Flickr badge and new blogger

Hi,
I switched to the new blogger and so far I like what it does. However... I still have issues trying to get my flickr badge to work. I like to have the badge lined somewhere between my profile and the blog archives....
Blogger keeps coming back with this line:

"Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure all XML elements are closed properly. XML error message: The reference to entity "zg_person_id" must end with the ';' delimiter. Replace this line of text with the main body of your post"

I have been squinting at the code and this message and I can't find what is wrong. I think it has something to do with the spot I try to insert this code in. The only time that I could actually see the badge on my blog it was positioned at the top of my page, showing some of the XML as well, bit sloppy!
Can someone please help me? Please type very slowly as I am a bit tech-challenged ;(
Thanks


This Post was written by Karen/Baking Soda from www.bakemyday.blogspot.com

[writing exercise] What's Your Blog's Identity?

David Lebovitz's call for self submissions to his blog roll was the inspiration for this...

Describe your blog in one sentence.



This Post was written by McAuliflower from Brownie Points.

[inspiration | how to] How to Turn Your Blog into a Book

Good post up on lifehacker today,
Turn Your Blog into Book, part 1

And there is also Clotilde's classic set of posts following her Chocolate & Zucchini cookbook creation, indexed here.

>> edited to add:
Heidi's post at 101 Cookbooks: Create Your Own Cookbook.

This Post was written by McAuliflower from Brownie Points

New Scraper Site

I have some watchlists of technorati tags that I view regularly to see what other people are talking about. I use it to see candy/chocolate related posts on non-foodie blogs.

Today I was shocked to see a new scraper site that's not just taking the digests of posts of other food bloggers (101 Cookbooks & SimplyRecipes), but the whole post including images:

It's called World Food

Here's what I found looking for the domain info:
Allers
PO Box 3284
Bridgetown 2901,

BARBADOS
+1 246 238 1896
mmallers [at] superbs.net

So if you see your posts there, you might want to lodge a complaint. At the moment it's not a monetized blog, so you can't complain to Adsense or anything and as it's offshore, I'm not sure what we can do. They are, however, republishing copyrighted content under a CC license.

Any thoughts?

This Post was written by Cybele from Candy Blog

UPDATE: Okay, I tried the email thing and of course it bounced as undeliverable.

Now I've contacted Feedburner who republishes my feed in hopes that they can do a discrete block.

Bad Marketing in Comments

To follow up on Elise's request for stories about good and bad marketing, I wanted to share this experience with my fellow bloggers. (Partly to vent and partly to be a cautionary tale and partly to get opinions on how to handle this in the future.)

I've removed personal and identifying info.

In August I got an email from a new candy store owner asking to be added to my list of links. I didn't answer the email but I did bookmark the site. I checked back on it at least twice. At first it was just a promo site for a little candy shop, but eventually they added a webstore and I was thinking about visiting them when I was in the area (they're not near me but somewhere I visit often).

In December the person started posting comments to my blog, she always used her full name but never identified her affiliation to the store (at first I didn't put it together but when back and found the email from a different address but with the same name):

12/6 (Candy Cane Review): A great location for all types candy is [website] - Yummy !!
12/19 (Barley Sugar Toys Review): The pops and free standing candies can also be found at [website] in [city] - YUMMY! And unlike Regennas, you can still order these.
12/20 (Zotz Review): Zotz and all kinds of retro candy can be found at [website] - Yummy!
1/10 (Joseph Schmidt): [website] - Atomic Fire Balls to Zots - nothing pretentious, great variety

After this morning's comment I decided I'd had enough of her self-promotion. The previous comments were vaguely on topic and for the 12/19 & 12/20 it might even be a service to readers to help them find some of the less common candies.

So I wrote her a note:

I considered adding your site to my list of links but was waiting (a site needs to be active for at least three months) but your more recent abuse of my commenting system to promote yourself is distasteful.

I don't know if you're doing this on other sites, but leaving promotional comments off-topic does not make your site or your store appealing to web-savvy readers, especially when you don't reveal your affiliation.

I think you should develop a new strategy to get the word out about your company.

Sweetly,
Cybele

She replied within 30 minutes:

I'll be sure not to visit again. After such a mean email, I don't think you should sign it "Sweetly"

Okay, maybe I wasn't sweet, but I certainly wasn't mean. I was professional, which is not what she was.

At that point I'd only removed the most recent comment. I've now deleted all of them from the site and "banned" her email address from posting any longer (just in case she decides she'd like to share more advice with my readers).

Now, as a rule I don't mind when stores chime in that they carry a particular item that may be hard to find, as long as it's something that someone has requested already in the comments or I mentioned in the post itself. I also prefer that they divulge their affiliation with the store in question and I haven't had much of an issue before.

