Downtime, part 2

The server the Veg Blog is hosted on hit some rough patches over the last few days. There was the 36 hour outage to start the weekend and then a disk failure to start this week. Fortunately, data was moved safely (with no loss, as far as I can tell) and things seem relatively stable now. Remind me to make a backup of things just in case, OK?

My presentation

Thanks to everyone who asked how my presentation at UMW went. While the crowd wasn’t enormous, about ten people, it was a decent enough size for me to start getting more comfortable talking about veganism and animal rights in front of a group. About half of the attendees were vegetarian or vegan and the other half were meat eaters, with one or two of them falling under the “considering vegetarianism” heading. I think the presentation itself went relatively well… I was a little nervous, probably went overboard with “um”s, and could stand to make more eye contact, but overall I think I hit a decent enough balance of information and humor.

Afterwards, there was a discussion amongst the veg*ns in the group about challenges faced with family, at school (like the cafeteria staff using “vegetarian” and “vegan” interchangeably when labeling food), and even a little talk about the welfare vs. abolition argument that was the fancy trend in 2007 and may rear its head again now that the AR and TAFA conferences are in sight. It took a little prodding to get an omni to talk, but eventually one did speak up and say while she respected vegans a lot, she “liked meat too much” (slide 3!) and wouldn’t ever give it up. While I didn’t get to delve into that any more deeply, she did say she thought that vegans needed to be more active than just being vegan. This sparked some good responses. Morgan, who organized the talk and heads up the AR group at UMW, said she thought that being vegan was the most active thing one could do because it’s taking a belief and living it every moment of your life. Another recently converted vegan spoke up and said she thought it was hypocritical for people that protested for animal rights to not be vegan.

All in all, it was a good talk and I hope everyone there enjoyed it. Thanks to the UMW crew for having me out. Let’s do it again.

I’d hoped to record my talk, but completely forgot until about 1/4 of the way through. Here are the slides if you want to take a look.

Lunch with Bazu

Today I had lunch at the always-excellent A Taste of Burma (their site is down as of this posting) with Bazu of Where’s the Revolution. Bazu’s been a long-time commenter on the Veg Blog, so I was happy she was able to take some time out of her visit with family to meet up for lunch. She’ll be posting pictures of our food over on her blog when she gets home.

A few minutes before she arrived, I had a chance to talk with the owner of A Taste of Burma, who’s possibly one of the nicest guys on the planet. I asked him a question that had been burning on my mind for the last couple of months. You may remember I wrote a while back about the amazing fermented tea leaf salad that they make using really hard-to-get leaves from Burma. I’d gotten addicted to it and eventually looked up the recipe only to be shocked to see that every recipe called for fish sauce and dried shrimp powder. I feared the worst, but was pleasantly surprised when he told me that while that’s the traditional way of making Lephet Thote, A Taste of Burma doesn’t use fish sauce or the dried shrimp. Phew. Crisis averted.

Guess what I ordered for lunch today.

Sorry for the massive (almost 36 hours, by my calculations) downtime. Big hosting issues yesterday, it seems.

Things look to be back to normal now.

You may remember a post I wrote last year titled “10 Ways to be a Kick-Ass Vegan.”  Number nine on that list was “Give a talk,” something about which I said: “Here’s one I’ve been meaning to work up the nerve to do for a while now.  Ideally, I’d like to find a group of young or beginning vegetarians to talk to about veganism, like a high school or college animal rights group.”  Well, I’m finally taking that step and doing my first AR-themed talk.

The talk will be titled, “Why Isn’t Everybody Vegan?” and will focus on the multitude of reasons that people use for not changing their diet and lifestyle, even if it may be completely in line with their ethical beliefs.  It’s part of Animal Rights Week at the University of Mary Washington (Fredericksburg, VA), which is an ambitious week of outreach by a new and small (but dedicated) Animal Rights Club at UMW.

It just so happens that UMW is my alma mater and being the talk will be in my major’s building, so this talk should be extra fun.  Here are the details:

Why Isn’t Everybody Vegan?

When you make the transition to veganism, it’s hard not to be
enthusiastic about it.  It all seems so right and obvious and you
begin to wonder why everyone else isn’t making the same connection.
This talk will look at the reasons people aren’t vegan (”It’s too
extreme,” “I love cheese too much,” etc.) and how to counter those arguments in others (or yourself).

Where: University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, VA (Trinkle Hall Monroe Hall, room TBA)

When: Wednesday April 9, 2008; 6pm

What else?: There’ll be food.  So come, eat something, and listen to me blabber on about why veganism is the greatest thing since sliced (vegan) bread.

