5 Ways Using Pinterest Can Improve Your Food Blog

Pinterest! It is the wonderful time suck that many of us love to use. I was thinking this morning of how often I use their website. Let's just say, I use it a lot. Lot lot lot. Which led me to think about some ways that you can utilize their website to improve your own. Are you ready? Let's jump in.

1. Create a visual recipe index.

One way to (somewhat) quickly create a visual recipe index without having to mess with creating one hosted at your own site is to create a board on Pinterest.

How to do it: 

After you have added the Pin It code to your posts, simply click and add them all to the boards of your choice. You can do one board and pile them all in there, or create categories if you would like.

Alternatively, you can put the Pin It code into your internet browser of choice and go through your archives and pin each of your old recipes.

It takes a bit of time but it really isn't too bad compared to creating a recipe index from scratch and having to upload all the photos, set up links, and hope and pray that you don't mess up somewhere along the way and lose your work.

2. Allow your readers to easily pin your posts by filling in the info for them!

When a reader clicks your Pin It button the box will pop up with all the information already in it. 

The end result! With a clickable link to your website.

How to add the Pin It Button for Web Sites:

Start off by visiting this link.

The main page we are working with. The top half is the info we need to fill in. The bottom half is the generated code that we need to add to our website.

Taking a closer look at the important stuff. There are three boxes to fill out. 

URL of the page the pin is on: Be sure to use the direct link to your post. Not to a category, or a comment section, or anything silly like that.

URL of the image to be pinned: Go to the published post and right click the image and select Copy image URL.

Once you have all the fields filled in, copy the code generated and insert it into the HTML of your post. Update and you are done!

3. Gain exposure like woah. 

Did I ever imagine that 120,000 people would pin a very basic recipe for Cheesy Garlic Sticks? Nope, but they did!

Or 59,000 pins for my trashy Mexican Dorito Casserole? No way!

4. Analyze what is popular on your site.

At a quick glance I can see what has recently been pinned. People really like my trashy casserole, what can I say.

How to do it:

Type the following URL into your browser, replacing your URL with mine. Notice that when I typed in my personal URL at the end, I left out the 'www.' part. Just put in the address without that.

5. Organize your inspiration for future posts.

How to do it:

Create boards and organize them by course. It takes a few minutes to set it up but believe me, in the long run you will appreciate the organization.

Those are my five tips to improve your blog using Pinterest. If anyone wondered, this is not a sponsored post. I just enjoy using their website like many of us do. Do you have any Pinterest tips to add? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Oh, and before I forget, be sure to follow me!  

Food Blogging & Negativity: Do you post recipes that you hate on your blog?

Today I'm touching on a variety of topics dealing with food blogging, but the theme between them all is negativity.

First up, Bad recipes. They happen to the best of us. We make a recipe with the best intentions and it turns out to be a total flop. What is your next step?

• Do you redo the recipe, hoping it will be better? 
• Do you post the recipe on your blog with a negative review? Is it constructive criticism or an out right attack to the blogger?
• Does it make any difference if the recipe came from a food blogger as opposed to a food celebrity, like Paula Deen or Bobby Flay? 
• Is your first instinct to blame yourself or the recipe? 

Secondly, negative opinions. You don't like the quality or type of ingredients used in a recipe. What do you do?

• Do you take inspiration from their recipe and tweak it to fit your dietary standards?
• Do you immediately dismiss it and move on?
• Do you leave a comment informing the food blogger that they are using the wrong ingredients and as a whole their recipes stink?
• Do you get on your blog and write a long rant about how anyone who ever cooks with ------ ingredients is a terrible cook and should be ashamed of themselves?

I used a cake mix. I must be
a horrible person

These are all questions I wonder about frequently while I am browsing other blogs.  I try to keep my blog as uplifting and positive as possible. Even when I tell you all the things I hate about your blog, I try to do so in a hopefully light hearted way that is meant to be helpful and not snotty.

I don't come across very many hostile and mean spirited food bloggers, but they are for sure out there. Just like hostile and mean spirited comments, I don't get a ton but I know they are out there. The most frequent style of hostility that I personally come across is people who are food elitists.

