blogs?
Diet and Food Blogs
Eating Local blogs
etc...


Has anyone got any ideas to help poor Mario understand that food blog is a very wide term and if he starts dissing it he is going to upset a few people including some of his most stalwart fans.



This Post was written by sam from becks & posh

Sunday, July 01, 2007

[Not so] New Pupils

I have been so behind with adding new pupils to the blog roll.
I apologize.
I have now caught up for 2006. You can find them in the new classes on the blog roll as follows:

Z 06 Zucchini
A 06 Arbroath Smokies
B 06 Bakewell Tarts
C 06 Cream Crackers
D 06 Dabberlocks

Next I will start work on the pupils who signed up this year.

This Post was written by a very sorry for being so flaky Sam from Becks & Posh