More info: The event’s Facebook page

If you’re in the area, come on by and say hi.  I’ll be the nervous one at the front of the room.

This site, like any site that takes a decidedly anti-mainstream view on a topic, receives its fair share of nut job commenters. Over the years, I’ve taken different approaches toward the drive-by stupidity:

1. Try to counter their every comment. At first, I opted to pick apart every bit of their always weak arguments. Since they tended to post with lots of anger and with little in the way of actual facts, this was pretty easy. But before too long, I realized I was countering the same unsubstantiated, regurgitated “plants have feelings” and “we were meant to eat meat” tirades over and over again. So, then I took to a different tactic…
2. Let them make themselves look stupid. I’d say that 95% of the anti-veg comments that come into the site were borderline incomprehensible. For a while, I decided that perhaps it was best to let these people expose themselves for what they were: dummies simply out for a fight.

Then, a couple of days ago I got an e-mail from a reader:

Ryan, I just wanted to ask why you allow posts on your site from closed-minded, non-veg people? Allowing them a space to post about matters which they ‘really’ know nothing about, clearly evident with the same uneducated ramblings and arguments, is disgraceful. Give veganism the respect is deserves and monitor your postings! Just a polite plea from another veggie pal.

I thought about the note for the rest of the day and then noticed a comment that had recently come in:

Any of u Vegetarians and Vegans who think people are not ment to eat meat need to pull your heads out of your asses! I’m not going to get into evolution vs creation or hundreds of other factual data that indicate a need for humans to consume meat. I will simply leave you “enlightened Vegetarians/Vegans” with this…. if we were not ment to eat meat, then why in the hell do you think humans have “K9″ teeth? You think they are used to masticate berries and lettuce? (GET A CLUE CHRISTY TAYLOR, 11 Nov. 2004)

I hovered over the keyboard for a moment, almost reverting back to approach #1 and asking the person to let me know the next time they tore into the raw flesh of an animal they killed with their bare hands. Then I backed away and considered leaving the comment in place, taking approach #2. A moment later, I took a deep breath and hit “delete.”

So, it’s time to add a third approach, one which I’ll be following from here on out:

3. Delete stupid, antagonistic comments. This is not to say that I’m not going to allow comments that I may not agree with, but anyone that comes on and posts something similar to the nonsense above is going to get canned.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the future of this site and the direction I want to take (hence a lot of silence recently), and one thing is for sure: I’m done wasting time on the blowhards. They’re not the people I want coming back. You, the people nodding and thinking, “Jeez, it’s about time!”… you’re my people. You’re the ones I want to stick around.

Hey folks… sorry it’s been a quiet December around these parts. Things should pick up in the new year.

Even though I haven’t been writing much, I have been doing some work on the site. For one, the recipes are back online. These are recipes that were posted on the previous version of the site, but didn’t make it over when I switched to Wordpress. A few people had written in asking for old recipes, specifically the hot chocolate and the khong nuoc mam recipes, so I thought I’d finally get them on the new site. The URLs are different, but I’ll set up some redirects eventually.

If you’re actually visiting the site and not seeing this in an RSS reader, you’ll notice that the look and feel of the site has changed again.  I was never totally pleased with the earlier version and when I came across this theme yesterday, I decided it was finally time to switch it over.  Ideally, I would have designed my own, but with how tight time is these days, I figured it’s better to devote attention to content rather than the appearance.  So, I’ll be using this theme for the foreseeable future and making small tweaks to it over time.

Let me know if you stumble into anything that looks really awkward or goofy.

For some reason, the regular Daily Links haven’t been posting the last few days. If you’re fiending for your fix, head over here to see them.

Hey y’all… I’ve been a bit quiet recently, so I wanted to do a quick update.

First of all, I’m really starting to dislike this temporary design for the site. Expect a new (hopefully more permanent) version of the site shortly.

Secondly, I love Portland. Right now, I have my slave out picking up some vegan waffle sandwiches with maple spread and garden sausage from a food cart. Even if I don’t live here, a piece of my intestinal tract always will.

Thirdly, yesterday I met Julie Hasson, one of the three chefs on the new Everyday Dish DVD. We just met over e-mail recently, but it was nice to catch up with her in person and eat some food she made. I also got to meet and chat with the legendary Chad and Emiko from Food Fight. They were very excited about doing laundry.

More soon, including lots of pictures and restaurant reports from this trip to Portland. My slave is back, so I’m going to go eat.

Why am I seeing so many trolls on the site these days? The anti-veg crowd really seems to love visiting (and commenting on) this site. I just can’t understand the mindset where you’d waste time getting purposely riled up with people you apparently hate. I mean, I don’t subscribe to a single anti-veg or pro-meat feed and lord knows I’ve never wasting my time commenting at one of their sites.