Let me clarify one thing real quick. If you are not a fan of cake mixes or canned soups, that is just fine. There are from scratch alternatives for almost everything out there that is a convenience product. I am totally A-OK with the fact that you don't like them. What I am not A-OK with is when people rant on their blogs about how lazy, stupid and horrible people are who do use them. 

The food bloggers who say (I'm paraphrasing but this is what I read) that anyone who EVER uses a cake mix is a lazy, fat, horrible cook. That using a can of cream of chicken soup is literally poisoning their children and they should have their kids taken away.  I'm not exaggerating these remarks, I have run across quite a few of them the past few years. Does this kind of hostility and negativity bother anyone else?

Run for your life!
Ahhh, the horror!

I recently had a young woman who pinned one of my casserole recipes onto a Pinterest board that she had titled, "This is why you are fat." I was stunned, although I probably shouldn't have been. What is stunning to me is that someone has so much free time to be so negative and spiteful. (On Pinterest of all places, which is normally so fun and inspiring. She had literally created a board of all the things she hated. Hah!)

You and I don't eat the same? Hey, that is fine by me. I'll leave you alone, how about you leave me alone too? Keep on blog browsing and don't let the door hit your butt on the way out.  What I don't get is pinning a bunch of random food blogs on Pinterest and leaving comments of, "GROSS!" "THIS IS DISGUSTING!" and the like. How awful and mean spirited is that?

All I can think is that this is a girl who has a lot of hate in her heart and she feels the need to lash out at people on the internet. It is kind of sad, but frankly it riled me up because how snotty and judgmental her comments were. We are all young bloggers at one point, and to see something like this when you are new can be a real buzz kill.

Back to the recipes, do you take the time to write up a post, take pictures, and type up the recipe when it was a dud? Do you name names, calling out the blogger who provided the recipe? Or do you just skip posting it and move on?

I am absolutely a skip posting it and move on kind of person. I don't think most food bloggers would ever intentionally post a bad recipe. I tend to question if I really followed the recipes closely, if I misread an ingredient amount, and scrutinize if it was my mistake that a recipe turned out bad. What about you?

For some reason I will admit that I am far more lenient and forgiving to food bloggers and their recipes than I am of the celebrity cooks out there. I am more likely to post a negative review on a Food Network recipe than I am to visit a blog and leave a comment. I am not saying that is right, but it is just the way I feel. I connect with fellow food bloggers and I feel a sense of solidarity between us all. I want to uplift others, not tear them down.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the topics above. Do you get negative comments on your blog from food elitists? Or do you get blamed for a dud recipe even when it is clear the cook didn't follow your recipe closely? Please share in the comments.

Also - Inspired by eRecipecards did a thoughtful review of one of my recipes and my blog as a whole today. He poked a bit of fun at me and the things I hate about blogs. Check it out. See, I can take a joke when it is a good natured jab. :)

Why I hate Google Reader.

1285 subscriptions. That is the amount of websites I am subscribed to in Google Reader.

This means that even if a fraction of them update on a daily basis, I can never really catch up without devoting a lot of time to speed clicking my way through them. I realized one day as I was doing my daily catch up that all this speed clicking was mindless, boring and not fulfilling. I had no real sense of who was writing these posts.

I came across a post by the lovely Whoorl a while back, ironically while I was reading her blog in Google Reader. She mentioned that she loved using 'the next button'. I was confused because the only next button I had ever heard of was the button you click in Google Reader to zip to the next unread post. This was not the same button. THIS button was a button you put in your internet toolbar, and when you clicked it, it would actually take you to the website of the next unread post of your google reader subscriptions.

Hmm...interesting. It would make the process longer, but you would actually be visiting the blog itself and seeing the beautiful designs that people have put so much work into. You would also (probably) see their profile picture in the sidebar, which puts a face to a name, and you would create an impression on their page that helps them support their blog if they run ads.

I decided to give it a try, to see if connecting with blogs and their authors was easier if I visited the actual website, even if the drawback was that it took more time.

At first I was a little annoyed at how long it took to get from one site to another, but I told myself I want to give this a chance and I told myself to stop being in such a hurry. I got into a groove, and I started exploring websites that I hadn't visited in ages. Sites that I didn't even realize I was subscribed to, because I had always just rushed through my reader and never visited the site.

