November 2007
Free Food Blogs
Amid the big announcements last week, one big feature of Common Kitchen got underplayed, and now may be a good time to highlight it.The simple summary is this: if you’re a Common Kitchen user, you can keep a free food blog on the site. Just go to the “My Account” link on the left, and you’ll see a link which says something like, “Create Your Blog.” And there it is. Take a look at mine, for example.The point of these blogs is a bit more complicated. Every recipe on Common Kitchen has a source, whether that’s a cookbook, a magazine, or a website. But anyone who has been cooking for more than a few weeks has at least one recipe kicking around which bears no relation to any published source. How would you put that recipe on Common Kitchen?The answer is: post it on your blog. Now the blog is the source. That’s what I did with my sweet potato fries, for example. As I was writing the post, I checked a box at the bottom of the form which said, “Add this as a recipe to Common Kitchen,” and now the recipe is listed on the site (and quite well rated, as well, since I fed them to Noah and medfordgardener.)There’s nothing stopping you from using your blog to write about other things, like musing on oregano or even non-food-related details. It’s yours, after all. So now that I’ve rambled on, what do you have to say?
Our official “launch”
CommonKitchen.com has officially launched! We’re not “done” in any sense, but most of the major pieces are in place. We’ve taken the “beta” phrase off the logo on the site, which means we’re not planning on removing anything big without giving you a lot of warning.
If you haven’t visited the site in a few weeks, come on by and see what’s new: better searching (including restaurant searches based on location), recipe indexing from magazines, and food blogs for everyone.
We’ve posted an announcement about Common Kitchen on our website. Please feel free to send the link (or the entire announcement) on to anyone you know who might be interested in Common Kitchen. You can also use the “Invite a friend” link on the site itself.
And don’t forget to add your recipes! If those of you in the USA need last-minute Thanksgiving ideas, check our collection of recipes tagged “thanksgiving”. And after dinner on Thursday, come back and review the recipes, or use your food blog to tell us what you tried and how it worked! It’s your collective experience with the recipes on the site that makes the community work.
Thank you for being part of Common Kitchen!
Server crash
CommonKitchen.com was offline for a few hours on Wednesday night and Thursday morning. Our server had hardware problems which took several hours to resolve.
As a small company, we’re obliged to rent server space, rather than owning our own hardware. This has advantages–for example, a hardware failure doesn’t require us to purchase expensive new equipment–but it also means that our server is in Dallas, while we’re outside Boston. We have to rely on our hosting company to fix certain problems for us, and while their support is generally excellent, miracles (like e.g. swapping entire hard disks into new servers) take a few hours.
We’re taking steps to minimize our downtime during events like this, but the technical details are really outside the scope of this blog, so we’ll explain them in a more technical post elsewhere.