As we pick up the pace here at LuvMyRecipe, visitors will see changes that aren’t necessarily an update to the website but things have changed in a way that seem like it may have been updated. The truth is that our process enables these features sitewide before they’re available to users “sitewide”.
In order to test the website in a live environment, we have to enable the update in a live environment. We have to know how the website is going to react under the conditions the server is under at any given time. We can test our update all day long in a sandbox environment, but we’ve come to learn that sandbox is not live and they can be two totally different animals when users are contributing and using the system.
LuvMyRecipe Beta Group
It’s important to remember that as some of our new features become available, they may have already been available to certain users here at the website. There are users logging in while other users are restricted from joining. We do apologize, but it is needed to ensure we have a smooth transition to the new formats and templates.
We are getting close to allowing new membership here at the site. Up until this point we’ve been able to restrict these updates based on membership to the site. If you weren’t already a member than you weren’t granted access here. Many times the site would appear down but in fact the website was open to our community members while we worked out the issues in the system.
In order to continue this process, we’ve set up an official LuvMyRecipe Beta group. This is a private group with a limited membership currently. This will be our way of continuing our updates while keeping a “phasing in” process, without restricting use to the rest of the website to all visitors. Members of our LuvMyRecipe Beta Group will have access to new website features before the go live for the rest of the community.
Where’s the Ads?
While we update the site, we’re going to be free of advertising for a little while. We’ve done this in order to speed up the process of updating the website. We want to roll out the features of the website without worrying about how or where to incorporate any advertising just yet. This is only a short hiatus from the advertising.
We’ll be bringing the advertising back when we’re satisfied key features for our community work as expected. This helps us on the back end (right now) while we try to incorporate new features and not worrying about how advertising scripts or code might effect our community members experience on our website.
Enjoy it but don’t expect it. Websites can’t survive without revenue and advertising partners are a part of that relationship.
Where’s the Recipes?
We actually were able to get some more recipes migrated into the current system in the past few days even though we said we were going to hold on doing that. The process involves going through back-ups of our website and files over the years. These are in several formats to include .xml, .zip, and .gz files. It’s a tedious process really and we’ve opted to put it on hold while we get moving on some of the new stuff. As we mentioned in our last posting, new stuff is more important than the old stuff. The old stuff isn’t in an SEO format the way search engines like to see them anyway. We were only able to get into doing some of the archived recipes this week because we had some time waiting for something else to finish.
Redirects are being put in place for the posts or recipes “not found” errors. Because we’ve changed the structure here at the website involving the taxonomies, posts, and recipes, these “not found” errors ticked up a bit. Social media sites like Pinterest, Facebook, and users with bookmarks come looking for the posts that are in a new location. We have to tell the website where the new locations are when these requests come in and that’s a process added on to the migration of these recipes.
Community Written Articles
Community written articles, “Member Posts”, have been put on Hold. This is now becoming part of the updates in the future list. In keeping with our “SLOW” approach to updating, we’re going to be enabling RECIPE posting before the articles. The plan was to do both at the same time, but some issues arose during testing and we’re going to focus on one thing at a time. Since everyone is here for recipes and fewer for articles, we’re going to go after the community shared “recipes” first and make sure they can be put through the paces of our new LuvMyRecipe Beta Group.
Community articles and posts are still part of the plan here, but we’re all in favor of making sure current things work right before moving forward and this is a step toward that end.
Thank you for reading and your continued interest,