The experience of actually visiting the websites, which are these authors homes, really floored me. At once I could feel the warmth of their designs, their smiling pictures in the sidebar, and I started to feel connected again to the people writing these posts. I actually felt happy to be visiting them, a far cry from how I felt every time I pulled up Google Reader and saw the giant number of unread blogs at the top, and would proceed to speed click my way through all of them.

I am in love with the next button. I do not see myself ever going back to reading blogs in a reader. It is too cold, void of any personality, and it disconnects me from my blogging friends.

Why I love Google Reader

Google Reader is not all bad, let me just get that out there. It is a great way to organize websites that you subscribe to. The ability to search through previously read posts makes it a giganto recipe index that you can search through when you are in the need for a specific recipe. Have a bunch of strawberries and don't know what to do with em? Pop over to Google Reader and search.

Another perk is that if a website doesn't offer full feeds (ahem), you don't have to worry about it. Heck, you probably won't even know about it, since you are visiting the actual site.

The Perfect Balance

Using both Google Reader for the search function and the next button for blog browsing has totally changed the way I as a blog reader connect with websites. It is the perfect balance between organization, search functions and interacting and connecting with the blog author and other visitors.

Should I also mention that it makes it easier to pin something on Pinterest? Since you are already on the page it is once less step in the process.

I use to pride myself in being able to zip through my giant list of subscriptions at super speeds, but no longer. I am in the process of removing a whole bunch of subscriptions to blogs that no longer resonate with me or that no longer post. There will always be thousands of blogs out there - you can never really catch them all. I would rather be subscribed to a reasonable amount, the blogs where my friends and my blog readers write at, or sites that are truly beautiful and inspiring.

So, what do you think? Are you willing to give the next button a try? 

I hope you do. It feels really good to see the faces behind the names. It feels good to be awed and inspired by all of the beautiful blog designs out there. It helps me be a better blogger and to improve my own website. I have come to love-to-hate Google Reader.

You might also like to read this post on the subject:

• If you read blogs, you should read this at Rage Against the Minivan

New poll for my readers: What is the ideal posting frequency?

There is a poll directly to the right that I would really appreciate you voting on. What I'm wondering is what you, the reader, thinks is the ideal amount of posts per week for a blog.

I'm worried that posting every day is too much for readers to keep up with. I'd love your feedback if you have any thoughts. Thank you!

Have you blogged a recipe from Jam Hands?

One thing that I would like to start doing is adding links to my posts to the bloggers who have made & blogged a recipe from Jam Hands. If you adapted the recipe that is fine too. You can leave a comment on the post itself, or let me know by emailing me. I'd love to add your links to send readers to your website as a thank you.  Have a good weekend everybody!

Working at a restaurant- Cooking confessions & humiliations

Over at the Jam Hands & Friends community forums we have been talking about our food confessions. A lot of them involve snarfing down way too much food. Or hiding the good food from our family, so we can snarf it later. Haha!

Today I wanted to share a few embarrassing cooking confessions that all occurred while I was working in a restaurant many years ago. Normally in the kitchen you might start off washing dishes, and I did, but since we were short handed I only had about 20 minutes at that station before moving on to the pantry. The pantry is basically the cold line - you prepare salads and desserts. Since this restaurant was slightly upscale, there was a ton of prep work to be done for each dish.

I started each day by taking stock of what vegetables, fruits and nuts were low in stock, and prepped them. Then I made the salad dressings from scratch. Then I moved on to making the croutons, which I inevitably burned since I would forget to set a timer. After the basics were done, I made whipped butter, piped it into rosettes onto parchment paper, and got those ready for the waiters to serve with the fresh bread.

What made it quite the workout was the fact that our freezer and refrigerator were at the bottom of the building and I had to hustle my butt up and down the stairs all day long, carrying stainless steel pans full of ingredients. When the kitchen is 110+ degrees in the Summer and you are sprinting down flights of stairs, believe me, it can get to be a workout. You tend to linger a few minutes longer in the walk in refrigerator than necessary just to cool down your body.

I guess I should say a word or two about the chef. The one real positive that I can say about him is that he gave me a job when I was about 18 and had no kitchen experience other than home cooking. That was very nice of him. Other than that, he was kind of a creep. Being a chef is, I imagine, very stressful and difficult. It takes strong personalities to do the job. Unfortunately his personality was that of condescension, hotheadedness and sarcasm. He was all smiles and charm during the interview, but once I got to work, it all changed.

