I’ve received some emails from some of you noticing I haven’t been posting many blog posts recently and if everything is all right. First let me thank you for your concerns and let you know that everything is just fine. The reason I haven’t been posting much lately is because we are putting the finishing touches on a year long project to update The Reluctant Gourmet website to a brand new platform.
Trying to keep up with all the incredible technology now available, reluctantgourmet.com is transforming from a static html site to a dynamic Joomla engine. (I tried Joomla but it turned out to be a disaster so I changed it to WordPress)
What this means is you will be able to navigate the site much more easily to find the cooking techniques and recipes you are interested in and a whole bunch more bells and whistles.
Some of the new features in the new site are:
Search recipes by Ingredient – Recipe – Category – Technique and Cooking Tools
Ability to find similar recipes when looking at a recipe – for example let’s say you are checking out my turkey soup recipe, you will soon be able to find photos and links to 4 or 5 other soup recipes on the same page.
Categorized cooking techniques – I’ve put all the cooking techniques into separate categories so if you are interested in learning “how to braise”, all my posts about braising are right there.
If you then want to find all my braising recipes, there is going to be an easy way to find them too.
Integration of Blog and Site – right now there is a web site and a blog with no coordination between the two. With the new design, it will look like one seamless site that’s easy to navigate.
There will be quick access to social media like Facebook and Twitter plus I’m adding Pinterest. And there will be RSS feeds from all the major category pages.
More photography with larger images and as I learn more about food photography, (hopefully) better food shots.
The ability to make the font sizes larger or smaller. I don’t know about you, but it seems the font size on some sites is getting smaller and smaller. I suppose it could be my eyes aren’t what they used to be.
Here’s one you’ve all be asking for – the ability to print recipes without all the stuff in the headers, footers and right column. You’ll even be able to print with or without the photos.
So please be patient with me. We are getting close, but there is still a whole bunch more to do. Every recipe, article and photo has to be brought over to the layout, cleaned up, reformatted and then checked for mistakes. I never realized I had posted that many pages over the years. There sure are a lot of them.
I think you will enjoy the new look and appreciate the easier navigation. We are doing what we can to launch as soon as possible with the understanding that many of the pages will need to be tweaked afterward.
I’m still eating so I’m still cooking and will try to post some new recipes and techniques while this is all going on but wanted you to know why you haven’t heard from me in a while. I’ll be sure to post updates on my Facebook and Twitter pages, as we get closer to launch.
Wish me luck
Looks great.