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Wednesday, April 27, 2011

some housekeeping...

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...and goodness knows, my house could use it!

You may have noticed a few changes around here lately...part of the problem of starting your blog in 2006, is that in 2011....it looks like you have a blog from 2006. :p

Now, I'm no designer, and I certainly am not about to hire one, so you'll just have to deal with my little tweaks as I bring this blog up to date....so here's what's goin' on:

1) I changed the colour scheme (a couple of weeks ago). No more burgundy. I'm sure your burning eyeballs are thanking me.

2) I've added some easy options for you to subscribe. In addition to Google Friend Connect, I've also added RSS and email subscriptions via feedburner. (second widget from the top right). Now you don't have to remember to go through your bookmarks and physically come to the site - you can get new post notifications right in your email inbox.

3) I've started adding printable versions of my recipes. It's not fancy, like you'll see over at some other blogs, or on the pro-cooking sites, but if you want a photo-free, quick black and white print, it should do the trick.

4) New email address - leslie at definitelynotmartha dot com (sorry, gotta make the spammers work if they're going to invade my inbox). Hate mail, love letters, recipe ideas, whatever - I'm happy to hear it and I do my best to respond (I usually do!). If I don't respond, it's not because I'm a stuck-up diva...it's mostly because trying to balance full-time work, part-time work, parenthood, wifedom and blogging sometimes leave me in a bit of a tizzy. No hard feelings?

5) As the new email address indicates, I've got my own domain now! You can change your bookmarks to http://definitelynotmartha.com . Eventually this change will be reflected in the address bar, but I'm just not enough of a tech genius to make it happen quickly.

6) I briefly pondered adding a 'jump' to my post, but a short-lived poll overwhelmingly showed that readers do not like this. I don't like it either. So I won't be doing it. BUT, in order for the homepage to be a little less pic-heavy, I'm shortening it to five posts instead of 10. *I* don't need the jump, because one thing that won't be changing is that I still don't run ads on my blog. Unless I miraculously become so super famous that it would be ridiculous not to have ads, I'm just not willing to do it for a teeny amount of income that would just mess up my taxes. I hate forms and I hate taxes and I also hate ads. So none of that here.

7) Comment moderation - not on new posts, but I've had to add this to older posts (older than a month, right now) because I kept getting aphrodisiac-hawking douchebags filling the comments with spammy linky garbage. I won't censor anything but spam, and I do try to moderate one or twice a day, so there isn't a long wait to be part of a discussion. I do get emails of comments on my old posts, so if you have a question, don't hesitate to ask!

8) Layout....this will slowly evolve soon. I'm going to have to enlist hubs' help because my crowning design achievement was figuring out how to make my main column 500 pixels wide to accommodate my photos. I want to add a third column, but this has thus far eluded me. Stay tuned.

Anyway, feel free to check out the new feed features, print new recipes (eventually I would like to add printable versions of the older recipes, but oy...that's a big laborious job....).

So there you have it. Oh, also I ordered pizza for dinner tonight. Cooking fail. :p

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

You might want to consider a new header. Dated!

leslie @ definitely not martha said...

You don't pull any punches, eh, anonymous? ;)

Yep, I'm trying to figure out what to do for a header. And I'm accepting any and all suggestions!

Spydergrrl said...

Harsh, Anonymous. I for one would suggest something totally classy, much like the Mrs herself :)

Kat said...

I get your posts in my Google Reader, and they're truncated now- I only get the first few lines of the post, but to read the rest I have to pop over to your actual blog (not that that's a bad thing!!)....is this going to be a permanent change, or is it a temporary thing while you're making changes?

leslie @ definitely not martha said...

Kat - that was a deliberate change....for the time being. What do you think of it?

The thing is, with reader, I can't measure at all how engaged people are in a post (i.e., do they click, do they read the whole thing, etc.). Having truncated posts in reader allows me to actually measure the engagement of the people who subscribe to the blog, and it also gives readers access to various other content on the blog (i.e., polls, link within) that they wouldn't see within the subscription service.

Do you think it's too annoying? Do you think it's better to offer full posts through reader?

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