Post Category → meta

At least she didn’t mention the war.

What is the point of swallowing the last 10 years of Hanoi food writing from U.S. magazines, visiting said city for a holiday-come-assignment, talking to the self same people you’ve read about in those U.S. magazines and spewing 2,129 words of uninspired, unoriginal, factually inaccurate, poop out the orifice of an American printing press at the other end? I dunno, but maybe the editors at The Smithsonian can tell us.

It’s worth taking a look over at Noodlepie as Graham Holliday eviscerates the latest steamy gut-pile of parachute journalism on Hanoian phở. I’m still amazed that there is a market for articles where the journalists interview just the “cultural translators” – those handy English-speaking experts who can be relied on for a pithy quote – rather than the people who cook the dish on a daily basis.

10 Food Blog Templates

It’s been two years now since the start of the Last Appetite, so I’m beginning to consider putting together a new design. The choice is between building/modifying a new one from a free food blog template myself or having a template built bespoke. Either way, the process involves me trawling through the best templates out there and deciding whether I need to hire a designer.

Here is a selection of my 10 favorite finds for food blog templates so far. Any preferences?

Magazine-style templates

As you can probably tell from my current template, I’m a fan of the magazine-style template and using images to steer traffic around the site rather than just links alone.

mimbo
Mimbo

massive
Massive News

fakeblog
Overstand

wpnewsmag
WP News Mag

unstandard
The Unstandard – This is my current theme

Three Column Templates

imprezz
Imprezz

Ascii One
Ascii One – Almost pure typography as theme

Infinity
Infinity

Experimental

viewport
Viewport – This template is a side-scrolling set of posts. Very graphic heavy.

urban blog template
Urban

On the lack of food blog coherence

grapes
Grapes, apropos of nothing

Sorry I’ve been a bit light on providing content over the past few weeks, I’ve been busy elsewhere, in a frenzy that sounds lke it comes straight from the kitchen of a Wes Anderson film. At SBS, I’ve been writing on those interlinked topics of mince and chicken tikka lasagne from Iceland. I am still flying a mouldering Cambodian flag back at my other Cambodian food blog, a habit that I can’t escape. As a snapshot of my domestic life, I took an annotated photograph of my refrigerator for the world’s greatest food blog, Gut Feelings. It is a sad indictment of my current lack of regular eating habits and a reminder that I should buy a refrigerator less than two decades old.

In the real world, last weekend, I rode a bicycle around the Mornington Peninsula in service of the Wall Street Journal (article forthcoming), just to prove that pinot and physical exercise are not diametrically opposed pastimes.

I’m not sure where or how any of these disparate strands tie together but they certainly don’t make for coherent food blogging.

Four tips for food blog PR

There has been debate on the Australian food bloggers group about opting in or out of the public relations onslaught, mostly because when it comes to food blogging, some PR people act like dicks.

It is no great secret that Australian business is a long way behind the US when it comes to online PR. It is something that an Australian PR agency might tack on to their services but few (if any) specialise in online in Australia or do it consistently well because there is not a great deal of cash in it for them yet. As it is dawning on the industry that print media as we know it is doomed, jumping on the social media bandwagon is the action de jour.

My four tips:

1. At the very least, read some of the food blog before you fire off a press release.

It’s not that hard to work out the topics in food that are of genuine interest to a particular food blogger. Read their blog. You’ll soon discover that food blogging is a broad church and it is not likely that your clients’ product will align with the interests of all food bloggers. If you’re doing your job, you should be able to find a good fit somewhere.

Unlike print media, unpaid food bloggers are under no compunction to put out regular editions or posts. There is no pressure to fill column inches and so this negates the need for bloggers to trawl through press releases at the end of the day just to churn out a few hundred words. For most food bloggers, press releases have zero value.

