I should actually write something exciting for our blog, but that will wait for another day.  No problem though–Meps wrote something good and decided to publish it today!

Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out how to get our blogs put up onto Facebook, since we got sucked into that a while back. I’ve found a plugin called Wordbooker and I’m hoping it will work well.

We’ll see what happens on my facebook profile soon enough. There is supposed to be some sort of magic where comments transfer back and forth between Facebook and the blog.  Watch out, here I come moving right into the social media of the ‘aughts, marginally still within the decade!

When we launched this website, we created a monster.

We’d been writing for Brian Guptil’s site for about 8 months, while we worked on and then cruised his 44-foot Freedom sailboat, Cayenne. When we left Cayenne, Brian revamped his site, so we decided to launch our own. We wanted our loyal fans (both of them) to still have access to our essays and limericks. Besides, we simply enjoyed writing about our travels and adventures.

Around the same time, we uploaded my entire recipe collection, so I could look up my recipes anywhere we had an internet connection. And that’s the monster.

Anyone, anywhere in the world, could also look at my recipe collection. Soon I began to notice that people were hitting mepsnbarry.com when searching for TVP meatloaf, pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, or Brazilian cheese bread. There have been dozens of hits on Palak Ka Saag, which I’ve never even made, and Quentão, which I have.

So I started to feed the monster, capturing more recipes from friends, family, clippings, cookbooks, and other websites. I’d invent a new recipe, try it out on Barry, and then run to the computer to publish it as soon as he proclaimed it “Yummy.” Sometimes, a dish would grow cold while I happily photographed it from all angles.

Earlier this year, I started publishing articles about food, and I needed a name other than “Meps’ Recipes.” That’s when I came up with “The Foodie Gazette” name.

Some of the people who use my recipes seem to think I know something. They send me questions about how to make some dish from their childhood, or whether it’s safe to leave soaked dried mushrooms on the counter for several days. (heck if I know — depends on whether you live in Mississippi or Alaska!) I’m no home economist, I’m just a writer who likes to write about food.

Today, we’re going to turn the monster loose. We’re moving all the recipes and food articles to their own dedicated website: www.foodiegazette.com.

It’s still just Meps’ recipe collection. But it has a fancy new design, the articles are featured prominently, and there will be more useful cooking links and pages. Most importantly: The search function works!

Life is full of funny surprises. I thought I’d be traveling on a sailboat in the Caribbean right now, and instead, I’m launching a website about food. But I’m headed to Portugal to look at a boat for sale in less than a month, and while I’m there, I’m sure to be eating some great new foods. So stay tuned — both of you (grin) — and I’ll post adventures of both kinds, travel AND food, on both sites for you to enjoy.

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Postscript: Speaking of monsters, the limericks on this website are another thing I can’t seem to control. I even have a category for limericks about food!

Right now Meps and I are in the middle of the process of moving our virtual home. While we were living with Brian, we had put quite a few bits of ourselves up on Brian’s webpage. But we are no longer living there, and upon moving out, decided it was time for our own website too.

After several days of searching for available urls, we ended up here, and we think this will be a good place. Moving is, of course, always a combination of disruption, excitement, hard work, and opportunities, and some things may be in different categories depending upon who and when you ask. Here’s some of the stuff that’s been keeping me busy these days:

• The last site was mostly done in Movable Type, but by the time we started this one, there was a new version (3.0) with a new license that was generating near universal bile and hatred from the blogging community. The licensing scheme has improved a bit, but it still seems that a simple site like this one which has two authors (barry and meps), no longer qualifies for the free copy, while previously anything non-commerical qualified for the free version. I couldn’t even find the older version (with a license we could use legitimately) on their website. While on one hand I hate to stop using good software just because I’m a cheapskate, on the other hand, I am not sure how much I want to trust my stuff to folks who keep changing the rules and costs of playing with them. Amid all the outcry about the new license, I found suggestions of alternative blogging software.
• I went looking and found WordPress as a possible alternative, and started looking at installing it. Right now, it seems a little simpler and cleaner, although I do miss the wonderfully written documentation of Movable Type.
• This gave me the opportunity to learn about PHP and MySQL, and I always love learning about new computer tools, so this was fun. Since the Vero Beach Public Library doesn’t have a good selection, I read my first “dummies” book, and found that it had some good stuff even though I hate to consider myself to be in the target audience!
• We never did get that photoblog or photoalbum that we had been planning to do someday, so I’m back looking at stuff I can use to make that job easier.
• Meps and I get to play around with designing a new site design, including using some of these new toys.

Anyhow, it is now time to stop web-surfing and playing with new computer goodies and put something up, so that’s what I’m doing now. I’m sure it will take a bit longer to finish the move-in process, but in the meantime, we’re going to get a couple things up on the site. Like a physical move, there will be a few things that stay in the cardboard boxes waiting until we get around to finding the right home for them, so be patient, we’ll get around to it eventually. There were also a couple bits we wrote earlier but couldn’t put up here since we didn’t have a blog to put them on, so they are going in, back-dated, along with our old “Travels with Meps ‘n’ Barry” stuff.