GrumpysMonkey

I’ve been meaning to post about this for some time, but we’ve been so busy that I seem to have found myself in some sort of funk. We’re swamped between Cook Local, our jobs, the house, marathon training and the cats. Don’t worry, we’re fine, but things like personal blogging are falling a bit to the wayside these days.

But, since I have a little bit of time this sunny Friday, and I need to focus on something other than work for a few, here are some things that we’ve been doing around the house.

We planted primroses on either side of the front door. Some day we’ll actually remove that bottle of Drano too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rosemary tree and catmint (anyone want a long wheeled cart?)

 

 

 

 

 

 

That’s a rosemary tree (a gift from the Sloan’s), and catmint, a plant that’s supposed to attract hummingbirds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next, we’ve got the salad table that John built. Currently, we’ve got butter lettuce and romaine in the center section, and 4 kale plants in the right section. We’ll be planting sunflower greens in the left section next week.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last, we’ve got a tub of Brussels sprouts. It’s hard to believe that this wine barrel will eventually be home to huge club-like stalks of Brussels sprouts.

 

 

 

 

And just because I don’t think you can ever have too many pictures of cute cats on a Friday, here are a couple of Binky and Wingnut.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well, Cook Local is finally profitable. It’s not much, but by the end of the month we should have actually made some money. A whole $5 or so.

Our hits are steadily climbing, and it’s rare that we have a day under 100 hits now. Take a look at our hit chart for the past 12 months. It’s kind of hard to read but that last column is over 3,000 hits.

Next milestone: 5,000 hits.

So this past week I finally moved Cook Local to a new hosting company. The previous hosting company, which shall remain nameless at this point, kept having unexplained downtime. Some days, Cook Local was down for 15 minutes. Other days, it was down for an hour, and two weeks ago, it was down for over 5 hours. When you’re trying to grow a site, it helps if people can actually access said site.

So I moved to Lunar Pages. Another food blogger I know recommended them, and so far they have been great. I have gotten one report of a downtime incident that lasted a couple of minutes, but our hit counts have been skyrocketing since we commented on a very popular blog the other day. In fact, we’ve gone from an all time high of about 50 hits in a single day to over 300 within the space of a couple of days. I don’t expect the hits to stay that high regularly yet, but even one or two days a month with high hit count days are good.

Currently we’re debating what little rewards we’ll give ourselves when we hit certain milestones.

Last month we got a little over 1,000 hits. I think when we get over 3,000 hits in a month, we’ll open a bottle of expensive beer. When we get 5,000 hits in a month, maybe the champagne or one of the nice bottles of wine we’re saving. If we have a month where we get 10,000 hits… maybe dinner out at Le Gourmand (a really nice restaurant we’ve been yearning to go to that would probably be well over $200 for a meal).

W00t! CookLocal had it’s first 100+ hit day today. For some reason, one of the posts I made this week (Honey Mustard Glazed Carrots) was Stumbled. Stumble Upon is a service that lets people rate pages on the Internet that they like. People can send popular pages to friends, and really popular pages can appear on StumbleUpon’s home page.

So by around 10am this morning, Cook Local had received over 100 visitors. Our daily average is running around 20-30 visitors.

While this doesn’t make us a huge amount of money, and I certainly don’t expect it to happen again tomorrow, at least it is possible. We’re producing good enough content with good enough pictures that at least a few people are noticing. As we continue to improve the content and the photography, hopefully more and more people will notice.

There are a few more milestones I’m looking forward to in the near future (say the next 3-6 months).

1. Being linked to by SlashFood
2. Being linked to by Serious Eats
3. Averaging 50 hits per day

I’m trying to keep my expectations reasonable. If we manage to achieve all three of these milestones in the next month, then I’ll make new ones.

If you’d like to know what you can do to help, here are a few easy things that can go a long way.

1. Tell your friends about us. If you see a recipe you like, send it along to friends or post a link on your blog.
2. Submit any of our recipes you like to StumbleUpon or Digg. Just use the Share/Send link within each post to rate posts you like.
3. If you have any feedback about the look and feel of the site, or things you’d like to see, please let us know.

Can you take a couple of minutes to go to Shorty Awards and nominate @cooklocal for an award in Food? Thanks!

All you need is a Twitter account and about 2 minutes.

You can even tweet the following directly from your Twitter client and bypass the website completely.

“@shortyawards I want to nominate @cooklocal for a Shorty Award in the #food category because…”

Thanks! 2009 is the year that Cook Local explodes, and any help will be much appreciated.

Just a quick note. John and I have been spending a lot of time working on Cook Local. We’re doing some minor advertising with Google Ads, and possibly more importantly, we’ve added a Digg link to all of the posts. This is a great way to increase the visibility of our posts to the rest of the world. So please, if you like the things we do over at Cook Local, consider taking a few minutes to create an account over at Digg.com and then when you read our posts, click that little DIGG this! text at the top of the post and submit the post. You can also use Stumble Upon for the same type of functionality. Over the next few weeks, I’ll probably add one of those links as well.

