…or a fully year. Cool. But it would have been only half the fun without you! So first off, I’d like to Thank You for being part of delicious:days, for all of your comments, suggestions and corrections! What an exciting ride it has been, turning around, looking back at the last 12 months, a couple of things I’d like to get of my chest…just before we’re entering our second year – a touch-and-go landing if you will :)
I blog for fun, but moreover I blog because I feel I can share a bit of my culinary life with people who have similar perceptions & take on what’s important in life and appreciate the little things just as much; so many positive things have developed out of this blog, reaching beyond “bits & bytes” (pun intended) including dear friendships in the offline world: How about a blind date for starters? On the day after New Year’s Eve, non-blogging readers of delicious:days invited us over for a late afternoon brunch. We had such a good time and what else can I say, other than “Foodies connect easily“… we enjoyed wonderful finger food in equally wonderful company, with a funny highlight: asking for a specific recipe, the response I received was “Got it from Johanna’s blog!“. That’s when you realize, that food-blogs indeed have become an increasingly attractive counterpart to much longer established food media like magazines or even books… Cheese–sandwich, anyone?
I love to read other blogs and the abundance of well done food blogs is breathtaking, making it a full time job to keep up with all the newer kids on the blog block. There is so much energy and inspiration out there, keeping me almost on a constant high – who said you can’t be high without sugar? Pure eye candy. Along these lines, I guess the only constant is change. Naturally, from a design perspective, delicious:days will continue to grow and evolve like it did over the last months. Sometimes in less obvious places, other times in form of a complete revision. Not trying to be presumptuous, but not without a teeny chuckle, I realized the adoption of round corners, popping up here and there…
I love all animals, except copycats. In a creative world it’s hard to draw a clear line between an intellectual copyright infringement and inspired work products. Whether its copying from cookbooks or from fellow food bloggers, reusing exact wording of published material without permission and/or credits, or design/photography-wise; e.g. check out foodwhore’s post (&comments). Hotlinking (without reference) we also see on a daily basis, so if you steal photos, do it right and copy them at least to your own server. Duh. Hope that trend line doesn’t continue to move up… Besides, what’s the fun in having your own blog, if you just copy the work of others, show it off and don’t even give credit?
So last year definitely has been an overdose on culinary information and inspiration and I should have made notes of my personal highlights out there. Consequently, I’m quite often drawing a blank when trying to think of a certain article from a fellow food-blogger (annoying it’s-on-the-tip-of- my-tongue-type situations), a few favorites however I see clearly in front of me:
David’s excellent write-up on Vanilla. Mrs. D’s and Chopper’s fabulous looking checkered ravioli. All of Clement’s posts on desserts – ‘glad he’s back on board, his dessert creations are simply jaw-dropping and amazing. Sam’s Chevre Cheesecake Pots with a finger-licking-delicious photograph, Eddie’s strange yet courageous food experiences, as well as Santos’ candy stripe cookie experience and Louisa meeting the “knife doctor“…
The “per capita” food blogger ratio in Germany is still way, waaaaaayyyy behind the Bay Area, where the concentration of food writers seem to beat the density of lead ;) On the other hand and perhaps unique in itself, a sweet example of an apple not falling far from the tree – mother and daughter not only sharing their passion for the culinary world, but also for the blogosphere :) On a different note, I was -very positively- surprised to find out that one of our favorite local cookbook authors has his office merely a stone through away from where we live. Sebastian did the complete, outstandingly successful Basic series for GU, which is also available in various other countries. Meanwhile we not only connected food-wise, but also seem to share a similar taste in bars (Negroni)…
It has just got to be one of the proudest moments of a blog owner finding out about what Google search queries spit out your site. Sometimes funny haha, a lot of times funny weird. Phrases that make you scratch your head, questions you hope to not have the answer for anywhere on your blog. Here are a few PG13 samples of Google searches leading to delicious:days:
- pizza express dough balls recipe
- hot mom next door
- st elmo squirrels and chipmunks pictures
- space drink germany
- ikea kitchen photos
- love for 18 yield
- today october 19 is what kind of chocolate day
- at the vikualienmarkt you can buy
- what does vanilla bean taste like?
- what makes germany so famous
- don’t try this at home recipes
- green day weck me up when september ends tab
- humidex any comments
- oasis pics from july 9th 2005
- how to melt a spoon with your fingers
- how to get rid of a burned tongue
- how do i get my rainboots white again
- how old is daniel cook on this show
- how much was delicious bought for?
- wmf happy spoon
- what does 2 oz of cooked pasta look like?
- can we use a coat of powder mustard and water treat a cough?
- how many days are there in the christmas brownies
- sweet recipes for flu
- how much money to drive a 1000 miles
Finally, to round up the post, below some useless-trivia-logfile-stat-info that we’ve collected over the past year. Not so long ago I ran across a post on FoodBlogS’cool about Blog-Owner-Stats and sure enough we check ours once in while, too – for what it’s worth *):
Number of page request:
in March ’05: 20,875
versus last month, a.k.a. crazy February ’06: 75,017
There are currently:
99 posts and 1,504 comments, contained within 8 categories
According to Feedburner:
~1030 RSS Reader
Most visitors a day:
February 1st (6,812) (it’s all “2006-bloggies” fault!)
Most visited/referred to post (5702 times): cubed coffee
*) With all the different reporting and statistics options and tools out there, what’s amazing is that they all produce different output. So don’t take these numbers as absolute numbers, chances are that they’re off. That’s something all web statistics seem to have in common and thus should generally be marked with a huge disclaimer. Counting IP addresses seems easy enough, but apparently it’s tough differentiating visitors from returning visitors from bots/search engines and what you have, going through proxies -cached or uncached. Oh well.
What else? A painful upgrade to WordPress 2.0 earlier this year, fortunately entailing only a brief downtime. Why painful? Because, based on the earlier version of WP we incorporated so much additional functionality in form of plugins and also via direct source code changes, that a clean upgrade path wasn’t necessarily given, to say the least. ‘Went through a few hoops cleaning up the code, making it XHTML (1.0 Transitional) and CSS compliant and turning all hacks into regular plugins. Good point in time to thank my sweetheart for all the late night hours he spent on straightening out the mess, **smooch**.
Is that it? Not quite. One of the most hilarious moments we had, when we received an offer from a Wisconsin based Sauerkraut producer asking if we were interested in a partnership and learning more about Sauerkraut. Fact is, we live in Sauerkraut-City. Munich is and has been surrounded for centuries by farmers producing Sauerkraut, reaching back into the 16th century. It’s like selling the idea of fugu to a Japanese restaurant in Tokyo ;)
A semi-final note: we very much appreciate each and every email we get and your interest in delicious:days, however, please accept our apologies for possible delays in our responses. Our inbox seems to be hooked up to an email IV line, receiving a constant inflow. Perhaps also check here for more info.
Now entering the second year what will change? I’m not the tiniest bit tired of engaging in new culinary experiences, quite the contrary: expect more food craziness than ever – of course always with a stylish note. And then there are still those uncountable cookbooks I can hear shouting my name and waiting to be discovered…so much good food, so little time.
Looking forward to a fun next 365 days with you!
Nicky (and Oliver)
Mar 6th,
2006
Congratulations on reaching one year and creating a truly delightful blog along the way.