Blogging Round Table Discussion: Is it wrong to post recipes?

Food bloggers and the recipes they post. I have seen the topic brought up regarding posting recipes from published cookbooks or magazines and that bloggers have been 'strongly advised' to remove any recipes from their blog lest they face 'further action.'

What is new to me, however, is the thought that it is a faux paux to post a recipe, even with adaptions, that comes from another blog. This is assuming they even give credit back to the original posted. Instead, you should only link back to the website.

What do you think?

I have to say, while I am of the 'to each her own' line of thinking, the longer I mulled over this, the more confused I became. Why put your recipes on the internet if you are going to become so upset when someone posts it on their blog?

To clarify, this is not when someone steals your photographs or a recipe and says "This is MY photo, this is MY recipe that I created." This is when someone says, here is a recipe from such and such blog, here are my adaptions, ta-da.

I do not subscribe to food blogs that are photo's only, with no links to a recipe. I just don't see the point of it. Furthermore, if I want to see photo's only with no recipe attached, I'll just go browse Pinterest. Hehe.

I am of the opinion that if you are that upset that someone loved your recipe enough to blog about it, give you a link back and credit you as the recipe creator, you should probably say "Thank you, thank you!" Better yet, write yourself a cookbook and stop posting recipes online.

Okay, your turn. Do you agree with this train of thought? Why or why not?

Link Party Hosts - Please stop and read.

I have spent a whole lotta time creating my linky page, seen here. In fact, I get a lot of visitors to my site every day that use my list as a resource to find where all parties are at on a daily basis. I love finding new parties to explore and meet fellow bloggers.

If you host a weekly or monthly link party and would like to list your button in my big directory, please head over to the link party page and add your button at the very bottom of the page. All I ask is that you link up a party that is current, as in you host it reliably on a weekly/monthly basis. It can be food, crafts, DIY, etc.

You can also leave a comment here and I will get you added, if you aren't able to add a button yourself.

Thanks!

How to see what posts from your website people have pinned on Pinterest.

Last week I explained what the dealio was with Pinterest. I had a bunch of people ask for invites (by the way, did all of you receive them? I hope so). Before I forget, my link to my boards is here, if you'd like to follow me.

This week I wanted to have a quick follow up post on how to see what posts from your blog people are pinning on Pinterest. You may have started to notice traffic coming from Pinterest.com when you check your statistics, but if you want the bigger picture of all of your posts that have been pinned, all you have to do is put this in your web browser, substituting your blog URL. Be sure to leave off the "http://www." part of your address. Just put the end of it, for me it was "Jamhands.net"


Here is the text if you want to copy and paste it (you still have to add in your URL at the end of it):

http://pinterest.com/source/

After you put that in, you should see a page like this, featuring all of the posts other people have pinned.

Ta-da! This can be very handy to see what posts of yours have resonated with readers. I hope this helps for all of the new Pinterest users.

Linking up to:  

Are you on Pinterest?

Do you know what the big deal is about Pinterest? I know there have been a ton of posts lately about how cool it is, but if you haven't checked it out yet, you may be wondering what all the hype is about.

I'll try to explain this simply, like I'm explaining it to my Mom. God bless her, but when she just came to visit and I asked her to click the play button on the Netflix that was streaming on the computer screen, she looked all over the mouse itself to find the play button. Sorry Mom, haha. Anyways, on to Pinterest!

Basically what you have here is a way to bookmark websites. Instead of calling it a bookmark, they call it a 'pin.' Instead of putting the bookmarks into folders like you normally would using IE, Firefox, or Chrome, you create 'boards', which are just your categories of your 'pins'.

I've got a lot of food themed boards, along with some fun ones like DIY, holidays, kid stuff, rainbows and more. So that is how you set up your pins.

If you are in the mood to browse other peoples pins, just click on either 'Discussions' or 'Everything' from the Pinterest navigation bar. From there, you can pick a category if you'd like.

If you find something to save to your boards, click the repin button on the image. That's it! Of course, be sure to follow some people that have posted pins that you enjoy. Half of the fun of Pinterest is browsing through all the beautiful pictures and discovering new things.