I dig alternative viewpoints, but some of these folks seem to have flown in from way out in left right field.

Last week, I quietly re-launched the resources section of the site. I’ve cleared out some old links, added a bunch of new ones, and slightly reorganized it.

Also, I’m slowly trying to re-launch the recipes section of the site, this time as a regular part of the blog. Of course, I went and made quite a stupid mistake on my first new recipe post for Terribly Tasty Teff Pancakes. I called for ground coriander when I meant ground cardamom. Coriander in pancakes would probably be pretty foul.

Sorry if any of you tried them as listed. My bad.

As you may have noticed, I’ve replaced the Google Adsense ads over in the right sidebar with an ad for the Sustainable Energy in Motion bike tour.  If you’re a vegan biker, this looks like it would be wicked fun.

Adsense is gone for a while (no more Omaha Steaks ads!), though I’m toying around with the idea of reviving it in the RSS feeds, because it’s generally pretty unobtrusive there.  Feel free to tell me this idea sucks.

Hey y’all — I hate to do this, but I’m going to delay the “Tips for New Vegans” series I was planning for this week until next week. Sorry about that.

Feel free to add some new questions to the pile.

Next week I’m going to be running a series titled “Tips for New Vegans” (or, think of it as “Tips for New Vegetarians” if that’s more appropriate for you) and I’m looking for that one burning question that you’re looking to have answered.  Whether it’s a “how do I substitute for ____?” question or a “how can I deal with my family?” question, bring it on.

Just contact me with your question.  I’ll pick and choose and will answer them starting on Monday.

New or transitioning veg*ns are welcome and I don’t even mind a question from a long-time vegan who just doesn’t know how to answer a question they’re always getting.

I upgraded Movable Type today and unfortunately, it totally borked everything. It may be due to some plug-ins I have sitting around, but in any case, I didn’t feel like trying to troubleshoot it. I’ve been planning a migration to Wordpress anyway, so this just means it had to happen sooner rather than later.

So, here it is. Everything should be relatively functional, though you may find some weirdness as you browse the site (like, no recipes section). Rest assured that I’m working on getting things back up to speed quickly.

There will also be design tweaks over the coming weeks. Right now, I’m using a Wordpress theme that is pretty similar to the old site, but will be making changes to it to make it a little less “template”-feeling.

I’m actually kind of glad I was forced to do this… now I can start doing some of the things I’ve been meaning to do.

Issue #12 of Herbivore Magazine is out. It’s the activism issue and, by golly, I’ve got the cover story! It’s an interview with Michael Franti of Spearhead and I’m really happy with the way it came out.

Also, I wrote a companion piece for the Herbivore Blog Mashup.

I’ve got a few other pieces in this issue as well, including spotlights on Woodstock and Poplar Spring sanctuaries and a review of the Cattle Decapitation/Caninus 7″.

Pick up your copy of the magazine here or here, with some vegan haggis (aw nuts, sold out of the haggis!).

So, after eight days of no new content, did any of you suspect the worst when you hit the site yesterday and got an error?

Apparently, a comment spammer DOS‘ed us which killed Movable Type and caused my host to disable the site. I swear, I’d forego my vegetarianism for a meal if I could eat a meal of deep fried comment spammers. They’re a scourge and have done the same thing to two other sites of mine in the past. It’s a waste of my time and resources.

Anyway, the site’s back and I’ll have some new content for you soon. I’m trying to get on a more normal writing schedule. Thanks for bearing with me.

(BTW — no baby yet. Soon!)

Sorry it’s been a bit quiet around here this week. I’ve been doing a lot of (non-site) writing, finishing up some articles for the next issue of Herbivore. I’m spending late nights at the computer like I haven’t in a while. I feel like I’m back in college.

That Josh. Always standing over me with the whip.

Things will be back to normal here again soon. In the meantime, go buy yourself some Cravings Place Chocolate Chunk Cookie Mix. That stuff is good.

The June giveaway is now underway for an autographed copy of Summer Keightley’s great Glad Cow Cookbook. Go enter now!

There was no giveaway in May (lazy me), but Hannah was the winner of the Cosmos gift certificate in the April contest. The question of the month was “If you’re vegetarian or vegan, what age did you give up meat (and go vegan, if appropriate)?” A surprising number of people have been vegetarian since their early teenage years and many went vegan either shortly after or in their 20s. There were a few later converts and life-long vegetarians mixed in as well.