Could my email have been nicer? Certainly.

Was her reply professional? Certaily not.

I have a "comment policy" buried in my About page but now I'm thinking that I need to make it clearer.

So, please advise. Do I need to be nicer? Do they need to be more savvy? Should I have just "called her out" within the comments section like some people do? I'm sure I'm not the only one who's experience this ... give me the dish on yours.

This Post was written by Cybele from Candy Blog

[Blog Content] Food writing classes- recommendations?

Resolutions are such fun. We make all these fabulous lists and put on our game faces. Within days we are up to our ears in chocolate, debt and those new skinny jeans that don't fit but that everyone said were "in" this year.

This year I made a list, checked it twice (hah!) and it includes a food-writing course- love to write, love to eat, love to write about what I eat, so it seemed like a natural thing to do, right? Well, the challenge has been finding something near DC and it's become clear: there ain't nuthin'. I could take a class on essay-writing and call it a day, but just for giggles I looked on mediabistro.com and found a plethora of options.

Provided I live in LA or NYC. Yikes!

I'd been looking for jobs in NYC, but found something in DC that I enjoy. There is an online version of the course, but I've always found those a headache (figuratively and literally) and not as valuable in terms of networking, my learning style, etc. And they cost the same as a regular course (even before you factor in transportation costs). I am more than willing to hop on the bus or Amtrak it to New York for one evening a week with Kate Krader of Food&Wine magazine, however I am more gung-ho than flush with cash. A contact of mine at the magazine says good things about Ms. Krader, but I think my friend is a touch biased as she works with her!

My question is this- has anyone taken any of these classes, would you recommend them, and what other resources would you recommend?

This Post was written by Liz from Good Stuff

"Eater" will publish all banned Chowhound posts

It's not news to anyone that Chowhound regularly deletes posts without warning or explanation. (And often, without making any sense whatsoever.) Several food bloggers have experienced and written about this.

Now Eater, a blog in NYC, is offering to publish any and all deleted/banned Chowhound posts for us. I think this is great, and it will certainly boost the transparency of Chowhound. As someone I know is fond of saying, "Sunlight sanitizes." Eater was motivated to do this after a little thread asking for advice on coffee shops was deleted. (Because, what, coffee shops aren't food-related?)

Hope that helps.

Love Your Blogging Family

Just noticed a classy touch at Elise's Simply Recipes...

In a post on making homemade pizza, she ends the post with a collection of links to fellow food bloggers' posts about pizza.

It's a great idea to reinforce the community aspects of inspiration.

I'm going to try to remember to do this also as a footnote in my posts.

Thanks for the linky love Elise!

This Post was written by McAuliflower from Brownie Points Blog.

[Blog Content] An About Page

After too many years of procrastinating, I finally knuckled down and created an about page for my blog. I created it as a regular blog post page. Then I linked to all the different headings in my blog roll so that once the post drops off the front page, new visitors will be able to click and find out these basics things about me without having to search too hard.

Commentors have already asked if they can 'steal' certain parts of my about post for use on their own sites. I would stay 'steal away' but I don't see it as stealing, I would look upon it simply as being 'inspired'. In fact the person who first asked to borrow was actually Shuna, who I think was the person who inspired me in the first place with her talk, in conversations we have had in person, of people behind a blog being 'real people with a face'. I have no qualms or worries about anyone at all setting up something the same or similar for their own blog, I see this only as something that might benefit everyone concerned.

Be warned however, this post probably took me 6 or 7 hours to complete, so it is quite a committment. However, it is a committment that I believe will pay off in the long run by allowing me to not have to answer lots of time-wasting emails. I also set up a new email address for the blog and have left the vacation responder for that email switched to 'on', replying with a whole list of further/repeated statements about why people who email me may or may not get a response.

I am breathing a big sigh of relief.
Blogging friends, of course can continue to email me at my regular edress, if they know it, no problem there.

Hope this might help some of you.
Happy 2007!


This Post was written by sam from becks & posh

SF Fancy Food Show Soon

If you are in the Bay area or plan on visiting 1/21-1/23, you may want to go to the Fancy Food Show. Here's the link for more info and to register.

Ip Deny Manager, useful or a waste of time?

My blog host provides an IP Deny Manager where I can input an IP and deny them access to my blog. I've been using this to battle the spammers who attempt to leave their garbage as comments every night. Does anyone else use this? Am I wasting my time?


This Post was written by Vanessa from whatgeekseat.com

Live Links to Food Blog Award Nominees

I've copied and pasted all the links for the Food Blog Nominees from the ballots at Well Fed.
If you want to check out all the nominated blogs before you vote, check out this Blog Appetit post.