So have I convinced you to try it out yet? Good! Last that I saw there was a wait list of a couple weeks (not sure what it is now), so if you want to leave your email address, or email me directly with it, I can send you an invite. (jamhandsblog at gmail.com)

Happy pinning!

Are you unable to blog or comment? Read for more info!

There is an issue going around on blogger sites that aren't allowing comments on posts, or for blogger users to sign in.

This actually happened to me for a full day before I switched from using Firefox to Chrome. If this is happening to you, try switching to a different browser, like Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome. Just try one that you normally don't use, and see if you can either comment or login to your blogger account.

Hopefully this might help.

Food Blogging - Making a quick & easy visual recipe index.

What if I told you that setting up a visual recipe index for any blogger site was as simple as a button click? Are you skeptical? Check out the screenshots below for examples.

Notice the grey text at the end of the URL. Also take note that the 'label' tab has been selected. This will create a visual recipe index that is categorized by the labels you have assigned your posts.

Wondering how you can do it? Ali to the rescue! Note: Full Feeds must be enabled on the blog for this to work.

So if you haven't read about it, blogger has started to introduce new dynamic ways to view blogs. If you read up on current blogger news you probably already know this, but I'm gonna take a wild guess that most of you haven't.

The scoop is this, if you visit a blogger hosted website, you have five new dynamic ways to view the site (including your own blogger sites). You have two ways to easily view these new designs.

The first way, and easiest way, requires you to use Google Chrome, which is an internet browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox. So all you do if you use Chrome as your internet browser is download the blogger Chrome plugin. If you view a site that is hosted with blogger, a little blogger icon will appear in the right hand URL bar (see image directly below). Just click it and pick your view!

The second way requires you to add just a bit of text to the end of a URL. See the first screenshot and notice that the light grey text at the end of the URL is the added bit of text. Here are all the snippets you can try:

/view/flipcard
/view/sidebar
/view/mosaic
/view/snapshot
/view/timeslide


Updated: I was heaping the praise upon Chrome in this post, but after I gave it an extra few weeks, I really am not happy with how frequently Chrome has issues connecting to websites. I thought it was a fluke at first, but I'd say about 25% of the time when I type in ANY web address, Chrome says the webpage cannot be found. This is really annoying.

I am now back to using Firefox 4 for most of my browsing. It seems to be crashing a lot less than when it was first released. When I am in the mood to surf blogs, I do use Chrome so that I can easily use the dynamic features plugin mentioned and shown above.

Mosaic mode, which is viewed by adding /view/mosaic to the end of the URL or by choosing the mosaic option via the Chrome plugin which I heartily recommend.

So now you've seen the flipcard view and the mosaic view of my blog. I picked a random blogger site from my Google reader, used my chrome plugin to select Snapshot view, and viola, here is Cajun Delights:

Finally one view that I find comes in handy when you discover a blog and they have a TON of archived recipes that you want to browse through quickly, without exhausting your scroll button on your mouse, is to use the sidebar view.

Posts are listed on the left allowing you to very quickly click through and skim the posts.

Ah, I'm in love.

If you would like to add a link to your sidebar directing your readers to your new visual recipe index, just copy the URL and add your link. Ta-da! While you can't rearrange things as much as if you were to build a more complex visual index where you uploaded pics and added in all the links manually, this is a quick and dirty way to set it up with minimal fuss.

Any questions? Leave a comment below and I will do my best to help.

I'm linking up to:  

Food Blogging - Organizing and tracking your recipe index.

If you have been food blogging for a while, the time comes where the list of things you need to blog to get caught up spirals out of control. Don't believe me? Take a look at my recipe index.

407 Recipes! -- I just updated this list and now I'm at 415+. Bleh.

Curious how many I've blogged about? About half. 'Ouch' and 'my brain hurts' is all I can say in response. If you are in need of a way to keep track of what food you have made and if you have blogged about it yet, I have a few tips for you.

The title of this spreadsheet is fitting, no?

