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March 21, 2012

Photo Geotagging: Stop Giving Out Your Home Address on Twitter

Welcome BlogHer readers!

How exciting to be on the front page of one of the top 100 US web sites. Congratulations on the recognition of your growth, BlogHer! I remember when you were a tiny fledgling thing...my how you've grown.

If you are new to kitchenMage, thanks for clicking by. Perhaps you would be interested in a sampling of my most popular recipes: Simple, flaky biscuit recipe (1k+ Pinterest Pins and often #1 on Google!), Small Batch Pioneer Woman's Cinnamon Rolls, No-cook ice cream recipe (yes, with eggs. I also rant occasionally: Dear PETA, women are animals too... and I am sort of chuffed that I got into Wikipedia for a bit of humor Cooks Source Statement: Slightly Corrected.

Um, see that ad on the top of the sidebars? I wrote a cookbook Picture Yourself Cooking With Your Kidsstep-by-step photos of recipes using real food, a Cook's Primer that includes lots of food for thought, and loads of tips on getting your kids into the kitchen with you. (Enough self-promotion, on with the post...)

Updated 3.22.2012 Sometime in the last twenty-four hours, between when this was posted and this morning, the Instagram maps I discuss have disappeared. Instagram is oddly quiet, too. I have inquiries out and will update you when I know something but in the meantime I am feeling all internet powerful and stuff...

Walt statue
photo courtesy Darren Wittko

 “Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.” Walt Disney

Walt died in 1966, years before the guys who invented Twitter were born, yet one look at a twitter stream will show you that Walt's words are still true today.

Twitter handles a staggering 22.5 million photos a day, according to twitter founder Ev Stone, about 25% of the 90 million total daily tweets. Media Bistro cites over 58 million photos were shared on Twitter in December 2011.

I know that those two statistics don't exactly add up but to be honest, statistics about twitter vary widely enough to make me doubt the specifics of all of them. My guess is that if I bothered to dig, Ev's numbers would reflect retweets while the second number counts photos, not tweets. In any case, the numbers are huge and that's somewhat beside the point.

Which is: What exactly are you sharing with the world when you tweet a photo?

Continue reading "Photo Geotagging: Stop Giving Out Your Home Address on Twitter" »

February 21, 2012

How-to: Block Pinterest pinning from your site

updated March 10th: Added how-to block pinning without advanced templates. Thanks to Typepad's support folks for the tip.


Nopins

While I am of the "Please pin my stuff" clan, there are others who are of the "Don't Pin me, bro!" tribe. For those folks, a short and sweet method for blocking people from pinning your pages.

Advanced Templates

Add this snippet to the HEAD section of your HTML pages 

<meta name="pinterest" content="nopin" />

Without Advanced Templates

Go to your blog's Settings Page, Basics section. Add this snippet to the Blog Description field.

<meta name="pinterest" content="nopin" />

I have it after the actual description on a test blog and it's working fine but this is a bit of a hack so please let me know if you see any weirdness.

Download text file with the NoPinCode and instructions.

February 03, 2012

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

Pinterestlogo

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.

Continue reading "How-to: Add Pin it Button with Pin Count to Typepad Advanced Templates" »

January 26, 2012

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

 

Pinterest_Logo
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.) 

Continue reading "How-to: Add Pinterest Pin-It Button to Typepad Without Advanced Templates" »

September 05, 2011

A Labor Day Thank You To "The Help"

kitchen: the long shot

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.

Continue reading "A Labor Day Thank You To "The Help"" »

April 01, 2011

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.

Continue reading "Typepad Does Not Support Google Recipe View on Blogs (Updated - It Kinda Does)" »

March 09, 2011

Wordless Wednesday: Tweaking My English Muffins

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.

November 10, 2010

Cooks Source Statement: Slightly Corrected

Internet-not-public-domain

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.

Continue reading "Cooks Source Statement: Slightly Corrected" »

November 04, 2010

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...

Continue reading "Cooks Source: Now For Something Completely Different" »

October 07, 2010

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.

44027839v1_240x240_Front_Color-AshGrey 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...

Continue reading "Words, Words, Words... Let's Start with Foodie (extended)" »

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All content on this site is © Beth Sheresh (2005-2012). Please play nice and don't take things that aren't yours.
See something you like and want to use? Drop me a note, kitchenMage(at)gmail(dot)com. I'm pretty agreeable when people ask.