Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Subtle Changes
| Things are changing a bit here at Krystal Adventure. Chances are you may not have noticed a few changes already put in place. Blogger.com (who runs Blogspot.com) has been beta testing a new version of their software for a while. Normally I don't mess with Beta software that I depend on, though I was a beta tester for the early versions of AOL and AOL for Windows (yes AOL was around before Windows... don't ask). I had pretty much ignored the beta testing at Blogger as none of the features interested me much. Well at some point last week, something went wrong. The blog was working correctly from what I could see, but the email delivery system I have set up that forwards my posts to folks by e-mail didn't work. I did some investigating and really couldn't find what went wrong. Quite simply, the listserv barfed. Using my super hero logic powers, I figured out the problem was somewhere in the communication between Blogspot and the Yahoogroup list-server. Blogspot said it sent the email, the list-server claimed it never got on. So I was stuck. I gave it a few days to work itself out but nothing came of it. So over the weekend I decided to see if changing to the Beta version of the new Blogspot might "reboot" things and get it all working smoothly. So far, so good. So now you're wondering what will happen with this new version of the blog software? Well as far as you are concerned you probably wont notice any difference. The differences are mainly on my side, and internal changes with how stuff is stored and organized. They assure me the new system is more reliable and faster. But then everyone says that, don't they? There is one feature you might get some use out of if I decide to go forward with it: labels. The idea is that I can assign "labels" to my posts. Blogger will then allow viewers to find articles based on these labels. It's probably easier to think of it like an index in a book. You look for the term you want to read up on, and it will take you to the posts that term is assigned to. If you go to my post from yesterday and scroll to the bottom you should see a label for hockey. I was testing my labels, and have "tagged" several of my hockey related posts. I also have several of my cooking and recipe related posts tagged as well. Eventually I can get a list of the "terms" on the left side of my blog like a true index. What I need, however, are the terms people would most likely be looking for. I figure recipes is good since I do a lot of that. And of course hockey comes into play on occasion. Then perhaps key terms for each of the delicious foods that Krystal cooks up (Krystals, Chik, Pups, etc). I can tage as many articles as I want and have as many tags as I want, but I dont want to go overboard. So you can help with the rework on Krystal Adventure. If you can think of a list of 5 or 10 good "terms" that would serve the general public to help them find the really good stuff on this blog, please email me. Once I get settled on them, I'll have to go back through all my old posts (about 170 so far) and "back tag" them, so I only want to do this once! Other changes. I have been contemplating altering my post formats some. The red border for each entry and the rotating bumper stickers. Is anyone getting sick of seeing them yet? It's not a huge amount of effort for me to "fill in the blank" between them, but if it is getting annoying, let me know, and I can chop them out. If I do decide to start posting via e-mail, then no more pictures or borders on those posts. Other than that, not a whole lot going on around here. I do have another recipe in the pipeline, ready to post on December 1st. Plus I have ideas for 2 or 3 more down the road. I have been asked on several occasions if I want to make a Krystal inspired cookbook. I suspect I'd need a lot more than 5 recipes to do that. However, if Krystal got on the ball they could probably pull the massive resources and the might power of the Krystal to produce a cookbook of recipes gathered from the Krystal Lovin Army. Perhaps for the 75th anniversary coming this October... hmmmm. I'd be happy to throw my recipes into the mix. Anyway, I think thats it from me for now. Let me know of any opinions on format changes and "labels" to improve the navigation of my blog. And I'll be back soon with more tasty tidbits from all of my Krystal Adventures!  |