1. First, you need to start a spreadsheet. If you don't have an Excel sort of program, head over to Gmail, then go to the 'documents' tab to start one.
2. Open up your recipe index on your blog. Highlight and copy the entire index. Click back over to the spreadsheet, click into the first box, and paste.
3. If necessary, delete any rows that were your category headers, like "Desserts" or "Main Dish". All we want is the name of the recipe. That's it! If you use Google docs it should auto save, but be sure to save as you go to be safe.
4. Next you are going to add in the recipes that you have made but not blogged about. You will want to compile the links ahead of time. Save them to a new folder to your bookmarks menu, or gather up all your print outs and you will be all set to go.
5. Now that we have a giant list of our recipes, you want to sort the rows so they are displayed A-Z vertically.  You should be able to skim through the list quickly and see if there are any doubles and delete the extra entry.
6. Click to the left (or you can go to the right) of your recipe column and insert one column to the left. This is where we will add in an 'X' to signify that the recipe has been blogged about.
7. Go through your recipe index online and quickly mark each recipe with an 'X' if it has been blogged about.
8. Be sure to save as you go along. Update this weekly or monthly and you are good to go.

Tip: When you are inserting or deleting a row, be sure that you are inserting/deleting an entire row. You do this by right clicking on the number of the row and selecting "Insert one above/below" or "remove row". The reason this is important is if you want to be sure that your two columns match up correctly and you don't accidentally mess the whole list up. That would be super sucky.

If you have any tips please leave a comment!

Party buttons can be found here. I'm linking up to:  

A million and one link parties: How to organize and track them.

If you have participated in some of the weekly link parties held at various blogs hopefully you have seen some good traffic to your blog as a result. During the past week I had considered writing up a little post about how to organize the many parties out there, and when I received an email from a fellow blogger asking me how I handled it, I decided to write this post.

I'm sure to some of you this may seem overly thorough but I am a little bit OCD when it comes to organizing so this works for me. Consider the following post a tutorial of sorts of how to set up and organize your link party list, track previous parties, and minimize the time you have to spend each day actually submitting your posts. If you have any feedback or tips of your own, please leave a comment.

• Picking your parties - What I did in the beginning was to basically copy another bloggers party list as my starting point. I emailed her and asked her if this was okay. After all, she had spent the time to write up a nice page for her parties, it seemed only fair that I ask if it was all right if I swiped it. This was just the first step for me. I knew I wanted to edit out parties that didn't relate to my blog, as well as add many more that she didn't list.

• Creating the master list page - Quite a few bloggers provide a link on their sites to their regular link parties, so I bookmarked about half a dozen, visited said parties, and added the ones that applied to my master list. You can do this easily by creating a page on your blog and listing each day of the week and the parties underneath each heading. I did this and it worked well enough, but I needed more information.

• Tracking the parties - I realized half way through my first week that I was going back to a few blogs again and again to verify if I had participated in their party. This lead to a lot of wasted time. I pulled up Gmail and opened up a Google doc and created a spreadsheet. Look for it in the top navigation bar, sometimes listed under the "more" tab if you don't use it much.  I simply copied my master party list by highlighting the text, copying and pasting into the spreadsheet. See the screen shot below for more details.

Organized by day of the week. Also shown is a column to mark if you've added their button to your blog (I haven't compiled this info yet so my column is blank), then following that I give each week a column and specify what post I am submitting. An "x" means I have submitted successfully to that party. Two marks is two posts submitted, etc.

• Keeping your parties current - After several weeks of tracking parties, you should be able to see which parties have closed down or gone on hiatus. I will usually mark a party by bolding their name in black text to signify that they are no longer current, and if by a few weeks time they aren't back, I put the name in red to signify that their info needs to be removed from the spreadsheet as well as the link page on my site.

Red crayons used to block the lapsed parties info. Poor little parties! Come back to us!

• Prioritizing parties - Using the extremely basic traffic counter provided by blogger on the "Stats" page, I assign a few select blogs a bold color to let me know that they have provided large numbers of hits to my site. That isn't to say they are any better than other parties, but if I don't have much time to spend submitting to parties, I know to hit up these blogs first. Speaking of saving time...

Create a second sheet within your spread sheet to remind you of what the colors mean. I haven't tracked the referrals of the week, but I added it incase I wanted that option later.

Time Saving Tips -

1. If you are able to, submit earlier in the day. The earlier the better. The reason being that the linking tools used by parties often get quite bogged down during the day and evening. What takes you 15 seconds to do in the morning can take 3 minutes in the afternoon.
2. Take the time to make sure your party page list of links is identical to your spreadsheet. This means you wont be searching through your lists trying to match things up. I pull up my link party page in one tab, the spreadsheet in the next, and just go boom-boom-boom down the list. No searching necessary as it all matches up sequentially.
3. Make sure the picture you are going to use in the party doesn't need intensive cropping. One less step in the process saves you time over the long haul.
4. If you only have a few minutes to commit to submitting your posts to parties, keep the priority parties marked by bold text and coloring their names on your spread sheet.

