We had an amazing time in Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands and can’t wait to share our stories and pictures with everyone!
During our time away I’ve given a lot of thought to the current format of Two Fat Bellies and we’ve decided to make a few changes to the site. First, you’ve all probably noticed that the design of our site changed a few weeks ago. We’ve gone from a standard WordPress template to something a bit more personal and more representative of us. The graphic in the header was designed by our good friend and talented cartoonist, John. We asked him to draw something fun and cartoony that would go with “Two Fat Bellies” and he was the one who thought of using our beloved cats in the header.
Here are some pictures of our kitties that inspired the header, Stewie and Rupert. Yes, they’re named after Family Guy. If we ever get a dog we’ll probably name him Brian. We adopted Stewie and Rupert as kittens in 2006 and our lives haven’t been the same since. They have such distinct personalities (Rupert is really the troublemaker but Stewie took that role when they were kittens and now it’s too late to switch their names) and make us smile and laugh every day. And they love food too, though we don’t usually feed them people food – just little bits of deli turkey or chicken occasionally, which they go absolutely crazy over.
Stewie and Rupert
Stewie chewing up his toy mousie
Rupert winking at the camera
The second and more important change to the site is administrative in nature but I think it’ll improve our content overall. I’ve been dating posts in “real time”, meaning that the date posted is the date we ate/cooked whatever I’m writing about. I did this because even though we started writing content for our blog on May 17, 2009 (our first wedding anniversary), technical difficulties prevented us from uploading content to the site until a few weeks later. Since I was the only one posting for the first few months, it wasn’t a problem for me to keep track of dates and post everything in chronological order. However, when Josh made his first posts, they were dated as of that current date. I had to make him change the dates to something older because otherwise, his posts would always be at the top until I caught up to date with my own posts, which might never happen.
Using original dates presented another problem because if we wanted to comment about something that happened recently, such as Daniel earning a third Michelin star (impressive, it’s moved to the top of my “must go to” list) or the closing of Chanterelle (sad for the industry, but really wasn’t impressed with the food when we were there two years ago), we would run into the same problem with those posts always staying on top unless we changed the date, but then it wouldn’t make sense and would look like we had predicted the future. So from now on, posts will be dated as of whatever the current date it is.
And finally, I’ll be jumping around with my restaurant reviews and posting about meals that were more interesting to me first rather than in chronological order of when we went to the restaurants. I know you all don’t really care what day we actually ate at those restaurants. And as a bonus for me, I won’t feel so pressured to “catch up” on posts, since I’m still writing about things that happened a few weeks ago but would rather post about other things, such as our trip, immediately.
Hopefully these changes will help make our blog better and more enjoyable for our readers. As always, please feel free to leave any comments or suggestions on other ways we can improve our site – we would love to hear from you!