Hardcore Spin-Off

I like my new camera more than I like this pizza.

Chunked chicken does not belong on a pizza, so, I had to make another.

Any chicken here? Sure is. Plenty. I took a breast, grilled and shredded it. Mixed it with some Thai rub and a bit of BBQ sauce just to make it smokey and sweet. I used the shredded chicken-and-rub-BBQ as the sauce. Spoon it on and spread it around. The cheese here is a hard-to-melt English Coastal Cheddar, and some quality Mozzarella.

Olives were cut with a new sushi knife. Rings are forever gone. These things work much better.


Cooking is going nicely and the shape is going bowl-o. I had not expected this, but I have repeated the result many times. Here is a cooked and detailed ultra-thin dough. I've taken 1/8 of a recipe and made a 12" pizza. My neighbor loved it. I got one slice.

This was declared a paper-plate crust. Want one?

I don't deliver pizza anymore, but I will make a deal with you.

I've got enough pizza stuff to make a whole new blog, and there are some that have pestered me to purchase dough balls so that they can make their own gluten-free pizza. This tells me that I really need to make a blog just for the pizza thing. Therefore, I will do so.

Once the pizza blog is ready to go on-line, the first post will be the recipe for the classic gluten-free pizza crust that you see above. It works like a pastry and has a bit of forgiveness. Do me the honor and come back to this blog and check the "Links" section to find the haphazard, semi-live pizza blog.

Cheers!

Edit Pages - A New Wrinkle

I didn't get an update e-mail from my other blog about the new Edit Pages tab that popped up in the display bar. It's highlighted in orange.

Clicking on it by mistake lead to the discovery that I can add up to 10 pages to the blog. An "about me" page was the example, but my first thought was to create a page for the copyright notice and the privacy policy, and get them out of the sidebar. The sidebar is getting crowded with stuff and I'd personally like to get a little more space for maybe one more advertisement. Of course, we're not talking about this blog, since I've not lit up ads over here yet.

Since I am talking about my other blog, which is currently under scrutiny from the reading public, I'd like to make sure that everything works properly. I'll do the job here first, make sure it works, and then take that new knowledge in hand and make the proper edits in one fell-swoop.

I have also found a workaround for the bug in the editor that causes hard returns to expand each time you come back to edit. The solution is to use the Post Options and set the publication of the post at a future time and/or date, and hit the Publish Post button afterward. This will change your status from Draft to Scheduled, and when you come back to edit your post, it will finally be WYSIWYG - and when you hit a hard return in the editor, it will automatically give you the blank line between paragraphs that I am accustomed to. I've already talked about the fact that the indent has been replaced by the blank line in Electronic writing.

So, I used Tabbed Browsing to open the Edit Pages dialog in another browser tab, letting me switch from one to the other. The options are fairly intuitive, and you're just creating what amounts to a permanent post entry. It will have a title, which will be used to create the URL for the page. It will have the format of:

http://YourBlogName.blogspot.com/p/TheOriginaNameOfThePage.html

You will then be asked if you want the gadget to be a bar below the header, or if it should be in the side bar. This can be changed later. I chose to have it below the title. Since my original name for the page was "Privacy/Legal/©opyright" it ended up as "privacylegalopyright" and stayed that way even after I changed the name of the page to "Legal" just to make it fit in the under-bar gadget.

It is like editing any other post, except that it forces you to use the new editor. You can get in and tinker with the html directly if you need to, and since I use an e-mail obfuscator, I do have to get into the html. For those of you that are wondering what and why and e-mail address needs to be obfuscated, visit the link and ponder that a machine can craw the web and look for things like a "mailto:" directive that says that "an e-mail address follows" and then harvest the address.

The obfuscator will take the entire mailto: directive and turn it into a random hodgepodge of escaped ASCII codes that every browser interprets immediately, giving you clear text. Because the bot acts on the stream of HTML code directly, not the browser output, the harvesting bot will never see a "mailto:" directive to harvest. Of course, if you've taken compiler design, you can make a smarter bot, but with those skills, you're not likely to be living life as a spammer.

So, the returning reader will discover that there are "Home" and "Legal" buttons under the title now. I will probably move the Coffee Break Blogs section from the sidebar to a "Links" page, which will have sections for various links. I think that it will make a cleaner looking blog, and should reduce the bounce rate by giving readers some place to click on, once in a while.

I've already removed the Copyright Notice and Privacy Policy display gadgets from the side bar. I already like the idea that the privacy policy is now no longer out in plain sight. I'll be making these changes, and another more important one, to the daily blog, real soon now. Because I know what to expect, it will be real clean and real neat.