And finally, one thing that makes me go “huh??” every week. Link parties that are set for a certain day of the week, as in the day of the week in is their party name, yet they post the day before. That always bugs me. I think I am gonna be on time to link up for “Tuesday blah de dah” or “Friday doop de doo” and I visit the website the morning of the party and 300 people have already linked up the day before. Doh! :)

I hope this tutorial helped you to achieve your party goals. If you have any questions, thoughts or tips, please share them in a comment.

Party buttons can be found here. I'm linking up to:  

10 Things I hate about your blog.

Here is a cute cupcake before we begin.
Hopefully it is enough to keep you
from getting annoyed at me.

Brace yourself. Just kidding, I promise this won't be too painful.

So I'm browsing through a new to me blog, Hope Studios, and I am reading a great post she wrote called "10 Things I Hate About Your Blog." Genius, I say.

Just to clarify, this is not a bashing bloggers sort of post. This is just a list of peeves and constructive criticism that apply to all of us, myself included. For the record, I have made most of these mistakes myself. My list is a bit more themed towards food blogs, since that is primarily the type of blog that I follow.

Let's get to it.

10 Things I hate about your blog

1. Music that auto plays - If you simply must auto play music, put the widget for it at the top of your page so I can turn it off quickly. 99.9% of auto play abusers hide the widget at the bottom of their blog and if I can't find it within 3 seconds I will just close down the page. That isn't exactly a good thing if you are trying to get new readers, right?

2. Hocking too much junk - This is a rough one because the thrill of getting something for free is very enticing. Be prepared as a blogger to be tempted by all sorts of pitches for free junk, and a lot of times it is just that, junk. Really think about if it is worth writing a post about, if it is something your readers are interested in, and if you can write the review of the product without coming off like you are hocking junk.

3. Cluttered design - Take a critical eye to your sidebars and consider ways to combine elements so that they don't take up too much space. I've always thought that less is more when it comes to blog design, but I still struggle with this.

4. Dark background / neon text - It is hard to read. If I can't easily read your posts, then I'll just leave. Simple enough, right?

5. No easily accessible contact/ about info - The first time I visit a blog I typically check out the 'about' page. If you don't have an email address associated with your blog, and may I ask why not, just let the reader know to leave a comment with their questions.

6. Too many step by step photos - This one is a toughie. I would say that if your photo somehow helps someone in the cooking process, for instance a shot of creaming butter and sugar for cookies, that is good. After all, not everyone knows what that should look like once it is creamed. On the other hand, blurry, dark or otherwise not so great pictures of every step in the process is really not needed. I can't tell you how many out of focus, dark and barely decipherable pictures of a hand holding a teaspoon of spices I've seen. *Updated* I felt I should clarify this a bit. What I meant was photography overkill for a recipe. Photos of the process are good. 25+ pictures where it is literally someone holding their ingredient in their hand, then a shot of them adding it to the bowl, then a shot of them mixing it, again and again, that is what I consider too much.

7. Exclamation points - I use to be a big offender of this, and I still have to reign myself in. Let me give an example. The other day I visited a brand new to me food blog. In one very short cooking post there were 10 exclamation points. Two sentences even ended with three (!!!) exclamation points. I've seen other blogs that pretty much use exclamation points to end every sentence. Ask yourself, am I really that excited? Don't get me wrong though, I'm not saying never use them, I'm just saying, take a critical look at your posts and see if it is being abused.

8. Using DH DD DS abbreviations - A lot of you will disagree with me on this one but using the "Dear Husband" abbreviation is just more than I can handle. Over the top cheese ball, if I had to put it into words. My solution? Every time you write DH I read it as "Dumb ass" or "Damn" Husband. Hey, it works.

9. Being a judgmental food snob/elitist - There is a difference between sharing your beliefs or being passionate about a subject compared to putting down those who disagree with you.

10. Being too critical of other bloggers - Heh.

What do you think? Do any of these bother you or not bother you?


