kitchenmage

How-to: Add Pin it Button with Pin Count to Typepad Advanced Templates

Typepad does not have a Pinterest widget so we are on our own for the moment. By "on our own" I mean I figured out how to do it and here's how.

If you don't have advanced templates, go here: How-to: Add Pinterest Pin-It Button to Typepad Without Advanced Templates

The one caveat to this code is that the first image in each post MUST be hosted on Typepad. I have asked Typepad if there is a workaround and they assure me there is not. I am moving my images...slowly. (There is a trick to move images all at once. Export your posts and then import them. That process seems to result in Typepad copying all the images to their servers. I am not recommending it unless you think the process through carefully but the option is there.)

Since they also seem to be looking to incorporate a Pin it button into standard templates, I expect this is what we get until then.

How-to: Add Pinterest Pin-It Button to Typepad Without Advanced Templates

 

Now the way I see things, there are two ways to be in the world: selfish or giving. All snark aside, I choose the latter. With Pinterest, for example, once I was enlightened about it I wanted to share the way of thePin. I wanted to share it here because then even more people could pin my biscuits. (Pin my biscuits! sounds a southern euphemism for...well...something else, doesn't it?)

I was surprised to learn that Typepad does not have a Pinterest widget. Yeah I know, right? That is just silly given the level of pinning going on right now. Being a geek, I put on my coding hat and figured out how to make a pin-it button for my web sites. being the generous sort I figured I'd share so you too can have Pin-it buttons now.

The instructions on this page work for all Typepad templates (and any other web page you want to throw the code into). If you have advanced templates, you can use these instructions for how to add the Pinterest Pin it Button with Pin Count to Individual Posts with Typepad Advanced Templates.

Going to the source, in this case, Pinterest's Goodies page, yielded some iffy scripts and a distinct lack of "simple" ways to get a freaking Pin it button onto each individual post. (Hard-coding each link and image is a joke, you guys. A freaking joke!)

You know what's not a joke? Look down there. (No not "down there"...jeebus people! The footer of this post.) That looks suspiciously like a Pin it button. Works a whole lot like one, too.

Have a Typepad blog and want one of your very own? It's a quick tweak if you are using Advanced Templates. If you don't code, though, you're pretty much screwed on this. Typepad even says so...

Hey, wait now...what about the post title? Where I promise you that you can have a Pin it button even without advanced templates?

Well, while I haven't yet figured out how to give you a Pin-it button in your post footer (like mine) without Advanced Templates, I can give you a Pin-it button in your Navigation Bar that works for individual posts. Would that work for you? Yeah, I thought so. I am really happy because any time a vendor shrugs their shoulders without getting creative, I wince. (@jaydeflix will be along any moment to tell me this isn't in the header/footer so technically Typepad said NOTHING about what I am doing. I would simply point out the lack of a Pin it button on Cook Local and move on with the installation instructions.) 

A Labor Day Thank You To "The Help"

Dear someoneElse, theKid, and various friends...but mostly someoneElse,

As we celebrate Labor Day weekend in the US—mainly by spending three days doing as little labor as possible—I'd like to pause a moment and salute all of your labor on behalf of this site, my cookbook and the rest of my food writing endeavors.

You, and people like you, are the unsung heroes of the food writing world: Our partners, children, roommates, family, friends and random people we happen to con into doing a little cleaning up...since we did all the cooking.

Barely acknowledged, and then usually in some way that reflects well on the writer, you toil unseen and unremarked while the cook reaps all the praise.

"Unseen" was going to be a joke. I was going to post a photo with a blurry figure working through a sink full of dishes in the background. I searched my 45,000 photo library and came up blank. Then I asked friends. Nothing. So, yeah, unseen. Unnoted. Definitely unthanked.

Unsung, and if you were, it would be definitely a Blues song.

Typepad Does Not Support Google Recipe View on Blogs (Updated - It Kinda Does)

ADDED LATER

There is a not-very-elegant workaround but my position on the problem stands. I'm talking to Typepad in tickets about the simple changes they would have to make to more fully support Recipe View. In the meantime, my transformation spell will include instructions on how to make it work on Typepad. See this for more.

Let me just start with a giant WTF.

WTF?

Ah! I feel better and I'll get to why in just a moment...

If you hang around food sites much, you may have heard about Google Recipe View. It's a highly selective search method that Google conjured up recently. When you click on it, you are presented with a tiny subset of recipes that are available on big corporate sites like Epicurious. There are a handful of big blogs included at the moment (literally under a dozen) which is pretty pathetic when you consider the tens of thousands of unique and interesting food sites that exist.

I expect that as Google begins to let blogs in - there is some mystical, black box method of selection - and sites provide useful data for the search refinements (it's largely useless now) it will be a worthwhile thing. For now, I am eschewing Recipe View for my personal use in favor of the broader and more interesting searches available with all of the web or even just blogs. Give it a while to mature.

In the meantime, there is a lot of work to be done by bloggers who want to have their recipes show up. Things like recoding every single recipe post with a seriously painstaking mass of code. This is an awful lot of work and many people are opting to wait until there are tools available that make it simple to meet Google's requirements.

So I made one.

Wordless Wednesday: Tweaking My English Muffins

I started with this recipe: English muffins and crumpets: an (almost) shared recipe and while it's closer to what I want, it's still not quite there.

Speaking of things that are not there...can we talk about me for a nanosecond? I have been ill lately, which is why I have been not here. (All I really want to say is that if anyone ever says to you, "quick choose a modifier for 'nausea and vomiting'..." you should NOT choose "intractable"...) This seems to be an ongoing thing (oh joy) so I have to figure out what the hell the food writer who doesn't eat much writes about (since we know I am not writing about myself). I am accepting input on this...

