Archive for the ‘Veggie News’ CategoryWhen I first started Veggie Friendly in January last year I was feeling my way gently into the blogging world. I wanted my site to be user friendly, but other than that I didn’t spend a lot of time on the overall look. As time went by I always meant to create a new header, and update the colour scheme, but only once I’d bought a camera and learned to edit photos, entered some blogging events, and tried that new restaurant that everyone says has good vegetarian food…. Fast forward a year and a half, and with Andy’s For the techies out there, I’ve changed to the SouthRiver wordpress theme by AskGraphics, updated to Wordpress 2.2 (without making a late night panicked phone call to Scott) and installed a different google map plug-in (geo-mashup) because Plug and Play Google Map didn’t cope too well with the change. I almost went with geo-mashup when I first set up my google map but the original plug-in didn’t play well with my blog. This version has been a dream to install, and has the neat feature of adding a geo code locator to each post rather than relying on the separate geo-code plug-in for which you have to source your own geo code information. I noticed that the geo-mashup plug-in also comes with images for different coloured balloons. If I can figure out how I’ll try to differentiate vegetarian, vegan and non-veg restaurants on the map. I’ve also tidied up a few features, like ditching the annoying snap preview plug-in, and will add a profile and contact details. There are still a couple of things I need to work out - like a way to automatically make text display above or below images instead of wrapping around them. Tips are welcome! Let me know what you think and if there are any other features that you’d like to see. I’m finding a few bugs as a result of changing themes, so please let me know if you find anything amiss. I’m taking a quick break from the honeymoon updates to catch up on some local news. After such a variety of wonderful vegetarian experiences overseas, it was hard to return to Australia and discover that vegetarian yum cha had suffered a body blow with the closure of two great vegetarian restaurants. Vegan Sydney reports that Pitt Street Vegetarian served its last meal at lunch on Tuesday, 27 February and that Purple Lotus closed down less than four weeks later. Both offered cheap, tasty vegan yum cha, and were a good alternative to the more expensive but better known Green Gourmet and Bodhi. If anyone knows the reason for their closure please email me at veggiefriendly[at]gmail.com. I’ve decided to keep the reviews of them on the site in case people are searching for them, but move them to a new section called closed down. The closure of Purple Lotus and Pitt Street Vegetarian follows the demise of Vegal Kitchen and Celestial Palace last year. I hope it doesn’t signify that times are getting tough for vegetarian restaurants. In any event, it’s a reminder of how important it is to support the vegetarian restaurants you love. Expect to hear the popping of champagne corks around these here parts over the coming weeks, followed by the sound of silence. The 29th of January is the first anniversary of Veggie Friendly. Ahh yes, it seems like only yesterday when I wrote my first review. To celebrate, Andy took me out to our local, Bondi Trattoria, where we had a lovely vegetarian meal and reminisced about the good times, which have included: 321 posts 7 reviewers (thanks guys) 5 different cities 84 restaurant reviews 0 defamation cases (hooray!) As if that weren’t cause enough for celebration, in two weeks time Andy and I are getting married and then jetting off to San Francisco, New York and Jamaica for our honeymoon. I’m really looking forward to the big day, but it seems there is a surprising amount of things you need to do in order to make a relationship legit. Anyway, if I’m distracted or neglectful (at least, more so than usual) it’s most likely the fault of my impending nuptials. Proving that miracles can happen, the founder of a vegetarian, coop restaurant chain in Melbourne yesterday beat the entire town of Beaconsfield to become Australia’s Local Hero of the Year. Shanaka Fernando, founder of the Lentil as Anything restaurants received the award for his successful, socially inclusive restaurant concept, where there are no prices on the menu and people pay what they can or what they think the meal is worth. He was also recognised for his work with Melbourne’s refugee community, including using his restaurants to provide training and employment opportunities. Congratulations to Shanaka and the Lentil as Anything crew on such a fabulous initiative! Ok, so it’s week two / three of the vegie delights challenge and I’m already up against it. We devoured the vegie delights sausages I bought in the first week, but unfortunately threw out the packet so that doesn’t count. I still haven’t used the soy mince, but found a recipe for san choy bow on their website so will give that a whirl this week. This week I bought some of their smoked soy fritz product, and polished off about half of it this afternoon. It’s weird, but now that I’m vegetarian the fake meat products I like the best are the ones that imitate the lowest grade type of meat. Perhaps that’s because there isn’t much difference between the real and fake thing. Anyway, given I’m struggling at this early point in the competition, I’m not sure that I’ll make it to the end (and can’t really imagine that many other customers would, either). Veg News magazine in the US has just announced the winners of the Veggie Awards 2006. Apparently 10 000 people voted in the awards, which Veg News claims makes it “the world’s largest survey of all things veg.” The awards have a strong US slant (so unfortunately I didn’t know a lot of the products and restaurants). However, Andy and I have decided to eat at the best vegetarian restaurant winner, Millenium, when we’re in San Francisco on our honeymoon. I thought it was interesting that Subway took out the award for most popular takeaway joint, given most of the other winners have a strong ethical slant. I think people had to vote from a shortlist, and maybe it was limited to franchises. Or perhaps the US isn’t lucky enough to have great vegetarian takeaway joints, like the Iku Wholefoods chain, in Sydney. San Francisco was voted the most vegetarian friendly city in the US, while London took out the award for best international city. I think there must have been some bias in the voting on this one. I lived in London for a little while in the 1990s, and while it was much more veggie friendly than some of its continental counterparts (that means you Paris) it was not a vegetarian nirvana. However, I was there before the mad cow disease outbreak, so maybe that frightened Londoners into becoming vegetarian. Personally, I voted for Sydney because a) I’m biased and b) we have lots of vegetarian restaurants, many other restaurants that are vegetarian friendly, and ready access to ingredients for vegetarian cooking. It also helps that Sydney has a strong multicutural base, because in my experience European cooking is not the kindest cuisine for vegetarians. Some other winners were Moo Shoes, for best storefront. I’m really happy about that because I’m a fan of their online service and was planning to hit the NY store when we’re in the US in February. Best online store went to Vegan Essentials. In the most prestigious category, favourite vegetarian celebrity, Joaquin Phoenix and Natalie Portman took out the awards for best male and female, and Paul McCartney took out the award for favourite musician. Next year will be yours, Thom Yorke! Technorati (the blog monitoring site) has just released its latest state of the blogosphere report. Among other things, the report looks at how blogs come to be authoritative (a question I’ve often asked myself). They measured authority according to how many blogs linked to the blog within a six month period. They only included blogs that had a minimum of three lnks. Anyhow, technorati found that there are some common characteristics of top bloggers. The biggest determinant was how often bloggers posted (d’oh). The ‘blogging elite’(the very high authority group - 500 or more blogs linking to their blog in the last 6 months) posted around two times per day. This group represents the top 4000 blogs. The next two groups (the high authority group with 100-499 blogs linking in the last 6 months and the middle authority group with 10-99 blogs linking in the last 6 months) both posted around 18 times a month - 50% more than blogs in the low authority group. The main factor distinguishing the high and middle authority groups was the age of the blog - the older the blog, the more likely they were to have more people linking to them. That makes sense, because I guess the longer you stick around the more likely it is that people will find you. So, I guess the take out for Veggie Friendly (currently a middle authority blog) is that I have to be diligent with my posts, and just keep on keeping on. Hmm, this authority business seems like a lot of work. |
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