Monday, November 29, 2010

My Recipe Structure for Blogging

Given my culinary-related central purpose in life, this blog will gradually become more and more food oriented as time goes on, though not to the point of becoming totally so. I will, of course, still want to talk about other things in life, such as my pursuit of realizing the ideal in myself or my favorite movies, but it should be considered inevitable that my writing will soon be dominated by my primary interest in life: The culinary arts. As a corollary you can expect me to be posting recipes here as well as track how I'm doing in educating myself in cooking, baking, and whatever else exists as a food preparation method.

The recipes themselves won't be in a consistent stream and will lack photos until a much later date, but I will post them to show what's going on in my kitchen, both to track my own practices and to give my readers thought for their own culinary practices. After assessing how many different ways other blogs post recipes I have formulated my views as to how I would like my recipes to be structured, and will make that explicit here.

Out of everything I have seen, the two structures I hate the most are 1.) When the recipe is buried in the post and 2.) when the recipe is integrated into the post text with no formal separation. The former is extremely inconvenient if you're one to bookmark pages as a way of documenting recipes, as you're forced to look through a sometimes great body of text for just that small section you need. The latter is even worse in that you have you patiently dig through the text in order to separate the recipe procedure from the author's descriptions and other talking, and it's especially difficult to have patience when you need immediate instruction.

Consequently, I'd like to avoid committing such vices by having a formal structure to my recipe posts, which I will follow strictly. First, anytime I post a recipe it will be at the very top of the page with little to no introduction. There will be the recipe title, a description as to what it is (maybe), prep and heating time, servings (sometimes), ingredients, and step-by-step instructions. The recipe text will be uninterrupted by anything irrelevant and will be kept as short as it possibly can. I'll try to limit each post to only one recipe in order to make things easier to reference due to each recipe being on top. I do not anticipate ever running into the need to post two recipes in one article, though the future may prove otherwise. It won't be until after the recipe that I'll talk about my experience with it, my evaluation of it, whether I'd continue making it, changes I'd make, etc. Once I start posting photos I will post only one photo at the top of the recipe and save the rest for after; I hate it when a blog integrates several huge photos throughout the recipe instruction since it entails cumbersome scrolling for future reference.

If anyone thinks of anything I could do to optimize the readability of my recipes please tell me so, as I want to make my recipes as easy and efficient to read as humanly possible. I'll post my first recipe on Wednesday.

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