Today I'm thinking about an alternative index structure for my food blog. I've gone through a few revisions, but with the available plug-ins for blogger, there isn't much that I can do as far as site organization goes. By default, posts are archived by year and month, and this is really unhelpful if I wanted to look for a specific recipe. I added cooking method and ingredients as major tag categories, which show up on the left-side navigation and all the posts that have exact match tags to those will show up in the feed when clicked on. This produces other unfortunate results. For example: desserts. I have made a lot of desserts. While they are all of different cooking/baking methods, every dessert recipe I have ever blogged will all show up in reverse sequential order (newest first) on that category list.
Recently added features to the site include: by popular demand (shows the most requested on recipes on the site) and LinkWithin's "you might like this" add-in which shows related posts by keyword tag. It's not terribly accurate but it's better than nothing. Maybe what I need is a master index of kitchen notes and food recipes. But how to cleverly serve up this content...
It's debatable whether or not I'll allow 3rd party advertising on the site, such as AdSense or BlogHer. Even though I am a diehard marketer, I hate looking at ads. That's not to say I don't have a few ads embedded in the recipes or kitchen notes with Amazon associate links. Besides, if anyone is to make money off my writings, it should be me. I haven't seeded the site onto more popular global sites or recipe exchanges because I would like to create my own e-book first and publish it through Amazon Kindle and/or Google Books. What stops me is the notion that there are at least 100 million home cooks in the US, and while few of them write about their recipes in the print or digital space, there are many who do, and I'm not particularly interested in turning this into a full-time venture.
The food blog is my online cookbook. It's so that I can access the ingredient ratios and cooking methods wherever I am, as long as friends/family have an internet connection. And, it's better system than the paper-based one I use now (scribbled onto random pieces of paper, unused parts of envelopes, the cardboard backing of writing pads) that I have clipped together with one of those bag clips. I write about successes, mistakes, and troubleshooting, but not quite with the writing skill of Cooks Illustrated. The majority of bloggers seem to only focus on successfully-made recipes and very rarely do they talk about what went horribly wrong in the kitchen.
