Tag: meta

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The Project

I Forgot My Own Birthday

Happy Birthday Gourmet Project!

On Thursday March 6th The Gourmet Project had its first birthday, and I forgot to mark the occasion.

I’ve been having a wonderful time cooking, photographing, and writing the blog and I’ve been thrilled with the steady growth in readership over the past year. My first month out the site had 142 unique visitors, while last month 4575 of you came by. I’ve really enjoyed interacting with all of you in the comments, and I’ve been especially pleased to hear back from those of you who’ve tried some of the recipes.

A Birthday is a good time for a little state of the blog update. With 149 recipes written-up I’ve maintained a pace of 2.8 recipes / week, and completed 11.5% of the project. At this rate I’ll be finished on Dec 1st 2015. All in all I don’t think I’m doing too badly. I still have a serious backlog of recipes to plow through, and it’s growing rather than shrinking. I’ve grown to appreciate the time between cooking and writing which allows me to mull the recipes over. But, in my ideal world, I’d only leave a couple of weeks lag, the present 3 months is too much.

Over the year the blog itself has been upgraded with features like categories, tagging, comment management, sharing on social networks, statistics, and progress tracking, which hopefully make the site a lot more useful. We’re looking into adding new features in the next little while. I’m planning on making my trek through the book more seasonal and thematic in the coming year, and focusing on some of those chapters that I’ve been neglecting.

It’s been a great year, and I hope you’ll join me for eight more.

* The lovely birthday cake photo is courtesy of Pinkcakebox’s excellent CC licensed photostream on flickr

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The Project

Winter Vacation

Happy Holidays,

After great visits with family and friends over the past few days, I’m heading off to the airport to join my dining companion and her family for a ski vacation. I’ll have plenty of time to relax and write about food, but only sporadic internet access. Look for updates in batches between here and Jan 8th.

During last year’s ski getaway my dining companion’s family asked me to cook something, and this is what I did.

wish me better luck this time around!

All the best to you and yours,

KC

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The Project

Double Digits

Check it out! I’m 10% of the way through The Project. Just 1164 more recipes to go.

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Food Blogs The Project

New Kid On The Block

I’m pleased to introduce a new food and wine blog to the web. My dining companion has started writing about the restaurants we visit, the wines we drink, the products we love, and her experiences as devotee of the good life in Montreal. I look forward to her lessons in leisure, and invite you all to follow along.

I’ve added her new site to the blogroll, along with a few other food sites I’ve been reading. I’m loving Carol’s The French Laundry at Home. She’s cooking her way through Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry Cookbook. When I complain about convoluted and arduous recipes in The Book, I just think of poor Carol.

I get a real kick out of gamecakes‘ pictures of video-game themed confections. High-tech gadgets are designed to look edible, and this takes it to the logical conclusion.

I’ve only recently tuned in to two of the bigger group authored food blogs on the web, Slashfood and Serious Eats. They’ve earned their reputations and then some.

So, what else should I be following along with? I’m always interested in great food blogs, particularly people doing similar projects to mine. If there’s something I should check out, by all means let me know in the comments.

And now for a minor update on the state of The Project. The most recent recipe posted was #113. This summer I challenged myself to write 60 posts in 60 days, and get #113 posted by September 14th. I failed miserably in that challenge, my two month project took three-and-a-half. I’ve been pretty good about keeping a steady ground-eating pace to my write-ups though. I’m catching up on my backlog, and I’m happy to say I’m only 32 recipes behind. The day that I have to go to the kitchen and cook something before I can write my next review is within sight.

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The Project

Tags

I’ve decided that in addition to the chapter categories we’ve already got, I’m going to go back and add free-form tags to my posts thus far, and to use them for posts going forward. I suspect that this is going to drive people who follow The Project through RSS nuts, as every item will show up as new. My apologies. But, if we don’t train the semantic web, how will Skynet become self aware? It’ll also allow fun features like tag clouds, and browsing by tags (not yet implemented).

edit: Seems like I can implement the tags totally behind the scenes, so much the better.

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The Project

Flattery Will Get You Everywhere

My friend, and regular Gourmet Project commenter, Nique writes a weekly comic devoted to thinly veiled jabs at the people in her life. This week she shows her appreciation for The Project. Check out all of her fine work at niqueworks.ca.

In other news, operation 60 in 60 is significantly behind. I’ve done 30 in 45, not quite the pace I was hoping to set. So I’ll need accelerate to two recipes per day for the next couple of weeks to get up to #113 by Sept 14th.

On a brighter note I’ve finished the backlog of dishes from the spring of 2006, and can now focus on the spring of 2007.

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The Project

Some Rights Reserved

I’ve decided to license all of the content on this site under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License . What this means is that you are welcome to reuse, remix, sample, mash-up, fool around with, build upon, and otherwise express your creativity with all of the content of this blog. As with any good deal there are a couple of caveats and provisos. If you use a picture or text from the blog you’ve got to mention that you got the content from here. You may only use the content for non-commercial purposes. And, if you want to include my work in some future work of yours, you can only release that work under a similar creative commons license. Sound fair?

The recipes I’ve copied out of The Book are fair use samples. I don’t own the copyright on them, therefore I can’t share that copyright with you. Those recipes belong to the good people at Gourmet, and they’ve reserved all of their rights.

I’ve added the Creative commons info at the bottom of the side bar, along with a Technorati favorites button. If you’re enjoying The Project let Technorati know.

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The Project

Catching Up

I’ve been looking through the backlog of recipes I’ve prepared, but still have to blog. While I’m doing well on the cooking, I’m way behind and slipping on the blogging. As of today’s count I’m 60 recipes behind, and I’m blogging midwinter recipes in July. Life coaches and fitness gurus are forever telling Oprah to set small intermediate goals which are achievable. So, my sub-goal for the summer is to blog 60 recipes in 60 days. By September 14th I will post recipe #113. If I fail, you can all mock me. There will be no prize if I succeed, just more blogging.

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The Project

Sprucing Up

There are a couple of new features and tweaks to the look and feel of the site. The technical wizard at Kebes inc. has whipped up a statistics page so you can track my progress in fine detail. Click on the Progress Bar, or the Statistics page link in the sidebar to see it.

Another nice addition is the Chapter by Chapter entry in the sidebar, which will let you browse the completed recipes by chapter from The Book. You’ll get a thumbnail image, the mushroom rating, and a snippet of each entry.

Beyond that we’ve made a couple of little user interface changes that should make browsing the site easier than ever. Enjoy.

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The Project

A 50th Recipe Perspective

With the writeup of the 50th post, it’s time to take a look at how things are going. There are 1293 recipes in the book, and in the past 127 days I’ve blogged 50 of them. At this rate I’ll be finished on July 7th 2016, that’s assuming I can keep my cooking ahead of my writing. I’m working on ways of speeding things up, but I’m enjoying the process so what’s the rush?

Things were getting a bit unwieldy when looking through the archives, so I’ve gone back and tagged each recipe by chapter to make things easier.

More stats and musing behind the cut.

Continue reading “A 50th Recipe Perspective”