I get suprisingly little hate mail here, which kind of surprises me. Maybe I’m really not offending that many people… or maybe they’re just not reading. In any event, the other day I got an interesting letter. Below is what he wrote, with my responses interspersed (I know, I know, do not feed the trolls):

Please enlighten me. I am not a vegetarian, but I have no particular feelings of rage or disgust against anybody that choses to be. What I am is a single parent with three children who gets upset when activists who have no concept of the real world try to influnce the one I live in. If you really care about stopping animal cruelty drop out of society and live off the land, because one cannot exist in this modern world without contributing to said cruelty.

It’s pretty simple, really. It’s impossible to live a life completely free of cruelty. However, just because one can’t completely avoid contributing doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do our best to make some sort of difference. It’s quite easy to avoid animal products in one’s diet and same goes for clothing. That takes care of a major chunk of it. And, really, we don’t need animal products to live, so it just makes sense to cause the least amount of harm as possible.

So burn that leather coat, take off those leather shoes,

My leather coat and shoes are long gone. :)

…please don’t crank up that internal combustion engine driven vehicle,(emissions harmful to both man & beast). I don’t know how but i’m sure that somehow reading this e-mail will contribute to animal cruelty,if for no other reason than it’s keeping you from your animal saving crusades. Sorry to cut this rant short but i’ve gotta walk the dogs before I drag the clan to Wegmans for some cage free eggs(wait a minute kids they’re 4 times more than regular eggs-sorry no breakfast for you!

Of course, the easy answer to this is not to buy eggs. That’d the cheapest choice of all!

PS- If I do not receive a response to this I will assume that you plan to do the honorable thing and exit society. The worlds downtrodden chickens will be very pleased!

You mention animal rights activists not having a concept of the “real world”… I think the problem is more that many of us have *too* much of a concept of the real world. It’s the everyday consumer that doesn’t realize the unnecessary pain and suffering that goes into meat production since what they buy is packaged so sterilely, looking far removed from the way it did when it was alive.

Listen, I know I’m not changing your mind with any of this, but consider watching a movie like Peaceable Kingdom. It may give you a little better of an idea why compassion towards animals isn’t some weird, strange, unreasonable ideal.

Periodically, I look back at old blog entries just to see how far I’ve come. Every so often, I run into an entry that makes the current-me cringe… like this one from five years ago. An excerpt:

I don’t know whether I’ll ever make the jump towards veganism, but even now, I’m trying to be as “cruelty-free” as possible (buying strictly organic milk, sour cream, etc.) as well as cutting back on cheese (due mainly to the saturated fat content).

Fortunately, two years later, I was already talking about replacements for honey even though I hadn’t gone vegan yet. That redeems me a bit, right, vegan five-oh?

Congratulations to Karen T., winner of the one year subscription to VegNews in March’s contest.

Those that have entered the contest may have noticed that I ask a question in addition to the contact information. I’m not doing any insidious gathering of information for marketing purposes, I’m just genuinely interested in what Veg Blog readers have to say.

March’s question was “What is your favorite thing about being vegetarian or vegan?” I got a lot of the responses you’d expect, “because I’m not harming animals” and “because I feel healthier.” But below are some of the more unique responses that I got:

Being a positive Influence on other people (ex. friends and family now regularly prepare vegan meals at potlucks and get togethers…before i went vegan none of them had heard the word before!)

Improving myself, next stop …hybrid vehicle. ahhh, I’ll just ride a bike!!!

Knowing there’s nothing dead in me. [This reminds me of a phrase that I heard during a world religions class in college that stuck with me for years even before I became vegetarian: “My body’s not a cemetery.”]

That I am setting an example as a compassionate, environmentally and nutritionally aware person for my children.

Being vegan brings people together in the name of a peaceful, cruelty-free lifestyle, and that’s a wonderful feeling to share with others.

I think I’m too focused on being a failed vegan for the past 15 years to remember to think about the good stuff about being vegetarian… [Don’t be too hard on yourself… keep at it and remember all the good you’re doing.]

Too many things … Just being super-awesome-cool? [Can’t] decide.

Being able to look any and every animal in the eyes and feel happy for us both.

Tofutti Cuties

And my favorite:

solving so many problems at once!

With that said, go enter April’s contest, a giveaway for a $15 gift certificate to the mighty, mighty Cosmo’s Vegan Shoppe!

I posted a new recipe (finally!) today for Irish Potatoes. If you’re looking for a creamy, “ouch-my-teeth-hurt” sweet, bite-sized dessert, this is the one for you. And, no, there’s not a bit of potato in it.

These are so good.

