I am all in an experimentation mood these days. I guess I am all bored with writing about same old visits to restaurants and I had run out of ways to say things like “the meat is tender and juicy”. I guess I want to push some boundaries of in food blogging. One of the things that I want to do is to find ways to make things interesting so that I can engage you on the blog.

A few days ago, I was having breakfast with Suanne in Lido. I came across an item on the menu I had never noticed before. I ordered that and I wanted to share with all of you what it looked like because I thought it would be a conversation maker.

Naturally I thought of using Twitter or Facebook but I wanted to do something different. So I whipped out the iPhone and tried to blog from it. I was doing it for the first time and so it was a lot of slow pecking and fumbling around. That 20 minutes breakfast turned out to be 40 minutes! Poor Suanne had to sit patiently while waiting for me to blog about it on the small device.

I am getting a hang of it. Each post I made gets easier and faster. However, this is just experiments. I don’t foresee I will blog a lot on-the-go. This is because these sort of posts are sort of quick and dirty — short sentences, poor quality pictures and all. I guess it will be useful for those “breaking news” type of posts or a single-dish-dining-alone restaurant visits.

I had been using the WordPress app on the iPhone a lot already. However, I was just using that app for checking new comments (above, right) and I use that feature a lot.

Chowtimes.com is written on WordPress and there is an iPhone app for WordPress. For those of you who blogs on Blogger, there should be an app for that. You just need to search the Apple AppStore for it. I am not familiar with Blogger and so will just cover WordPress on this post.

Talking about Blogger, I would like to encourage those of you on Blogger to consider moving to WordPress. Chowtimes.com started as a Blogger site but over the years we moved to WordPress and I am glad we are on it. There are pros and cons with moving to WordPress. The key thing is that WordPress … (more…)

Alright. Here is the latest leaderboard of the Top Vancouver Area Food Blog for February 2011. We cull these info from the chowtimes blogroll. There was quite a bit of work initially setting the process up. Once setup, it is providing a wealth of info of the state of food blogs in Vancouver. I find it amazing how one thing led to another from the blogroll.

The use of the blogroll had steadily increased. It used to hover just above 300 pageviews per day. Since the last two weeks, it went above 400 pageviews. It shows us that people do actually find it useful.

We were thinking of how many people actually attributed to these pageviews. Unless everyone puts up their hands to be counted, we can only guess. Let’s do that shall we? We know there are about 727 food related posts generated by vancouver blogs last month and that makes it 727 / 28 days = 26 blog posts a day (LOL! That’s A LOT isn’t it?)

Assuming that whoever uses the blogroll reads everything out there, we are looking at at least 16 people using the blogroll. But I know it is more than that. I think it should be way above 30 people. It would be great if blogroll users stick their hands up and be counted by leaving a comment.

In January we had 121 blogs on the blogroll. In February, the number of blogs that writes about restaurants in Vancouver has increased by another 14 websites  to 135. Isn’t it such a staggering number?

The above is the comparison between January and February of how frequent bloggers publish a post.

The blue bar represents the blogs that … (more…)

Every since we created and started maintaining the blogroll of all Vancouver Area food blogs, we have at our disposal quite a database of the blogs. Believe it or not, there is a total of 121 blogs that writes about restaurants.

So with the blogroll along with the use of a couple of tools, we are able to quickly pull data out from the feeds of the blogs and put together some interesting stats of the state of food blogs in Vancouver.

I don’t think it is any surprise that not every blog is active but there are five which are worthy to be mentioned for their sheer hard working in hammering out at least one post a day.

Between 84 blogs that has at least one post during January 2011, there is a staggering 803 posts.

That works out to be an average of about … GOSH … 26 posts a day. LOL!

OK, time to call out the MOST PROLIFIC Vancouver Food Blog (restaurants only) for January 2011 because these bloggers deserved to be called out for their sheer hardwork to keep all of us informed and entertained … (more…)

An old friend of mine had been feeding me interesting emails. He knows I am blogging about food and he always sends me stuff he comes across. I just don’t know where he finds so many of these interesting stuff.

So a few weeks ago, he sent me a series of pictures with no details. Just the pictures. I thought this is interesting and share these pictures with you. At the same time, people asked me about what Suanne and I carry with us when we go out blogging-eating. So, I’ll share with you what is in our bag … and hope that you foodies out there also tell me what you bring along!

Off hand, I would discount this little device which looks like a gun but what caught my attention is the most important equipment to a foodie — the spoon.

Hey actually, maybe the spoon is not the most important equipment to the foodie. I mean a committed foodie will eat with their hands, no problem.

But if there is one thing that I absolutely need, it is … (more…)