From February and moving into March should bring the updates we’ve been working on. Having worked through some issues with our Beta Group we can move forward a little more confidently as the whole process has taught us a few things and has lead to us not only correcting a few issues before going live with the new templates, but we were able to stabilize the form process on the back end as well.

Again, not so much of a big deal on the front end of the website but having a smooth recipe form process means a better experience for everyone, not just the staff here. A faster website is always a good thing in our eyes.

Cookie Notices

Those that have been coming to our site for a while would have noticed the front banner has come and gone in the last few months. It’s varied depending on when you visited us. We’re still working through this issue and you can expect some changes with a notification, banner, or alert when all is said and done. We’re making sure we’re compliant for privacy without compromising the functionality of the website. Our time frame is early March on this one. We’re already working the issue.

No Advertising?

Those that actually follow and read our Blog posts will know why there’s no advertising as of yet. Without actually going back and looking to what was written back then, the simple answer is that we didn’t feel comfortable incorporating advertising on a “work in progress” website.

When we started this project, we indeed had advertising. However, as our website started to change, we had to remove and change some things here. Some features were removed and then returned. Some new features were added then later removed. We were literally a “work in progress”. The decision came to remove the advertising here when we were inundated with spam posts that had some users ignoring our requests for decent images for THEIR recipes and no introduction or afterward to the recipe at all.

We’re happy to get the recipes posted and we’re happy to post the users link to their website or webpage. Be that as it may, the content has to be in the format as we described and are requesting. As we were trying to straighten this out with the users, Google started changing several policies for privacy, to include Google Adsense, Google Analytics and their reCaptcha policy. We wanted to make sure we were in compliance with all of that and the old recipe forms that allowed users to enter their recipes were lacking in this area. 

We decided to drop the advertising until we could present a website structure that incorporated these new changes and permitted us to move forward with the website features as originally intended. That moment is fast approaching. This would be the reason everyone should be seeing a return of the cookie notification when they first come to our website.

Profile Modifications

Users can expect modifications to their profile page in the coming month. At this point we’re trying to figure the best approach because some of the software that we use to provide a community here has changed and is continuing to change. “BuddyPress” is the software we’re using for our community because it allows for modification of the files in a way that is not only secure but fun to work with.

Unfortunately or very fortunately, depending on your view, this “BuddyPress” software has a very active developer community with updates and feature changes happening frequently. It requires us to research where that’s going to impact our website because we custom code some features for our user profiles and some things can be effected if we don’t research and more importantly, test.

If there are to be changes we have to test them before going live on the website or we risk “breaking” something. If the website is experiencing significant traffic, that’s a lot of user’s experience being impacted. We test with our Beta Group to make sure we don’t but there’s always time against us no matter the path. We’ve come to accept this but we definitely understand the frustration of the pace it sometimes takes.

Content

Many will notice, if not everyone, that the website content has stopped being posted publicly. We’re not just talking about recipes. We’re talking about the articles and the info items. The truth here is two fold. First, the content is actually here but it’s been posted in the beta section. We’re trying to get some new features to allow users to post their own articles and attach them to their profile page. Second, these templates are separate from the standard posting templates that are usually used and as such won’t show in a user’s feed or the public feed for that matter. 

This is another issue we’re working on. Most users will notice a new tab in their user profile labeled “My Recipes and Posts”. this is both viewable by the community member but is publicly viewable if someone goes the user profile. The recipe part of this equation has been solved and is working. The “posts” are coming soon. We’ll be moving the posts that various authors have written in the coming month as well.

As always, thank you for your time and interest.