Congrats to Nancy who won an autographed copy of Dreena Burton’s excellent Vive Le Vegan. Thanks to everyone who entered — this was the most active contest we’ve had thusfar.

The March contest has been posted. This month, you can win a one-year subscription to VegNews. So go enter, will ya?

(Side note: I apologize to any who’s contacted me in the last month or so and hasn’t heard back… I’ve been a bit scatterbrained recently and have let a few things fall through the cracks. Feel free to hit me up again.)

Update: Woops — there was a bug in the code there for a few minutes that kept you from entering. Should be fixed now.

The monster 25th episode of the Vegan Freaks podcast is now available. Yours truly is along for the ride as their interview subject for the week. Take a listen and enjoy.

It’s been a few months since I’ve done any giveaways on the site and I want to start things back up in February. So, I’m putting out a call to all readers that are involved in a vegan-friendly business that might want to contribute some goodies to the cause. I have a few people in mind, but I know there have got to be some other people reading doing cool vegan stuff that I haven’t stumbled upon yet.

Here are the rules:

• Your product must be vegan. ie. Don’t offer up a product that has animal-based glycerin in it.
• Your business (if you have one, and not just a product) should be vegan or very nearly vegan (I’ll take the latter on a case-by-case basis).
• No item is too big or too small. We’ve given away gift certificates, chocolate, and books in the past.

You’ll get a full month featured on the right side of every page on the Veg Blog. Readers will enter and at the end of the month, you’ll help me randomly select a winner. You then send the item to them. Easy.

If you’re interested, hit me up.

So get this: the Veg Blog is one of 31 finalists for the Feedster’s Feed of the Year Award! Apparently, the Veg Blog was also the Feed of the Day on February 19th of this year.

Since this award is being judged independently, this isn’t one of those awards that requires me to beg for you to go vote for me. Thank your lucky stars for that because, you know, I’m not beyond begging.

(It’s kind of funny that the screenshot they feature is from last week when I was moving servers, so the “We’ll be back soon” message is prominently displayed.)

It feels weird to have been away from the site for so long, but we’re back and running smoothly (I think). I had some issues with my previous web host, so I moved 11 of my domains to a new host with more space, more bandwidth, and better offerings. Unfortunately, their support squad is a bit swamped, so the actual transition of the domains took longer than I would have liked.

But, things should be back to normal. No more annoying errors when you post a comment and hopefully no more stretches of downtime.

Regular posting will resume today.

The veg blog Cafepress store is now open for business. Sure, if it were a real store, it would be a little off-putting to walk in and see only a single bumper sticker for sale, but more’s on the way… don’t worry. I just have to think of clever things that haven’t been said already.

I’ve gotten a few reports of people being told that the Veg Blog has the Download.Trojan virus attached to it. Has anyone here gotten that notification when visiting the site?

I may be vegan, but I hate Trojan horses.

Sorry for the quiet around here lately… I’ve had problems with MT and my web host (others have as well), and unfortunately, the problem for me hasn’t been fixed yet. In addition, the c: drive on my home PC has crashed, which has made meeting deadlines on certain articles difficult. However, lots of cool stuff is happening.

With that aside, I wanted to add on a bit to my post from Friday about my wife’s family’s visit last week. In addition to trying a bunch of great new recipes (by the way, I posted the Strawberry Rhubarb Crumb Pie recipe), I worked with my mother-in-law on writing down the recipes for vegetarian pho and not-fish fish sauce. I’ll be posting those this week, as they are two of the most frequently requested recipes I’m asked for in e-mail.

Lastly, is there anyone in the DC/VA/MD metro area that might be interested in doing a little volunteer farm work? Let me know.

See the menu up top there? (You people reading the RSS feed won’t, but…) Notice anything different? … Give up?

First, the news feeds are temporarily gone. I have some ideas about how to make it more useful, but need a little time to work on it.

Secondly, there’s now a “Story Tip” link. Use that link to send me links to any stories or links you think Veg Blog-worthy. It goes right into a to-do list (thanks for the idea, Paul!) so I can work through them one-by-one.

Sorry it’s been a bit quiet around here. Last week my wife and I headed up to New York City for a week’s vacation. While some people may not think of New York as a the most relaxing place to spend one’s vacation days, the quality and variety of food there just can’t be beat. Over the coming week or so, I’ll be writing up some brief reviews of the places we ate at. I hoped to do it while we were actually in New York, but our net connection was really spotty.

In the meantime, though, here’s a shot of me with Isa from The Post Punk Kitchen and Eric from Satya. Rock on. (Read more about our lunch in Isa’s LiveJournal entry.)

