We may have stumbled a bit but now we’re kicking into gear. As we mentioned in our last posting… there will be more updates. We actually have two updates ready to go.
However, given that there are always issues when going site wide with the updates, we’ve decided to take a new approach to our updates.
Slow. A rather simple strategy really. Many times in the past we’ve introduced a few updates at once that made things hard to track on our end.
What if there’s an Issue
If an issue arose, what update exactly caused what’s going on and why was an ongoing question. Is their a conflict with something already on the site, or with something we introduced along with the new update. Updating too fast to narrow down issues or conflicts was becoming the new issue.
We apologize for being too anxious. We have learned our lesson from these past mistakes. Hence the reason we’re taking this new “novel” approach. Knowing about food is not necessarily knowing web server routine maintenance and good admin etiquette and protocols. We are learning though and we have engaged some help.
This will allow us to plan future updates better based on the response from the website and our community. Monitoring traffic load on the server, keeping an eye on error logs and watching database errors has become a routine task (along with backing up the site) for our team when implementing new updates because of the issues we’ve had in the past. We’re hoping this new approach will help mitigate issues if they arise.
If our members see website issues or errors, they are encouraged to contact us via the website’s contact form. All contacts are reviewed when submitted.
More Recipes To Go
We’ve gotten many more recipes restored these past few weeks. We’ve still go more to go but we’re going to be taking a break from restoring the old stuff and concentrate on getting new content. The problem is that these old community recipes have to be converted from the old templates. Templates that didn’t include canonical URLS for the LMR community member posting.
With all links being removed from these old recipes because users weren’t maintaining their permalinks at their own websites, it looks like we’ve got duplicate content here. If the content is posted somewhere else, no doubt, Google knows about it.
While we may not get penalized or de-ranked because the duplicate content exists here, the content itself doesn’t justify converting over if we can post new content just as easily. As a consequence, we’ve put “legacy” recipe migration on hold in favor of just adding new content to our website.
We’re not ignoring the legacy content. On the contrary, the other option would be to delete the content that our community has contributed to our website to help us grow. Templates have changed, SEO has changed, and certainly many permalinks have changed at the original members’ websites with much of this community content. However, we’re committed to migrating all the content from the “legacy” style templates, so don’t be surprised if the recipes you knew were here at one time but somehow vanished… are now here again in some shape or form. As we migrate the recipes, they’ll appear in the listings.
More to Come
As mentioned in an earlier posting, we are working toward activating new membership again. We’re working on a format that enables us to customize pages per user and and their group. This will mean more customization for our members when they come to the site based on their preferences and interests. More to come on these features and we’ll likely not implement post, article and recipe posting at the same time (that whole updating “slow” and updating only one segment at a time thing again).
We’ll be setting up a beta group for beta testers. We’re going to start doing updates in phases as well. Updates that are ready site wide will be first introduced to our beta testing group before full website implementation. This will hopefully give us some insight into potential issues farther down the line.
Again.. we thank everyone for their interest and patronage.
