kitchenmage

Fact-checking a Photograph

Sometimes a photo just seems too good to be true. You know how it is, the hi-res sunset is too gorgeous for a phone, the amateur's cake is too perfect, the crowd is too large. Something is wrong on the Internet.

Like this photo, which is I now know not of a Trayvon Martin protest. Twitter disagrees. Still.

When I saw it, it didn't seem quite right to me that the crowd had grown from nothing to this without a tweet in between. If just felt off...so I checked.

Here's how you can tell if that "feeling" is real...

How to Tell if a Photo is Real...or Really Of "The Thing" They Say It Is...

btw, this is also a great way to track down sites that have lifted a photo of yours.

(Photo source: Guardian story on the bridge's 75th anniversary party)

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 Kids—step-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...

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?

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.

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.

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.) 

#anAppleForSteve

image courtesy Miss Mags at I want to go to Faerie College, one of my favorite blog names ever.

The Interwebs has a huge iSad today for Steve Jobs has uploaded himself to elsewhere.

While I am not a member of the club, I know that there are many of you who have been deeply touched and inspired by Steve over the years.

As a foodPerson, I also know what we do to console ourselves, or celebrate the lives of those who touched us. We eat.

Often special, ceremonial foods. Favorite foods to honor people. Something appropriate for the occasion.

The obvious thing to eat for Steve is an Apple.

It was not only the name of his company, it was his favorite food. (Unless you count the sushi that was the sole exception to his veganism.)

So if you're going to miss Steve, eat an apple. Locally grown, organic, from a farmer's market, as Steve would, or picked up at the local Wallyworld, I don't care. Just eat one.

It's affordable, near effortless, good for your health - and the Apple industry in my home state of Washington - and Steve would approve.

The tradition of my childhood plants trees in memory of people we love. If you have a garden, you might want to plant him a tree. An apple tree, of course.

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.

New Twitter Fixes: Remove Who to Follow and More!

UPDATE (October 30th)

Some people are reporting that the AdBlock Plus fixes aren't working for them any more. It seems to be people using Firefox 4.0b6, which appears to have known compatibility issues with ABP - the joys of using a beta 0 and I'm currently looking for a workaround. If you're a geek with this configuration and want to help, let me know.

UPDATE (October 29th)

Twitter has renamed the WTF (Who To Follow) DIV again so you need to update your CSS/AdBlock filters.

• CSS - add .user-rec-component to your CSS file
• Adblock - Add a filter for twitter.com##H2.user-rec-component

Also, the Who to Follow that pops up on someone else's page, after you follow them:

• CSS - add .user-rec-dropdown.profile-action to your CSS file
• Adblock - Add a filter for twitter.com##DIV.user-rec-dropdown.profile-action

If I have missed any bits, or if they change something, let me know and I'll get the updates here. I am going to reorganize this mess soon and break it up into individual bits for each browser so it's easier for the non-geeks to follow (sorry, the word makes me cringe a bit now). Soon.

   ~       ~       ~       ~       ~       ~       ~       ~       ~       ~

The silly lovely people at twitter finally let me have #newtwitter (that is the new twitter web interface for those of you who think twitter is silly) and it is...different. (Look at me, being all diplomatic and stuff!) Feature rich, in the best "It must be a feature, it is certainly not a benefit." sense. Screen hog, promoted trends, blah, blah.

Yeah, whatever. We know what to do with that noise, don't we?

Venn Diagram of kitchenMage ~ now with Badges!

Someone said to me recently, "I don't read, can't trust, sites without an 'About' page." (paraphrased and in quotes to annoy the editors) Once I got over sputtering to myself about having a very public real name, not to mention a link to my cookbook right there at the top of every page, I decided I'd use it as a nudge to actually write one.

Then I ran headlong into my inability to write about myself. Painfully. Repeatedly. Ouch!

At one point, I turned to my writer buds on twitter for consolation and discovered that logobiophobia (my new word for fear of writing about your own life) is as common as drinking. (There is a business there, but I am guessing few writers would want to do it.)

Failing to come up with words, well coherent ones anyway, I turned to avoidance doodling  illustrations as a way to simplify my explanation of what this site is about.

Good idea. Being a geek, I lean towards the scientific/mathematical representations so I not have a folder full of pie charts, graphs and this: my Venn diagram of kitchenMage.

I found the exercise of making a graphical presentation of the site - not to mention paring it down to three words - helped me sort out some of the noise in my brain about my current/future direction here. Starting with the new design which will be out by next week. The rest? Stay tuned. I'll let you know as I figure it out.

The one thing I know: there will be a real About page. Not because I agree that you can't trust sites without one, but because now I think I can write one that might even be worth reading.

Edited to add: The most common response to this post is a tweet saying, "You stole my Venn!" After a few such, @jeters and I decided that a badge was in order and here it is.

If it fits you, please feel free to snag a copy and post on your site. I'd appreciate if you linked the image back to this post so your readers can get the context. I'll add a list to this post of everyone who lets me now they have joined the Snarky Geeky Foodie cabal.

Download 450px wide image
Download 160px wide image

What would a Venn diagram of your site look like? I would love for you to make one and you might find it interesting. If you do, please come back and share the link with me.

Twitter, twitter, twitter...I do not care who else follows them...

Another day, another Div to block. This is starting to feel like Whack-a-mole.

Here's the filter for you AdBlocking kids:

twitter.com##DIV.followed-by

If you are using a stylesheet, open it up add this to it:

.followed-by {

     display:none

}

#followed-by {

     display:none

}

If you need the long version of the instructions, go here: Twitter Hovercards Die.die.die 

Okay, twitter. What's next?