Well Fed polls close at midnight EST January 9th. The software Well Fed is using to collect the votes does not allow for live links, so since I was doing this anyway, I thought I'd make a post out of it and save others the work.

Here's the link if you are ready to go vote for your favorite blogs of 2006.

Congratulations to all the nominees.

(Blogger) Changing Hover Color

My hover color in my blogroll section makes the text disappear. Anyone know how to change the color to something else?

Thanks in advance for the help.

Cate from Sweetnicks.

Difficult colors to photograph

Purple absolutely drives me crazy. For some reason I cannot get any with purple in it to show up correctly in my photos--it always looks blue. Last February I spent hours trying to get the purple on my king cake to look like purple in the photos, but nothing I did with the camera worked. I have a PowerShot S70 that I use primarily in manual mode, tinkering with lighting, f stop, white balance, and everything else. Today I'm trying to photograph something else that is primarily purple, and I've got the same problem again.

Any tips for getting purple and other difficult colors right?

This Post was written by Andrea from Andrea's Recipe Box.

(Misc) Your Contact Info

As I visited each FBA nominee to get their e-mail address yesterday, I found quite a few that did not have an e-mail address or other contact info listed on their site. I'm sure this is an oversight, but thought I'd mention it. You might want to give your site a quick glance to make sure there is some way of contacting you listed. Just a suggestion. If I can't contact you, readers can't either.

Cate from Sweetnicks.

[HTML Editors] Ecto or MarsEdit

I've just bought myself a Mac and was advised to use Ecto for writing/editing posts. I love the programme, works very well. However, I've just come across MarsEdit, from the team behind Newsgator and that looks pretty good as well.

I'd appreciate views on the merits of either from people with experience.

Thanks
Anthony from Silverbrow on Food

Picassa Web Album Erased by Google

Ok has anybody had Google remove pictures from their Picasa web album. All I had in there were all my food blogging pictures and they are all gone and I am being told that I violated their terms of service. How does food pictures do that? I also have not given anyone access to my account. Does anyone know what I should do?

The reason this panics me is that I can't upload photos directly from Blogger so I have to use the html of the picture from Picassa to have pictures on my blog. I also don't know if my pictures will start disappearing.

Update: Actually it looks like they canceled everything. My Gmail, My reader, everything.

This Post was written by Chrispy from Experimentation of Taste

Google searches don't seem to be finding my blog...

I'm hoping someone out there can offer some insight.......

I don't have a big readership on my blog, but I was starting to get quite a few visitors that would find my blog through Google searches. I've noticed that my readership has dropped off drastically over the last week or two and that I am getting very few Google search hits. Where I might get many, many Google hits, I only got 4 today.

At first I thought maybe people just weren't doing as many recipe searches now that the holidays are over or that my tracker wasn't tracking properly, but then I tried some searches that I've tried in the past - out of curiousity to see where my blog would fall in the pages. I tried searching for things that I know for a fact used to place me on the first search page and sometimes I don't find my blog at all or I might find it quite a few pages back from where I would find it before. So then I searched for something very specific "gorgonzola polenta in the rice cooker" - something that would definitely pull up my blog and be listed on the first page - but I found nothing in the first 10 pages of listings. I did a search for "Chocolate Chai Snickerdoodles" and it was pulling up quite a few other familiar blogs, but not mine.

Any idea as to what's happening?

It's not a huge deal, but I would like people to be able to find my blog if they are searching for a recipe and that doesn't seem to be happening.

This Post was written by Alysha from The Savory Notebook.

Anyone Using the New Blogger?

Curious, is anyone using the new version of blogger? Do you like it? Any problems changing over?

I haven't switched over yet. Would love to hear some pros and cons of switching. Thanks!

Much success to you all for the new year!

This Post was written by Tery Spataro from Daily Eats

Blogger archive still thinks it is 2006

3 days into the new year and I have managed to stop writing 2006 on all my correspondance, alas blogger still thinks it is December 2006 (at least over at my blog).

Any ideas?

I have upgraded to the beta version of blogger and all has gone smoothly, until the change of the year.
I have posted twice in 2007 - and in the main body of those new posts the date is correct - but in the archive section of the side bar the new posts are listed as 2006 and December. I now have two 2006s and two Decembers.

The sensible place to look is the template - but I really don't have a good understanding of html and also the new blogger template has a variety of inbuilt widgets which I am too scared to mess with.

You can alter the format of the archive section in the page element section - but each change in format is likewise wrong.

Many thanks for considering this problem and any solutions or suggestions.

This Post was written by Edward from wino sapien