All Entries in the "Blogging" Category
Frappe Bliss in Aberdeen Center (And What Happened To Chowtimes)
We might as well just post about Frappe Bliss since it was while we were in the Aberdeen Center we first learned that chowtimes.com had been suspended.
Food courts in shopping malls all around Metro Vancouver is so boring. They all look alike with the same stalls selling the same stuff. I find that all food courts are dominated by the same group of restaurants.
I find Aberdeen’s food court is different and a class above all other food courts around. The layout is very pleasing and they have lots of tables. It is bright and for an Asian food court, it is clean and well maintained. The best thing about this place is the selection of food and it is well represented by some of the bigger names in Asian restaurants like Jang Mo Jib and Cafe D’lite just to name a couple.
Having gone through the long cold winter, do you find that it’s kind of overly warm and hot this spring? We do. We wanted to just get out of the house and go out and look for a nice icy cold drink to cool down. Usually we’ll just go to Timmy Ho’s for an Iced Cap but it is just too heavy for us.
The ideal would be an “ice plate” like the ones we had in Well Tea. We thought the best place to look for one is in Aberdeen since we also wanted to go grab some small plates and place mats from Daiso. The closest we got to an Ice Plate was Frappe Bliss.
You have a choice … make your own ($2.36 Frappe with 71 cents per topping) or get one of their nine concoctions. We had the one called the Peanuts Iceberg which is $3.80.
Was it good? It was awful … pretty tasteless. It was also very light — I say it was very airy and had hardly anything in it. I find it intriging how they managed to make it so fine and that it did not melt much at all despite that. Yucks.
Aberdeen’s Food Court has Wifi. I must add that it was painfully slow. It actually felt like those days when we had the 9600 baud rate modems! We got connected and found chowtimes.com suspended.
If you want to read more about our saga … click below:
Julie and Julia
Oh wow. A true story based on a blog … and a FOOD blog at that too. This, Suanne and I got to watch!
This is going to be released on 07-August-2009.
What’s for dinner?
The Sidebar Tabs and Free Stuff on Chowtimes.com
Hi All:
I just want to point out a little change we had made on Chowtimes. Some of you would have used what we call the Sidebar Tabs. I want to call out the new “Free” option on it. But first a little about each of the Sidebar Tabs options.
Twitter: Frankly, I am still trying to get a grip on how best to make use of Twitter. I had that on because it is supposed to be the next best thing since Facebook.
Subscribe: This is where you can sign up to get Chowtimes postings delivered to you by email. Your email address that you provide to us is safe with us. We will NEVER provide your email address to anyone nor will we use it for any other purpose than to deliver Chowtimes postings.
Friends: This is new and is based on Google’s Friends Connect. I am not sure how this will work. I might decide to remove it later.
Popular: This is a neat little look at our most popular postings over the past two weeks. We can change the period but for now it is set to two weeks.
Free: This is what I wanted to let you know. If we have free stuff, we will post it here. Suanne and I will try to get freebies for Chowtimes readers. These are not high value freebies but they are fun!
We hope you enjoy these little changes.
Ben
Howzat for Speed?
I am a happy camper now.
It took a long time … but … I figured out quite a lot of bugs on chowtimes.com that was making the loading time go so slow. It used to take 60 seconds to load the homepage. It now takes only 21 seconds. Within the next couple of days, it should even load a bit more faster.
I had made radical changes to the innards on the site and so you might just come across a few cases where you might get a site error. At most times, the error will go away if you refresh the page. Let me know if you come across them and email me the screenshot.
Ben and Suanne
Searching on Chowtimes
We received an email from a chowtimes reader (Eric) who asked us if there is a better way to look for restaurants on the site. In particular, Eric was asking if he could look for, say, all Chinese restaurants in Burnaby. Yes, you can … to a great extend.
I can understand Eric’s needs. Chowtimes had grown over the years with a large throve of information. Getting to what you want is not always easy.
We always had on the sidebar a listing of categories by cuisine. Over the many years, we had amassed quite a lot of restaurant reviews (almost 400 now). Some of the categories were too large. We wished we had the time to go back and revamp the categories but that would involve way too much work. The above is hierarchical view by categories.
As a short term solution, Suanne and I had spent a couple of days and categorized all restaurant reviews by the cities in Metro Vancouver. We are categorizing only Metro Vancouver because most of our restaurant review readers are from Vancouver. That list above may help a little.
But what I wanted to point out to you is our Tag Cloud.
Incorporating Adsense for Search on WP-Vybe Themed Blogs
Hi All:
This post is only meant for bloggers, and aimed particularly to those who uses the WP-Vybe theme on their site.
I received an email today asking me how I implemented Adsense for Search on chowtimes.com using the WP-Vybe theme. Instead of responding directly to the one person by email, I thought I write this up and make a post for the benefit of all users of the WP-Vybe theme. The instructions below are meant for implementating Adsense for Search on WP-Vybe theme but conceptually it works the same for any WordPress theme.
By default, WP-Vybe implements the search capability from WordPress. It looks like this:
