HUGE FOODIE BLOGROLL UPDATE!!!! PLEASE READ IF YOU ARE ON THE FOODIE BLOGROLL!!!

Well in the past several months 2 things have happened consistently that brought me to a major decision regarding The Foodie Blogroll and its fate. Number one, I have been wanting to use it as a better tool for community building. As I have said before, this is the first blogroll for foodies and we are over 1000 members strong. We have a forum, where we hold a monthly event – The Royal Foodie Joust and it has been so great getting to know all the world’s foodies better. I have started showcasing the best of the best of The Foodie Blogroll each Friday in the Finest Foodie Friday installments. But I want more community! So Roberto and I have been working on a way to make this possible. We went through several different ideas, but finally decided to give The Foodie Blogroll it’s own home: www.foodieblogroll.com. In the upcoming months we will be making this more user friendly. Right now, as Roberto puts it, it is a skeleton.

Why did we do it this way? Well lately we have been having trouble with blogrolling.com our hosting company for the blogroll. I think it is just too big for them to handle! I was getting a lot of complaints from members that the blogroll was slowing their blogs down. So we knew something had to be done immediately. Unfortunately with our wedding coming up in just weeks, we knew if we gave the Foodie Blogroll its home NOW, it wouldn’t be all we hoped, but it was better than nothing and would make life easier for all the members. So it was the lesser of two evils.

THIS IS WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

1)The blogroll html contains only 3 links now: a link to join the blogroll, a link to foodieblogroll.com where the entire list is being hosted and a link to the forum. If you have altered the html code I originally gave you, at all, none of these 3 links will show.
So please put the entire foodie blogroll code as it was originally sent to you in your sidebar template. I promise it will not take a long time to load three links! Also, now that we are doing all this maintenance we are visiting lots of blogs at random to check that the proper URLs are in use, if you joined The Foodie Blogroll but are no longer displaying anything about it, you will be removed from the blogroll.

2)The blogroll list is spartan at best right now and if you are one of the first 150 blogs to join the blogroll, it was before, Roberto, computer whiz, created the foodie blogroll database that I now use to do everything I need to maintain the blogroll. This means that your blog will be (temporarily) in the W section (for www.) – since we had to import all of your blog info from a word document I was using in the beginning to track members – something that proved very hard to do at 2 AM this morning. So I apologize for this inconvenience, but it is better than slow loading time, right???? ;)
I promise this will be fixed soon – but we have to go in and manually change it all – something that wasn’t happening early this morning.

However, this is the bad news. The good news is that in the coming months www.foodieblogroll.com will be full of great features. Each member will have their own customizable page – where you can include a picture and there will be stats to show you how often you blog is viewed through the blogroll. You can also chose a subcategory that best describes your food blog so it will make it easier for people to find you, when they are searching for something specific. There will also be a section showcasing random blogs from the blogroll, something many of you from the second half of the alphabet expressed an interest in. Right now the page features the last 10 blogs that have joined introducing all of you to our newest members. These are random right now, because we had to imput those 150 first blogs last night, with today’s date - so now you will see old favorites and later the newest. So it is going to be great – but at the present time, due to personal obligations, I am not able to give you all that I hoped straight off the bat. I do apologize for that. That is not how I like to run things.

So you asked and we delivered! Boy Genius and I have given The Foodie Blogroll a new home so that your pages will load faster while still supporting the blogroll and reaping all the benefits of being part of this diverse, original and unique community of food bloggers!

So I hope everyone will be okay with this temporary solution. We will really do the best we can to get the total package up and running for you guys as soon as possible! Thank you so much for our understanding and support through all of this and I am very sorry for any inconvenience!

Since this is taking up all the room in the house today, I am not going to showcase the Finest Foodie Friday today – I don’t want to steal their thunder will all this Foodie Blogroll stuff. But stay tuned next week, I will feature my Top 5 Favorite Green Blogs! :)

Have a great food filled weekend everybody!