Archive for the ‘General comments on site’ CategoryHi patient folks. Thanks so much for sticking with me while I went AWOL. Let’s just say I was doing something less fun than food blogging. Many many thanks to J, the whose great posts from Melbourne have kept Veggie Friendly afloat over the last couple of weeks. Will try to catch up on all the great places I’ve been eating at. Sorry for the lack of posts in the last couple of weeks. A couple of major events - one very sad - have kept me away from the computer. However, I’m back at the keyboard and the posts will soon start a-flowing. Any time now.
Fellow food blogger, Rebecca of Cucina Rebecca just gave me my first tag, 5X confessions. 5 items in my freezer 5 items in my closet. 5 items in my car (technically not my car. So not so much of my stuff in it). 5 items in my wallet
This post was meant to be heaped praise for Belle and Sebastian disguised as a restaurant review. Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten the name of the restaurant I ate at before going to the concert. So now it’s just about the heaped praise. I saw Belle and Sebastian at the Enmore Theatre in Sydney last Tuesday with my friend Jen. This is the second time I’ve seen them there, and both times I’ve left the concert vowing that any time they enter the country I have to go and see them. They are that good. Their concerts rock, soothe, entrance and charm. With about eight people on stage wielding guitars, keyboards, drums, a violin, trumpet, and a cello they make a big, lush, glorious sound. Stuart Mudoch, the lead singer, is a very funny man with an angelic voice. He loves to create a rapport with the audience that makes you feel like you’re sitting alongside him in a bar. Anecdotes range from licking a girlfriend’s eye, to his recent jog along Lady Macquarie’s Chair where he admired the architectual wonder of the Opera House (’it’s still standing’), and art commentary on an audience picture of a cuckoo ‘I should acknowledge that it’s feasible that an eight year old could have done this.’ He even justified using a song lyric sheet with the aside ‘this one has a lot of words in it’. And then there was the music. Belle and Sebastian mainly played songs from their latest album, The Life Pursuit, including a beautiful version of Dress Up In You and Another Sunny Day. They let rock with Song for Sunshine and White Collar Boy, and treated the audience to some lovely dancing with Jonathan and David (because that’s the thing - Belle and Sebastian live is a joyful, head-knodding, sneaker-shuffling (or for those seated) foot-tapping experience.) For older fans, the set was pepperd with classics like The Boy With the Arab Strap, The State that I Am In, I’m a Cuckoo, If You’re Feeling Sinister, and Sleep The Clock Around. While I loved this show, and thought that The Life Pursuit was a stronger album than Dear Catastrophe Waitress, I preferred their earlier 2004 concert because it had more light and shade. There was everything from an AC/DC cover (Problem Child), to B-side favourite La Pastie De La Bourgeoisie (that was for you, J-Lo) and a beautiful keyboard solo version of The Fox in the Snow performed by Stuart bathed in a green light. The 2004 concert was also longer, just because the band was enjoying being on stage so far as I could tell. Watching the concert was a cathartic, but slightly bittersweet, experience. Each song was so good, and there was so much promise of more Belle and Sebastian goodness to come, that I spent the night entranced. But with every great song, I knew we were getting closer to the end, and that was something I just didn’t want to face.
Well, thanks for asking. Yes I have. Veggie Friendly now features a Google Map of vegetarian friendly restaurants in Sydney and Melbourne (i.e. restaurants that score VVV or higher). The Google Map shows balloons that mark the location of the posts. If you click on a marker it brings up a speech bubble. The speech bubble shows the title of the post which has the name of the restaurant, plus its V rating. It also includes a link to the original post. You can zoom up or down on the Map, and also move the focal point up, down and left and right. I was excited when I heard that Google had released maps of Australia for use with its Google Maps API, and that you could make a Google Map mash-up by overlaying your own information on to the map. My excitement began to wane when I started reading the instructions for the Google Map API. Nine frustrating hours later I realised my best hope was to tap into the Wordpress plugin community and see if someone smarter than me had already figured out how to autmatically link post information to a map. After a bit of digging I found two options: Yongfook’s Plug and Play Google Map and Cyberhobo’s Geo Mash-up. If you’re a wordpress user, here’s what you do: Both plugins rely on another plugin called Geo. You need to download Geo and save it your plugins directory. Then you go the plugin screen and activate it. Geo adds a custom field to your posts which lets you add geocode tags (latitude and longitude). You can also preset the coordinates for a particular location if you’re going to use it repeatedly. Geo does not give you the geocode data. For that, you need to find yourself a free geocode service. So far as I can tell, Google is still not offering Australian data so I’ve been using Travelgis with a little help from the Sensis postcode finder. It’s probably best at this stage if you add the geocode data to a couple of posts. You’ll also need to visit the Google Map API page and grab yourself a unique API key. The next step is to download either Geo Mash-up or Plug