WordPress brings VeganGirl back to life

Way, way back in 1999, I registered my very first domain name, vegangirl.com. This was back in the days when everyone used tables for page layouts. Back when everyone decorated their pages with spinning orbs, gaudy backgrounds, and blinking text. There were no blogs and no cascading style sheets. Just a bunch of amateurs throwing crap up on a website and waiting for the world to find them.

Vegangirl.com was never really a site about veganism. It was just a personal website, intented to keep my family and friends updated about my life. It ended up being about 90% photos of dogs and cats. Despite my fondness for it's tagline, "A terrible waste of a great domain name," I always did want to fix up the site and do something interesting with it. But I am no web designer, and the task always seemed rather daunting. Sucked in by blogger's pre-made templates and easy content management, I abandoned vegangirl completely in favor of chronicling my life on hightechsurvivor.

A few weeks ago, I decided to try out some search engine optimization tricks on vegangirl, and put up a few pages with actual useful content about veganism, but it still looked like crap. From Google Analytics, I could see that plenty of people were now finding the site via search engines, but abandoning it immediately, probably because it looked so amateurish.

Ever on the forefront of modern technology, I finally decided this past weekend to check out WordPress, a four-year-old personal publishing platform. It was a one-click install with my hosting service, then about an hour of slogging through some truly horrible WordPress templates, a little cutting and pasting of content into the WordPress content management system, and just like that, VeganGirl had a major face lift. My entire website was literally transformed in a day.

WordPress is written in PHP, which I've spent the last several months learning, so fortunately (or unfortunately), I've been able to do a lot of custom work to get the layout and functionality just how I want it. Who knows what it will look like tomorrow or next week.

But don't worry, I still have a link on there to all the old content, for those of you who just can't live without all those old pictures of the dogs and cats. You know who you are (Aunt Kathie). OK, I'll admit it, I can't bear to get rid of those old pages either.

Raw food dish of the week - Donuts

Oh my goodness, these taste like donuts! OK, maybe it's just been a while since I've had donuts. But these are delicious! I will definitely be making these again.

I strayed from the recipe just a bit. I couldn't find banana squash, but the produce guy at Green Life Groceries said butternut squash is pretty similar. So I took his word for it. The recipe also says to put these in the freezer, but I chose to dehydrate them instead, for a drier, more crumbly texture.



Ingredients: raw almonds, dates, shredded butternut squash, shredded coconut, olive oil, vanilla, nutmeg, Celtic sea salt.

Statistics Addiction

Some people get up and grab a cup of coffee first thing. I grab my laptop. In fact, I grab my laptop before I even get up, as I keep it next to my bed. It's the last thing I look at before I turn my lights off at night, and it's waiting for me first thing in the morning.

I used to be hooked on email, but now that I've moved to a new town and don't get so many emails anymore, my compulsion has expanded into other, more statistical areas. I check stock prices, how much campaign money Ron Paul has raised, whether anyone has clicked on my AdSense ads, which search engines have crawled my websites and when, how my search engine optimizations have affected my google rankings, etc etc etc. And I do this many many times a day. OK, I'll be honest: many times an hour. Sometimes, if I run out of things to check, I even check the statistics of other people's websites. I can't seem to stop myself.

What's worse is that there are so many free online tools that help feed my addiction to statistics. Tools to see not just how many people visited my site, but how long they stayed, how many pages they visited, what countries and cities they are from, how they found my site, whether they've ever visited before, and probably data I have yet to discover.

While my addiction to statistics checking might make me an excellent candidate for geeky internet work, it makes for a pretty dull daily life. This is not why I moved to Asheville. I was supposed to be divorcing myself from chronic computer use. I was supposed to be working less and living more. I was supposed to be making the most of every single day.

So here is my promise, to myself and to all 16 of you who visit my blog (spending an average of 30 seconds, viewing an average of 1.5 pages, 56% coming from referring sites, 5 returning visitors, and hello to you guys in Belgium and New Zealand!): from now on, I will only check online statistics 2X per day: once in the morning and once at night. Starting.....in about 10 minutes from now.

Raw food dish of the week - Sea Vegetable Soup
I've finally, after several disastrous tries, succeeded at making a tasty raw soup! This recipe is from Eating Without Heating, by the Boutenko family. If you have the book and want to try the recipe, cut it in half first. I have enough to feed an army.



Ingredients: Almonds, water, olive oil, lemon juice, agave nectar, bay leaves, Celtic sea salt, cayenne pepper, blended well. Arame, wakame, and dulse flakes stirred in.