One of the very few things I can eat on my not so good days is English Muffins, hence the recipe tweaking. The next batch will be get a little more water and be cooked in rings. Photos soon. I hope.

Cooks Source Statement: Slightly Corrected

To Unknown Cooks Source Source,

After waiting days for you to emerge and say something, I read your statement. I am really disappointed in you. In addition to some glaring errors, it has quite a few problems with style and substance. I have taken it upon myself to make some edits, gratis. Corrections are inline below, deletions are strikethrough and additions are red. Notes to consider when rewriting are red and parenthetical. (In case you haven't read it, the black text is the actual original.)

STATEMENT HUMBLE APOLOGY

We are sorry. So sorry.

We do not know how the hell that happened. I mean, we thought we hired a professional editor and we got...well, you know what we got.

We have cancelled lost control of our Facebook page on Thursday, November 4th, 2010 at 6:00PM. It has since been since been hacked by unknown parties and now someone else (I think this is a known unknown, not an unknown unknown.) unknown to us has control of it. Their inclusion of Cooks Source issues and photos is used without our knowledge or consent. (Really? You're going with they used your content without your consent? Really? Might I suggest you STFU instead.) Please know that none of the statements made by attributed to either Cooks Source or Judith Griggs were made by either our staff or her. On the other hand, that arrogant and ignorant email she sent to Monica Gaudio? All Griggs. Yeah, I know. We don't get it either. What do we get? That we are sorry. Very sorry.

Cooks Source: Now For Something Completely Different

Update: Cooks Source issued a statement. It needed a little cleaning up, so I did: Cooks Source Statement: Slightly Corrected (10.9.10)

If you care about food, writing, law, scandal, chicanery, hypocrisy and/or Internet drama — which may define my readers, by the way — you have no doubt heard about Cooks Source, but just in case you are none of the above, welcome and a summation:

The tl;dr version of this post: My 2005 Ice Dragon entry, called "A Tale of Two Tarts" was apparently printed without my knowledge or permission in a magazine and I am apparently the victim of copyright infringement.
             from Illadore's House o Crack - Copyright Infringement and Me

There is, of course, more.

It is the kind of 'more' from which grand Internet dramas are made: Clueless editor, arrogant responses, google reveals the magazine seems to be built on lifted content, class action suits are suggested (after someone finds Martha Stewart, NPR, and Disney amongst the victims; it's corporate money they want to use for lawyers)...and the pile-on begins.

We are now at less than 20 hours and there are dozens of posts, a Facebook pileon, thousands of tweets, fake twitter and Facebook accounts, the Cooks Source site has been up and down and there's just a whole lot of poo being flung around by the flying monkeys. It's only going to get messier - there's apparently a Travel Source magazine which seems to also be full of infringing material (check for your stuff here).

Illadore's article has the full story, which has now been rehashed all over the Internet, it is well worth the read it if you are interested in what is going on.

I want to talk about what is not...

Words, Words, Words... Let's Start with Foodie (extended)

Update: Suggestions for new words will be accepted until Monday, Oct 11th at midnight. Voting will begin on Tuesday the 12th.

As a writer, I have the privilege of making up words and shoving them into books as if they belong there. I do this knowing that it gives the word a certain veritas to make it to the printed page; as a tyke in a bookshop said, "It MUST be a real word, it's in a book!"

Okay, the truth is this. When I heard this kid at the store, someoneElse and I had just been discussing terms we made up for a book we were writing and I cringed at the power authors were being handed. Now I embrace the ability to create (or reuse) a word that encapsulates an idea beautifully and set it loose in the world. 

Words like fruffle - a cross between fluffy and ruffled, coined for a very fruffly furling; Or entanglement - our term for what someoneElse and I are to each other.

Cute words for cute things. Who could object?

Other words float in from elsewhere and are not necessarily as universally welcomed. Words like...

Recipes Are Like Children

Your recipes are not your recipes.
They are the sons and daughters of Food's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
                                           With apologies to Kahlil Gibran

Watching the International Food Blogger Conference online is bittersweet this year. I sold my ticket 24 hours before the conference started when it became obvious it just wasn't going to work out for me this year. Fortunately for those of us who wanted to go but couldn't, there are livestreams of conferences and blog posts are already starting to pop up. Better, there is the twitterstream (The hashtag is #ifbc if you want to follow along.)

One of the sentiments that was being tossed around on twitter today can be summed up as: "Adjusting a recipe doesn't make it yours"

Without going deeply into the legalities of recipe copyright, which are rather straightforward compared to the conversation around them, here's how it works. Ingredients lists are not protected but "substantial literary expression" in the descriptive text and steps is, as are collections of recipes such as cookbooks. This means that if you rewrite the steps, you can republish the recipe without giving credit to anyone. Technically.

Ethically, this gets really muddy. Someone once said "if you change three ingredients it is a new recipe." Somebody was making this up as she went along, and a whole lot of people heard and believed her. There is at least one prominent food blog claiming all recipes are originals that operates under this credo and last I looked, never credits inspiration or source. sigh

In my view, recipes are like children. I 'own' mine while they live at home in my cookbook or website, but once they mature and move out on their own...not so much.

If they get a chive mohawk or pierce their noses, well, that's their thing. I'd appreciate it if there was a shoutout to me - sort of like keeping the family name after marriage - but own them? Nah.

Take my recipes. Please. Use them. Tweak them to make them yours. Just give me a backlink, okay?

How about you: Do you write or adapt recipes? Where do your draw your lines?

Food Photo Props: Cleaning Clam Shells

Every food photographer I know is on an eternal quest for good props for their photos. Over the last couple of years, I have collected a lot of dishes; some days it seems the plates multiply when I leave the room...and still I want more. You, too?