The other day I was thinking, “What would be something really nice that I could do for both Veg Blog readers and people that make products that I really support?” It didn’t take me long to think, “Monthly contest!” After all, one lucky reader per month will get something cool and a company that I am comfortable supporting gets a month of exposure on the site. I’m “giving back,” but twice! It’s like resurrecting two birds with one incantation.

Since March is already nine days gone and I have to do a little legwork to lineup sponsors for the contest, I decided to go ahead and give away a copy of my hip-hop mix CD Conspicuous Absence. It’s not veggie-themed or anything, but it was mixed by a vegan. That’s good enough, right?

Conspicuous Absence is also reviewed in the new issue of Herbivore (#7). Also in that issue is my interview with the PCRM’s Dr. Neal Barnard who plays in a pretty wicked band named Verdun.

Posting around these parts is a bit light… two reasons: 1. computer at home died a horrible death, new one on the way in a bit, but that means no net at home (AAAARGH!)… and 2. busy as hell at work.

But, for now, go check out VeganFreaks.org, a new vegan blog by a coupla’ 30-year-old vegans. (Scary realization, I’ll be a 30-year-old vegan this year, too. Time to start looking for cemetery plots.)

Also: AnimalWritings.com. How have I missed this blog for the last year?

Man, the site’s been a mess the last few days, huh? I realized yesterday that when I upgraded Movable Type, I broke the comments and trackbacks. Both are working now. (If you ever get an error when commenting, please let me know… I don’t comment on my own site very often, so I won’t know about a problem unless someone tells me!)

And then I realized today that I had completed deleted the sidebar… a burp in FTPEdit. Fixed now.

One other change I made: I got rid of the “features” section and took all of that content and made it part of the main blog. I figured there was no reason to separate these longer, feature-length posts from the rest of the site. They have their own category. Just think, one less RSS feed to worry about.

I think I’m done screwing with the site for a while, so now it’s back to the content.

The other day I added a new feature (an RSS feed for the recipe section). Unfortunately, while it functioned flawlessly, I botched the rest of the recipe section, so any recipes I linked up earlier blog posts no longer worked. The problem has been fixed, so you again have access to our massive database of 14 recipes.

Now that you’ve all had a bit of time to live with the site redesign, how do you like it? Is it better or worse than the old design?

I’ve made a few small changes over the last few weeks that you may not have even noticed. One is that instead of emphasizing the dates on the posts, I’m emphasizing the titles instead. Another is that the Google Ads have been moved up in the sidebar. While I liked where they were visually at the bottom, the click-through rate suffered big time. I’ve also been beefing up the resources section a bit.

I wanted to get readers’ thoughts on one thing, though: do you like the way I’m doing the links as a sideblog, or would you prefer to see them grouped together daily as part of the main blog (see Jeffrey Veen’s site for an example of this in action)? One advantage of making it part of the main blog is that it would allow comments. The disadvantage (which may not actually be one) is that the sideblog links would no longer be part of every page.

Let me know what you think in the comments. And feel free to throw any other site-related criticism in there as well.

I’ve updated the classifications of vegetarians and made it a feature. Please let me know any glaring errors.

Greetings!

As you may have seen throughout yesterday evening, I’ve been working on transitioning the Veg Blog to a new design that’s been in the works for months. Everything is pretty much taken care of, though there are a few small changes I’ll be continuing to work on in the coming weeks.

Here’s a quick overview of what’s changed:

• Upgraded to Movable Type 3.x. This went surprisingly well, though I’m sure there will be a few little bugs here and there related to commenting. I’ll work them out with time. In addition, some commenting policies may change (in particular, related to older entries). Spammers and trolls will hopefully become a thing of the past.
• Added a sideblog for capturing of small news items throughout the day with little or no commentary. These links are stored remotely thanks to the wonderful del.icio.us service and are rolled into the main RSS feed. And that brings me to…
• Offloaded the RSS/Atom feed to FeedBurner. Not only does it roll the sideblog links into the main blog, but it also automatically serves up the right feed for your reader. Good stuff! (And, oh yeah, the feed now serves up full posts.)
• Moved recipes out of MT. The recipe section used to be a separate blog, but now it’s running in a separate database with a proprietary script I wrote and adapted for this site. You can still comment on recipes (though old comments are gone… there weren’t very many) and you can also rate recipes. There’s one new one in there, too.
• Trimmed things down. The Cookbook Capsule Reviews are gone. I wasn’t keeping them updated and, really, that stuff should be going into the “Books” category of the main blog. The “classifications” section is now gone as well, though I’ll likely be moving that to the “features” section or as an entry in the main blog.
• Updated the “About” page. I’m vegan now and have updated the about page to reflect this change and also give a new angle to my own vegetarianism and the site’s focus and direction. I may tweak this a little more this week.
• Updated the “Resources” section. It’s much more complete and useful now. This section will be continually revisited and updated to serve as a good launching point for anyone getting started with meat-free living.