2. Even better, don’t send a press release at all.

Cut the “positioning” bullshit. You’ll get much better results if you engage in intelligent conversation because for most food bloggers, intelligent conversation is their modus operandi. If there is nothing intelligent that can be said about your client’s product (or your client’s product does not relate to food for humans) then just maybe you should question your future career in public relations.

Approach this as if you’re forming a relationship that will last forever. Most food bloggers don’t think in terms of discrete campaigns or product launches: the biggest mistake that PR folk make when approaching any social media is that they expect that it will last for the life of the campaign and not any longer. If you burn bloggers early, it is likely that you’ll have to work extremely hard to get them back on side for any future campaigns or other unrelated clients.

3. Link to me and send me traffic.

If you want me to sit up and pay attention to your (or your clients’) website, link to mine and send good traffic; the traffic that reads more than a single page and adds comments. I segment my traffic and notice that behaviour. Write your own food blog or get somebody to write one who cares rather than spamming out press releases. I still wonder why clients would ever trust an agency to do “blogger PR” when the agency (or its staff) do not run a blog.

4. If all else fails, food bloggers are very easily bought.

Most food bloggers love free shit; especially meals and the feeling like they’re receiving something exclusive. You’ve only got to look at this food blogger meetup organised by Club Med just to see that even if your food is not necessarily the greatest in the world, you can still buy fawning coverage by some of the world’s biggest bloggers. POM juices got coverage aplenty simply by mailing out juice and holding a competition. The trick is permission and not expecting anything directly in return. Ask people’s permission to send them free things. Ask for their advice rather than “write about this in your next blog post!”.

How to food blog: breaking Food Buzz

I know that this is a little trite, but relearning how to play Javascript for the 4 Ingredients post has emboldened me to break Food Buzz, the giant “Web 2.0” food blog content scraper. If you want to stop Food Buzz from using your content (but still retain the incoming links and traffic from Food Buzz), put the following bit of code between the <head> </head> tag on your blog.

<script type="text/javascript">

if (top.location!= self.location) {
top.location = self.location.href
}

</script>

This will redirect the framed Food Buzz pages back to your unframed site. For example, go to http://www.foodbuzz.com/blogs/kr/korea/960180-dosa-hut and you’ll be redirected.

Just as a small warning for Blogspot users: this affects the ability to edit the template on your blog. If you have any problems editing your template, turn off javascript in your web browser. Once you’ve finished editing, turn javascript back on.

The Long Shot

Austin Bush and I have been throwing around ideas for new projects for a while but the one that that seems to have most resonance is chasing down regional Thai food. Sure, there’s Thai food cookbooks aplenty, but few (if any) that contextualise Thai food into regions. There’s a competition on at the moment, throwing around money at a photo comp that could fund such a project.

It’s a long shot (and probably the most unconventional of means of funding food writing and photography), but it’s worth a try.

Food Pornographers against Internet Censorship

bananas
Bananas!

If you haven’t been following Australian news, the Australian Government is about to embark upon its attempt to censor the Internet (or at least, censor websites and not HTTPS, IPv6, encrypted data or the torrentz, which is where the depraved of Australia will flee to get their porny fix). For me, it is going to be a great time to be working in the “Internet industry” and have the rest of the industry elsewhere laughing at you.

To take a guess, the first websites to be banned as “false positives”, (where a site that the filter says is illegal, but is in fact, not) will be food websites. Who else turns charcuterie objects into a fetish or makes the same volume and diversity of dick jokes about vegetables? These are freedoms that are dear to the heart of many Australians and need defending.

If you’re keen to do something about it, the irrepressible GetUp is running a campaign.

Alternatively:

Call the Minister

Express you opprobrium in person. Call Senator Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy’s office on (03) 9650 1188 and have at them.

Write to the Minister.

A physical letter to the Minister clogs their inbox in a way that email cannot. Mail to:

Senator Stephen Conroy
Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy
Level 4, 4 Treasury Place
Melbourne Vic 3002

Email the Minister

Pretty much a waste of time, but worth a try. Email Senator Conroy at: minister@dbcde.gov.au.