/grin

Making Netprints Visible

Perhaps you've returned to this site for another Domino's Pizza story. Perhaps this is your first visit to this Blog, ever. I really does not matter why you came, but I would like to make sure you come back. From a personal perspective, I would like to think that my random mutterings and witty writing style (if you can call it that) are enough of a reason to keep coming back on a regular basis. But how can I tell that I'm accomplishing the goal?

First, if you have not read the Privacy Policy, which is displayed in the administrative column of this blog (to the right on the current template), you might want to read it. It tells you that I might cause a cookie to be put on your machine, to help serve and track which advertisements you click on. Advertisements? What Advertisements?

If you read closely, I used the wiggle word "might" in the opening statement. Since I currently have an advertising supported blog, with an AdSense account, It's not too hard to add this blog to it, once it's approved by the Google content police. If you want to keep your ads, you'd better keep away from certain things - and with the audience that I know exists, I don't consider the Internet or the Blogosphere a place where it is safe to let-loose with the four-letter Anglo-Saxon set of colorful words, or anything that is strictly HBO fare.

Ah, you say. I've got you pegged, Mr. Blog Editor, you're here to earn advertising revenue.
I would not be able to disagree. I've seen the advertisements from Google "If you can Blog, you can Earn" and others like it. I have also read and reviewed a number of successful blogs, with lots of followers, comments, and a vibrant and living community. Yes, I created a blog because I believed that it was a marketable idea, and that means marketable on multiple fronts.


Of course, I did not know what markets my blog would appeal to until I got some kind of feedback. Like many other bloggers, my personal friends were happy to tell me what they think, and I took that feedback and stowed it. I keep looking for more of an indication as to the correct target market. After discovering a site that featured regularly updated fiction, I realized that I had created a daily blogfic that was worth listing, just because there were so few dailys out there. Generally, you're getting paid if you blog every day. Not me. Not yet.


Feedback in the form of a comment is great, but it's not all of the feedback that is out there. Just the fact that people other than I were visiting my blog would be enough. If people like it, they will come back for more, so page impressions would give me a nice counter to see. I thought of putting up a hit counter, like a little odometer, but thought better of it. It seems to be more like bragging than anything else, and my blog was not appropriate for a counter.


Then I got feedback. One of the fiction sites that I listed on had a couple of votes. 3 and 3.5 stars out of five. At least they did not give it the one-star-of-death. Plus, I am still writing. One reader also wrote a review, with feedback that I was able to use. Rather than just comply, making it easier for passersby, I used that same material as the seed for a marketing campaign.


I've been investing a good chunk of personal time on the task of pumping up the reader-base, and if you count visitors to the site as success, then I have had fantastic success. How many of those readers convert to regular readership, only time will tell. However, just like I crave feedback, I have come to realize that my readers might like some feedback as well.


Since the current campaign is via direct-mail, and I hand address each piece and pay proper full price postage, with a stamp, it's about as personal a request as I could ever make. The genius is the fact that it is a post-card, which means it's safe. It can't hold anything, like a suspicious white powder, and can't languish unopened, just with one face down. As soon as you uncover it, you recognize it. It's cheap. It's effective, and it's useful when reading the blog too.


So, here's the reverse-reward feedback. I hope it results in improved retention, as I have not had follow-on hits from the initial target states. Since you're not completely anonymous on the Internet, and are quite traceable, I've loaded my blog template with Google Analytics tracking code. Once you have an Analytics account, you can track multiple websites, with resolution as fine as the city in which the traffic originated. Every time a visit occurs from a new city, it will be added to the top of the list that now appears at the bottom of the blog.


Anyone who sees that list, is highly likely to see if their city is already named. If they come back, they will see new cities at the top. While this is a low-tech version of the "hits across the world" maps that feature pins or flags, I like it better for the following reasons.

1. I don't need another map of the English speaking world
2. 200 pixels is too small for a reasonable map anyway
3. the list is in order, most recent first, honoring those that came before
4. I can turn text into hyperlinks, and could get paid to do so
5. It's much more personal that a number on a counter
6. It probably loads faster than a graphic that needs a database of points.
7. It's trivial to update frequently.
8. It's only on the website.

This is February's twist on the marketing campaign. It also reveals that other people are interested in the blog, since the list is currently more than will fit on any reasonable screen size, but not so long that it prints on more than a single page. Being the beginning of the month, it is a good time to make such a change. I'll let you know how thing go with the marketing and the quest for readership. In the mean time, please rest assured that I am nowhere near done with Pizza.