I’m excited about these changes and what they mean for the site. The Veg Blog is the one site I run that I really want to pick up the pace on more than any other. So look around and please let me know what you think! I look forward to your feedback.

Some crazy things are going to be happening to the site today through about midnight. Please be patient if things look funny, act funny, or smell funny. Thank you for your patronage.

I’ve just posted an overdue cookbook review (and have a couple more waiting in the wings). This one is for Nava Atlas’ The Vegetarian Family Cookbook.

A new feature article has been posted… one that was eight months in the making: An Interview with Josh Hooten. Josh runs Herbivore Clothing with his wife Michelle Schwegmann and is a mighty interesting fellow. Read and enjoy.

On a similar note, I’m happy to announce that the crew from Herbivore magazine has welcomed me aboard as the newest staff writer. I’ll have a few pieces appearing in issue six, which should be on the newsstands in the late October-ish time frame. The writing in Herbivore is excellent thanks to folks like Josh, Shawna Kenney, and Sarah Kramer and I’m proud to be joining them as part of the world’s best (and, admittedly, only) “vegetarian culture” magazine. (Hey, you, go subscribe.)

Just added: a vegan adaptation of a tasty tomato salad recipe, the perfect side dish for summer.

Sorry. Comments were screwy yesterday (an additional anti-spamming measure gone awry). They should be working again.

I posted a good recipe for Tofu Sour Cream from Vegan Vittles today. It’s a great replacement for those days you just can’t buy a package of Sour Supreme.

Good news: the feeds are running properly. I even added some new content after I updated the gnews2rss and magpie scripts. The “news feeds” have up-to-the-minute veg*n news from Google and Moreover, animal rights news, mad cow news, and organic farming news. The blog feeds have entries from Vegan P-rn and The Vegan Blog.

Enjoy.

A new Veg Blog feature has been added: Violence and Activism.

Wow… some people take this stuff a little too seriously. I just got an e-mail from a young lady who saw that I listed “cannibal vegetarian” on my classifications page and didn’t seem to get the joke:

Do you really expect to be taken seriously when you have”cannibal-vegetarian” listed on your site as a disciplined comsumptive practice? Anything i would’ve read on your website, and not already known to be true, I’d have dismissed as invalid simply because of your lack of representation of the vegetarian social movement. re-assessment may be beneficial! p.s. this is just my personal opinion, of course, but that’s nauseating.

Yikes.

Unfortunately, it looks like some of the news feeds have stopped working, and if you’re wondering why: Google has issued a cease-and-desist to Julian Bond, who wrote the simple (but very effective) Google News -> RSS script we use. It’s unfortunate, but somewhat understandable.

Isn’t it about time that Google started offering their own RSS feeds for Google News searches?

A new feature article has been posted, a review of Peaceable Kingdom, an amazing new documentary from the makers of The Witness.

I got a note today from a friend that he can’t visit the Veg Blog from his job at a New Jersey school district because they use SonicWALL Content Filtering, which results in this when they try to load the site:

I tell ya! You never want to let those impressionable students access something as controversial as information about vegetarianism! I sent an e-mail to Sonicwall, so we’ll see if they take any action.

Just another reason why Internet filtering software is a total waste.

The Veg Blog is switching servers again, so commenting on entries will be temporarily disabled. It should be reenabled later this week.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Update: The move is complete.

You may notice that on-site comments and off-site trackbacks have been combined using SimpleComments, and really it makes sense. They are displayed slightly differently so that you can tell which comments are local and which are remote, at a glance.

Also, I’ve made e-mail and name required fields to leave a comment, but the site will no longer display your e-mail address in order to help keep it hidden from spammers.

These are the first of a number of changes in the works over the coming month or two at the Veg Blog. It’s hard to believe that this site’s been around for over three years. Thanks, as always, for reading.

A couple of new things for you to check out: a veganized hot chocolate recipe and a new interview with Sage Francis. More new features are on the way, since I’m feeling guilty that the last one I posted was December of last year.

Calling Chicago Veg Blog readers…

If you’d be interested in doing a Veg Blog get-together (I refuse to call it a “meetup”!) late next week, I’m thinking lunch at some nifty cool place near an El stop, drop me a note or leave a comment here. I’ll be in the area and would like to meet some of you fine folks in Chi-town.