To not be a total jerk face, here is:

A  few blog things that bug others but don't bother me:

1. Typos. They happen to everybody. I could care less. Of course, if it a typo on an amount for an ingredient this can be troublesome and ruin a recipe, so double checking is always a good idea.
2. Less than great photos. We all start somewhere and I know that I was terrible at taking food pics when I started. Not that I am all that great now, either.

Blogging - Photo and recipe attribution with a side of silly snack mix.

Let me tell you a story about a picture of some puppy chow.

So I'm doing some bloggy browsing and out of the blue I run across a picture of mine for a puppy chow post. Funny, I thought to myself. Probably just a random thing, no biggie.

Then I got to thinking, I wonder how they found my image. Did they do a google search for puppy chow and find it somehow? So I pull up ol' google and type in the words.

I'm flabbergasted. This picture is everywhere. I mean, you'd think it was the prettiest picture of puppy chow to ever be taken by how much it has been lifted and posted around the web. Dozens of websites, and not a single one that I could find ever gave proper credit back.

Mind you, even if they had given me credit, they also needed my permission, but I am more than willing to overlook that if they at least credit me and link back to my website.

I wrote a few emails to the large, head honcho type websites, and left a comment or two at the smaller bloggy style sites. I might have gotten a tad annoyed, and I hope if you are here reading this because I left such a comment that I wasn't too abrupt. It was just a little mind boggling that it was so prevalent.

Even the people who attempted to give proper attribution to the photographer ended up giving it to someone else who had lifted the photo. It was a never ending cycle!

Anyhow. I don't expect many of the bigger websites to give a hoot about me and my stolen photo. I'm fully expecting to get responses back from people that are annoyed that I dare ask for them to either give me credit or take the picture down. How dare I, right?!

What this experience has really hit home for me is attribution. That goes for recipes, too! That is one area I can be forgetful. I'm not perfect either. I am going to make it a priority to work through my archived recipes and track down the sources so my info can be updated.

When it comes to photos and recipes, always site your sources. Do your best to always give credit when you can. Especially when it comes to photos, always always email the photographer and ask permission first. This can get tricky, especially my case where if someone wanted to ask me permission they'd probably never be able to find me since the photo had been swiped so many times.  Just try your best. We all need to have good blogging Karma, right?

Oh, and as much as I have resisted using watermarks in the past, expect a big, fat, watermark in my photographs from here on out. I really dislike trying so hard to take a decent picture of food only to add a watermark on top, but apparently it needs to be done.  On second thought, I think I'll go with a watermark on the side. See the updated picture above for an example. A watermark on the side or bottom is less obtrusive . Unfortunately some thieves will still crop it out, but what else can you do.

Has this ever happened to you? How did you handle it?

Blogging - How do you handle linking up for blog parties?

Blog parties. Love them or hate them, they are a great way to showcase your blog posts and generate traffic to your website.

If you haven't participated in them before, many bloggers have created weekly round ups that you can submit posts to and your link is then displayed on their blog. It is simple to do, but there is one problem. There are so many out there!

I am torn with how to handle this. Part of me wants to add a compilation of links at the end of each post. The downside is that it takes a lot of work to add that info in each and every time, not to mention it tends to really clog up your blog posts if submit posts frequently.

Links or buttons on each post

• Pros: Providing links at the end of each post makes it easier to direct your readers to the hosting website.
• Cons: A huge list of links at the end of each post can make the blog look messy and cluttered. More work is required to craft the list for each day you participate in a party. Don't get my started on all those buttons!

An option to avoid the blog clutter is to do a stand alone page (see example here) that you provide a link to at the end of your post directing your readers to the parties you normally submit to. I am considering this, but what do you think, is it not enough?  I've also seen blogs that provide links in their sidebar, organized by days of the week.

Master list of parties or links in the sidebar

• Pros: A permanent page would allow you to set it up once, then forget about it. The blogs listed might get more exposure in the long run from a permanent page, as opposed to getting lost in the clutter at the end of blog posts.
• Cons: Afraid that a master list would come across as me being lazy or rude to the folks hosting the link party. Your submitted link may be removed from their party.

So how do you handle it? Is it required to link up to each and every party, or do you think it is all right to provide a link to a 'master list' of sorts with a list of the blog parties you regularly participate in?