and Play. I initially tried Geo Mash-up and an earlier Google Map mash-up program by Yongfook. Neither worked - Geo Mash-up would activate in my plugin screen, but when I tried to run it I got a message saying that Geo needed to be activated. Yongfook’s original program simply didn’t appear in my plug-in screen. Finally discovering some programs that would do exactly what I wanted, and then not being able to use them was really frustrating. I left a comment on both sites, but assumed that the developers would be too busy to answer. The next day I despondently went back to the sites, only to find that Yongfook had created a new version of the Google Map program called Plug and Play. It immediately loaded and worked on activation. It’s a really simple program to use. The instructions on Yongfook’s site are very clear, so I won’t repeat them in full here, but in a nutshell you create a new page which the Google Map will appear on and add a single line of code. Plug and play creates a special admin panel in the Options menu. Through the panel you enter your google key and set a few features of the map like the display size, the starting coordinates for your map (I went with Sydney Town Hall) and what you want to be displayed in the google map speech bubbles. You also add the post slug for the new Google Map page, and hey presto, you are up and running. There are some fun optional extras, like being able to add a thumbnail jpg picture to the speech bubble, and adding a button to the post which takes people to the Google Map. The only thing Plug and Play doesn’t do is let you publish multiple maps (for example, I was thinking of creating specific maps for Melbourne and Canberra as well because I have some reviewers in these cities). I guess an alternative approach would be to have a map of Australia, and then people could zoom down to the city of their choice. I also need to mention that Dylan, the Cyberhobo behind Geo Mash-up, came back to me within a matter of hours. He told me that the problem activating Geo Mash-up could have been because no geocode info was entered for any posts, or because the Geo did not load properly. He’s working on a newer version of Geo Mash-up so contact him via the Cyberhobo site if you have any trouble loading the program. So, yay Google Maps and the brilliant Wordpress plugin developer community. Today I chanced to discover that Veggie Friendly was named on a list of the Top 20 food blogs in Australia. This was a particularly generous seeing as I actually came it at no. 21. The list is compiled by the guy behind the Tomato food blog and is apparently based on your Technorati ranking. Luckily I had a whopping 16 links from nine sites. The more popular places had hundreds of links so not sure if I will make the grade next time around. If you want to help me keep the coveted 21st position please keep the links flowing in! Seriously though, I’m surprised to see that I’m even a blip on the blogging radar given I only started Veggie Friendly this year. I’ve been surprised by the number of visits I’m getting - a couple of thousand each month in April and May, with not too much self-promotion. A lot of people are still coming to the site directly, but an increasing number are coming through search engines. Unfortunately my two stat programs return different results so still not sure exactly how many people are dropping by. Have to say a special thanks at this point to the Melbourne and Canberra reviewers - you guys rock and you sure know how to pull the crowds with your erudite-yet-witty posts. I know that the site visits are tiny compared with popular blogs but I’ll take what I can get. For a couple of years I ran a creative writing website with friends, and despite having a bigger profile I always thought it was hard work to get less hits than Veggie Friendly does now. I don’t know whether there are more people going online now, or if it’s that there is an increasing awareness of blogs, which weren’t really that popular when we ran the other site. It seems to help that the content of Veggie Friendly is related to restaurants because this pulls in a wide range of searches. The most popular reviews and search terms are for iconic vegetarian and vegetarian friendly places, like Soul Mama and Lentil as Anything in Melbourne, and Bodhis, Mother Chu’s and Gertrude and Alice in Sydney. I’ll try and keep the focus on these places - been meaning to do Green Gourmet and Govinda’s in Sydney, for example. Also have a long list of improvements I want to make to the site. I guess this is what it feels like to own property and feel a constant need to renovate. Thank God I can’t afford a mortgage. Anyway, enough navel-gazing for one night. I’m off to celebrate short-lived celebrity. Something I’ve noticed since starting this blog: my capacity to eat outpaces my ability to write. Obviously there’s a correlation. The more lunchtimes and nights I spend eating out, the less time I have to go online. However, posting in ad hoc, slightly delayed fashion means the posts aren’t reflecting what I’m doing in any kind of systematic way. Recently I asked some friends to give me some feedback on this blog. A few people said they wanted to see more personality, and I guess, to feel that the blog is telling a story. I agree. You may see a bunch of posts appear over the next few days. That’s because I’m trying to clear the decks and get all the reviews up the site in a semi-orderly fashion. From now on, I’ll try and put my posts up in a chronological order and and do it shortly after I’ve eaten out. Let’s see how long the resolution lasts! |
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