I’m proud to announce something that’s been in the works for quite a while now: The Veg Blog’s Adopt-a-Farm-Animal Project. If you’ve ever thought about adopting a farm (”food production”) animal through The Farm Sanctuary but have resisted because you don’t know if you can afford it, this is for you. Click through and read for full details.

A fancy button is coming soon, but I wanted to get this page online as soon as possible.

Sorry for the silence. A major server move is now complete so posting (and commenting) can resume as necessary. Let me know if you run into any strangeness.

Welcome (a few days late) to new visitors coming in via the New York Times article, “Blogs in the Workplace!

(If anyone happens to have still have a print copy, drop me an e-mail.)

I’ve changed the format of the news feeds available on the site. Now, from one place, you can see the most recent vegetarian/vegan-related news from Google News and Moreover as well as RSS feeds from several veg*n-themed weblogs. These pages are generated dynamically, so they always have the most recent information available.

If you know of any resources that should be added, let me know.

My final entry for Ryan’s Journal on Vegan.com.

Now available, a new feature interview with horror director Larry Fessenden. He discusses animal rights, vegetarianism, and ecologically sound filmmaking.

A full-length cookbook review of Mollie Katzen’s excellent Sunlight Café has been posted along with a recipe from the book for polenta waffles with berries. Remember that you can now comment on specific feature articles and recipes.

The feature articles have now been imported into Movable Type, which means you can comment on them. The links have changed, but all old links should automatically redirect you to the new URL.

Several new features are “just about” done, including an interview and a pair of full-length cookbook reviews.

Also, the Moreover newsfeed that used to be on the left side of every page has been moved to the news page. I found that if the Moreover servers were slow, it caused the Veg Blog to be slow, so offloading the news feed to a separate page seemed to be the best solution. I hope to add some other news feeds to that page in the future as well, to make it a one-stop location for news of interest to vegetarians and vegans.

The recipe section is now powered by Movable Type (meaning that now you can comment!). In addition, there’s a new recipe posted for an adapted verson of Paella (pay-EE-yuh). You’ll love it.

The Veg Blog has made the move from Blogger to Movable Type. Let me tell you: it was quite a process.

Importing the entries from Blogger to Movable Type wasn’t a big deal. Even importing the entries from dotcomments to Movable Type was pretty easy. What was a time suck was titling and categorizing 340 separate entries!

But, phase one (the most complex phase) of the transition is complete. Commenting is enabled and Trackback will be enabled from this post forward. What’s to come? I’m going to MT-ize the “Features” and “Recipes” sections, which will make life easier on me and allow you all to comment on specific features and recipes.

Posting should pick up signficantly in the coming weeks. Thanks for sticking around and continuing to support the Veg Blog for the past two years!

Been a little quiet around here recently, huh?

Sorry about that… I’m working on it. :)

On the left, you will see that there is now a Veg Blog button that you can use on your site. It’s an 88×31 GIF and I just ask that you put the graphic on your own site before linking it up.

Thanks to Patrick at the Dark for taking the time to design the button and send it along.

I’ve been meaning to welcome new Veg Blog readers from Nava Altas’ In a Vegetarian Kitchen. The Veg Blog was featured as the “Site of the Month” in her most recent newsletter. That means a lot to me… Nava, as you may know, is an author of a number of vegetarian cookbooks and writes reguarly for the VRG’s Vegetarian Journal. She’s been a great supporter of the Veg Blog and it’s always fun to chat with her on e-mail. If you haven’t checked out her site, take some time to do so. She has some great recipes and tips for new vegetarians well worth checking out.

On an unrelated note: the Vegetarian Resource Group has redesigned their web site! I was really happy to see the clean new look, as I’ve always thought their site was about five years behind the curve in terms of design, which was a shame because of the wealth of content. Check out their new site and browse their extensive archive of information.

A new feature article has been posted: BK Veggie Experiences, recounting my first two (no-so-great) experiences with the BK Veggie.

As you may have noticed, I don’t post many of the recipes that I discuss, mainly because I was concerned about copyright violation… turns out, I might not need to worry about it. Individual recipes cannot be copyrighted (because the list of ingredients how to prepare them are considered “ideas” which can’t be copyrighted), but a collection of them can. So, while reprinting a substantial portion of a cookbook isn’t acceptible, recipes can be. Taking this into consideration, I will likely start reprinting the recipes that I try here on the blog so I can share them with you all.

On an unrelated note: those of you that have expressed interest in the “one day a week” group I mentioned last week will be hearing from me within the next couple of days.

I’ve been thinking about doing it for a while now, and I think it’s about time to start…

As you may know, I’m a lacto-ovo veget