If you use Google Reader to view our posts, consider sharing those posts! If you share a post in Google Reader, your friends can see it too.

We’re also twittering at www.twitter.com/cooklocal. We’re not one of those annoying blogs that JUST twitters blog posts (though we do that occasionally). We often twitter things that we find that are exciting at the farmers markets, or twitter on local food policy or news.

If you’ve got suggestions for how we can make Cook Local better, please feel free to email us. There’s even a Contact Us link right on the home page!

Advice time again. I think I know what I need to do, but I’m just looking for some confirmation.

Examiner just hasn’t really done much of anything. I’m averaging around 40 hits per day, less on days that I don’t post. While this isn’t necessarily bad, it isn’t great and the numbers have basically stayed the same since I started this whole gig. Compensation is dismal, because the hits aren’t there. If I had a lot more hits, I’d make more money. I’m not convinced that those 40 hits a day don’t all belong to my friends and family either.

I have gotten a few readers to Cook Local from Examiner, and I’ve gotten a few contacts that I didn’t have before, like the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day authors, who have added me to their blogroll and have been a great source of information on baking as well as a lot of fun to interview.

John went to a blogging conference last weekend and came away with a number of ideas for Cook Local. I’ve been getting more commenters and have been putting more effort into the posts. I’ve had ideas like branching out into other cities, doing how-to posts and videos, and giving some history into some of the food we use. I’ve got so many ideas my head is spinning. I’ve even started talking with a local farmer to see if there’s a way we can help each other out.

So basically, what I’m asking is this:

Should I phase out Examiner?

As a background, I write 3 posts a week for them these days. Each post takes me about an hour to deal with. I usually take content from an old Cook Local post and use that, but I still have to reformat it, crop the pictures, upload everything, and massage the wording a bit.

My only concerns with doing so are:

1. If they replace me with someone else, will that hurt Cook Local because of competition?

2. What if they do actually come through on their promises of promotion one of these days and columns do start getting hits? Is this even something I should worry about since they’ve basically not kept their promises thus far?

The other day I blogged at how cool it was that Jefe from Austin Cantina gave me an onion slicing lesson while we sat at the counter for dessert the other night. Well, in his blog today (yes, the restaurant has a blog… a pretty decent one too), he writes that basically the entire kitchen staff has turned over recently and he’s running the kitchen almost on his own (their main cook left to go pursue his dream of working in the environmental field). They were decently busy when we went there, only one open table and the three seats at the bar, and Jefe still took time out to show me how to easily dice an onion.

That’s amazing service and someone who truly enjoys what he does. Finding out that they were completely and totally empty on Tuesday night saddened me. I think their food is excellent (though having never been to Austin I cannot speak to the Austin-ishness of it) and the welcoming feel I get every time we go there is worth its weight in gold.

So if you happen to be in Ballard and you need a place to eat, go to Austin Cantina. I don’t want them to close!

John’s designing some business cards for me for Cook Local. Any ideas for a job title for me?

This is really a Cook Local post more than anything, but since I haven’t had time to get the polling software working on that blog, I figured I’d just open it up for comments here first.

I’ve made the decision that when it comes to food writing, Cook Local comes first. Not that I’m not still working hard on the Examiner column. I still post there 4-5 days a week and I will continue to do so. But when I’m planning recipes and coming up with new recipes, they are going on Cook Local first. That’s the site we own, that’s the site with Google Ads, that’s the site that I know exactly how many page views I’m getting and from where.

But what else should I do? I’ve had a few suggestions.

1. Branch out. I own www.cooklocal.com. But I could easily set up sites like www.miami.cooklocal.com or www.bayarea.cooklocal.com. I’d need to find writers from those areas, of course, and then I’d need to manage them (a little). I’m not sure I have time to do that yet, but then again, I’m not sure how much management it would really be. Plus, there’s a chance that would dilute the main page readership. Though as long as it was still resulting in page views and ad clicks, would I really care?
2. Add How-To’s: I’ve already done this a little bit. I’m wondering what interest there would be in cooking techniques? How to make a braise? How to mince garlic with a chef’s knife? How to make butter? (that one I’ve already done). I did a post on setting up your kitchen the other day. Does the site need to be just about local cooking? Or can it be about cooking techniques as well?
3. Farm reviews: I’ve done some of this for MetBlogs with my Meet Your Local Farmers Market Vendor series. Would people be interested in that? I know I have readers from all over the world (there’s at least one in Australia anyway). So if I did that, I might lose readers? Or would they just skim over the Seattle-centric posts and wait for the recipes?

I’m not going to make any big changes right now. I don’t have the physical or mental energy for it. However I do want to start making plans, so if any of my five readers have input, please let me know. Do any of these ideas appeal to you? Do you have other ideas? Maybe this weekend I can actually get polling software installed and see what Cook Local readers think.