A few months ago, I started a companion blog which I called French Chocolate Kitchen.My original idea was to create a place to store chocolate recipes and experiment with New Blogger, then known as Beta Blogger or Blogger Beta.
I began using the blog as a repository for anything chocolate that was also posted here. I switched to the new blogger template and began playing around with that, which was scary at first.
New Blogger is easy to use, it turns out. It's not so scary after all. It got a bad rap, for some reason — I think because there were issues in the beta stage.
So of course, New Blogger was intimidating at first.
Now that I've played around with it for a while, I like it.
The upshot is, I'll be changing French Kitchen in America to the new blogger template sometime in the next few weeks. I am pretty sure that means all my carefully entered links will be lost. It will take a while to replace them. So be patient.
If for some reason, your link is lost in the process, let me know. Fortunately, adding links with the New Blogger is very easy and less time consuming.
By the way, if you have any comments on switching to the new template, please post them here.
Meanwhile, please visit French Chocolate Kitchen and tell me about your favorite chocolates nibbles. My favorite combination of chocolate and something else is chocolate and orange. It has been since I was about 5 years old and punching holes in the bottom of chocolates to see what flavor they were (chocolate and raspberry is a good one, too.)
Oh, and one piece of other news: For the first time ever, my humble little blog hit the 200 visitor mark. That's right, FKIA had 215 visitors Friday. Since I haven't done a lot to market this blog, that was good news.
The blog is also coming up on its 200th post. I expect we will reach that milestone by March 15.
You made that possible. Thank you.
15 comments:
Just back up your template before switching, Mimi. It'll help if you have a text editor (free versions are online) but you even CAN save to Word or something similar so long as you don't really edit/format there and just use it to record the html.
Mine converted like a dream though I'm still dealing with residual feed issues. Good luck! (And congratulations on all the visitors! We all start somewhere! I didn't get a comment for maybe three months or something like that.
Thanks for the feedback and suggestions, Alana.
I am a little nervous about this. But I really like the new version — I feel it gives me more control.
The only problem is that the post heads are too flush with the photos and text. There should be a way of inserting a space or some ledding.
Thanks you for visiting, too. I'm still learning. . .
Many milestones to celebrate! I'm in awe of anyone who has the time/energy/creativity to maintain two blogs. I tried it for several months, and finally decided to give one of the blogs (and the tired blogger) a rest.
Don't know anything about Blogger, but will keep my fingers crossed for a smooth transition.
Lydia, my interest in blogging really got going when I was working on an investigative piece about an anonymous blogger who was harassing a female public official.
In the process, I learned a lot about tracking people online. Thanks to a series of e-mails under "noms des plums" and tracking technology, I exposed the blogger, a disgruntled ex-employee.
In the process, I visited a lot of blogs and got hooked.
I'd like to do more!
Mimi,
I love the chocolate blog -- not just for the chocolate (duh), but for the aesthetics. Oh, and, obviously, the word verification is working again for me. YAY!
Oh, that's good to hear.
New Blogger has its issues, I guess. But oh, once you start rolling, it's great.
Thanks, Mary! New Blogger makes it easy to customize — I wasn't sure at first, but after some playing around...
(Sheesh! I sound like a commercial for New Blogger.)
Cheers to you and to all your accomplishments-you do rock,Mimi-and convert, it doesn't hurt! You are one of the best sites that has happened to the blog world-there are so many wonderful people who feel the same way!
Thanks, Jann. You are, too!
I love having you and all the others as online friends.
How wonderful that food and blogging unites us.
I've been blogging all day,
Tonight, it's time to make my blog rounds, which I have not been able to do much these past few days and fo which I am feeling guilty.
You've done so well in a fairly short period of time Mimi, and I admire you for that! Good luck with the transition to the new Blogger. I did it on my garden blog and then after several months switched back to my old template. I'll be waiting to hear how your do with the new stuff and hope to learn a thing or two from you.
I'm off to check out your chocolate blog now...
Thanks, Christine. I tried the new template here - for an agonizing three minutes and then switched back.
The problem, as I see it, is that the spacing is out of whack with the new blogger.
So, who knows, if it looks awful, I may switch back, too.
Hi Mimi - I have another blog, too, which is on my website. I don't post as often on that one as I do here. It's incredibly time consuming to do a decent post. (At least for me, it is.) Some days it just rolls out, and some days I wrestle with it.
I only started blogging this year, so I never used the old blogger - only the new. I'm using Wordpress on my website - some things I like, and some things I just can't figure out.
I have no idea how many people have visited my blog. How do you do that?
Good luck in the conversion process! I will put in a prayer to the techno-gods!
Toni, a few months ago, I heard about and signed up for Google Analytics. It's free — now, anyway — and tells you how many visits, where they came from (which blogs), what locations, domain names, countries, what words they searched for to find you, and so much more.
This blog gets a lot of hits from the East Coast and Midwest and Canada. In Europe, most of the hits come from England and France.
Congrats on your hits.
As for me...I guess I'm boring. I just like plain ole, rich, dark, very dark, chocolate. Not fussy about the shape, etc. Bring it on! Plan to start indulging in that chocolate this Wednesday.
I've really enjoyed new blogger. It seems to me -- if I remember correctly -- that I didn't lose my sidebar links but that I did lose any extra "stuff" I had put in (Flickr badge, links with logos, etc.) Alanna is right, though -- make sure to make a back-up copy of your template somewhere. When I changed FP they told me a copy of the old template would be saved, but I was never able to find out where! When I changed CQ, I just made a copy on Word, especially for the plug-in codes.
It's not that big of a deal and I really had no problems with it. I think it looks much neater than the old one.
Congrats in getting 200 hits in a day! I don't think that has happened to me yet, but I have had over 15,000 visits to La France Profonde. I didn't even notice it because I don't check my stats that often.
Have a great day!
Terri, I have been thinking of you! I will be there in spirit as your plane takes off. Will you blog from France?
Thanks for the words of advice, Betty. I have encountered only one problem and that is with the ledding between the title and the text/photo in the template I use, Scribe. (Love that name!)
I had an inkling we might have had a lot of visitors on Friday because of the post level.
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