Looka! » webloggy stuff

Cocktail index finished – RSS onslaught over!

Chuck — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:30:11 +0000

Okay, finally! The Looka! Cocktail Index is now complete. Well, caught up, that is. Every cocktail post from 10 years of manually coded weblog has been tediously and painstakingly imported into WordPress (with the exception of two or three really shitty recipes for boring vodka cocktails from the old old days, and if you want those you’re going to have to obsessively dig for them).

The running total so far: 315 cocktail recipes in the index, plus 49 51 more that are multiples within a single post. We haven’t yet figured how to get the AZIndex plugin to create two separate index entries that point to one post; Marleigh’s waiting to hear from the developer. When we do figure it out, that’ll bring the cocktail index up to 364 listed recipes. New cocktail recipe posts will be automatically added to the index.

Despite the tedium I really did enjoy going through all those old posts again, and there are some drinks I forgot about that we’ll now revisit — that’ll be fun. Enjoy randomly clicking through them, as there are tons of things you won’t find in cocktail guides, like original recipes by our bartender friends near and far. (Oh, and there’s one joke in there, but it’s pretty obvious.)

I truly apologize for the barrage in your RSS feeds. I thought that backdated posts wouldn’t show up in the feed as new, but of course, WordPress had to make me look like a jackass and feed them anyway. I’ve gotten some good feedback, that some of you enjoyed seeing them go by, at least. I hope it wasn’t too bad for the rest of you. Posting will now resume at its previous intermittent rate (i.e., when I feel like it and when Wesly finally gets around to another one).

Wow … I think this weblog transition is actually kinda almost done.

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New cocktail index in progress

Chuck — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:00:25 +0000

By the way, y’all … Happy New Year! I know, January’s almost over by now, but rather than doing a special brief Happy-New-Year-post on the 1st I thought I’d just dive right in to regular posting and spit out some content. (Yes, I’m aware I didn’t get around to it until the 18th. Gimme a break.)

Now that we’ve had our break, Wesly and I hope to charge into 2010 (or “oh-ten,” as we’ve heard some people say, to our mocking delight). With Marleigh’s help I’ve gotten started on another new feature. Note that there’s a new link up in the header that says Cocktails — it’s a work in progress at the moment, and when complete will be a compendium of every cocktail recipe I’ve ever posted on Looka!, going back to 1999.

I’ll be importing the old cocktail recipe posts into WordPress and backdating them so that the index can add them, and for the most part I’ll be leaving them more or less intact. This means that I’ll be keeping in the embarrassing shit like “I’m not a big fan of gin” and “I don’t like vermouth” in posts from 10+ years ago, plus embarrassing drinks like the Velvet Hammer. I will be updating recipes for clarity and accuracy, however, plus fixing dead URLs as I can and throwing in an annotation here and there. All original posts (plus the rest of the old content) will still be there in the stone-knives-and-bearskins section of the archive.

So far I’m about halfway into 2002, and I’ve got along way to go. It’ll likely take a couple of weeks, but by the time I’m done importing we’ll have a very handy and convenient index of cocktail recipes here on the ol’ blawg, and future cocktail recipe posts will be automatically added to the index.

Whoever of y’all that have been nagging me to do this for years (Barry? Chris?) … good things come to those who wait!

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Internet Explorer bug fixed!

Chuck — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 21:05:09 +0000

For those of you still using Microsoft Internet Explorer, you may have had difficulties reading Looka! since the WordPress changeover and, more recently, seeing the sidebar. If you’ve given up on us because of that — and are still, I hope, glancing at your RSS reader — please come back! The bug’s fixed (gaah, stray comment tags!), all is well, and IE users will have a trouble-free Looka! reading experience from now on. (But it would behoove you to switch to Firefox. And if you’re a Mac user, Safari works great.)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled weblog. Don’t let this distract you from reading “Go forth and conquer,” Wesly’s first Looka! post, if you haven’t already.

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Please welcome Wesly to Looka!

Chuck — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 23:36:38 +0000

You’ve seen the boy’s name mentioned here enough times, and even got to read a bit of his writing here and there (such as when I was, um, too blotto to clearly remember the end of certain meals). He’s an excellent writer too, and I thought it was a shame that more folks didn’t get to read his stuff.

So, after much suggesting, wheedling, cajoling, pleading, coaxing, flattering, obsequity, bewitching, bothering, alluring, urging, perseverence, ass-kissing and just plain nagging (“Ahh, ya will … go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, GO ON!!!”), Wesly Moore has agreed to become a (semi-)regular author and contributor to Looka!, when he feels like it.

He’ll be writing about … well, whatever tickles his fancy, be it cocktails or food or travel or whatever. Now that I’ve publicly put him on the spot, I suspect he’ll have to come up with something soon.

Please make him feel welcome. And of course, Team Chuck ‘n Wes means more free content!

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Voilà … Looka!’s spiff new look!

Chuck — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 03:19:09 +0000

Finally, this place is gonna start looking a bit more like it used to!

As of today, we’ve got the basic look of the blog down. The theme is based on the free Vesper theme by Valen Designs, which had the kind of layout we were looking for, if not so much the exact look. (I wasn’t really down wit’ da urnge.)

The custom Looka! theme was designed by my friend Marleigh Riggins Miller of SLOSHED! fame. Not only is she a terrific cocktails and spirits writer and drink-maker, she’s a very talented graphic designer — the kind of stuff she does for a living — and she did a really lovely job. It’s still a work-in-progress, and over the next few days or week or two we’ll roll out other features, including navigation along the header with links to full archives, an about page, a list of cocktail recipes (i.e., the old “Cocktail of the Day” feature, which I will gradually import into WordPress going as far back as I can), a page of links (instead of that really long frakkin’ sidebar) and maybe some more. We’ll see!

I also want to thank my friend Jay Hepburn of Oh Gosh! (the UK’s premier cocktail and spirits weblog, in my humble opinion) for his preliminary work in helping get this place ported to WordPress. He’s meeting Wesly and me at the Connaught Bar in London next Thursday, and I think there’ll be a drink or three there with his name on ‘em.

Onward and upstairs!

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Say hello to Looka! Mobile

Chuck — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:04:30 +0000

My friend Matt the RumDood once told me, “Your blog takes friggin’ forever to load on my mobile. I could start loading it, go eat lunch and then maybe I can read it afterward.” Well, something like that. He probably said something a bit more epithetic than “friggin’,” at least.

Well, gnash your teeth no more. As of now, if you care to read this weblog on an iPhone, iPod Touch or Android phone, it’ll look like this:

Pretty spiff! (Yes, I know I’m easily impressed, but this kinda entering-the-current-century stuff is all very new to me.) You can read posts, comment, forward them, log in as a user/subscriber, forward to Twitter and a bunch of other social bookmarkers, or flip a switch to turn the mobile theme off and look at the full site. Alas, you can’t look at Flash videos, but that’s a limitation of the phone. If you have some other kind of mobile, at least the new WordPress site should load a lot faster than my ridiculously bloated hand-coded versions did (most of which averaged around 200K of code alone, not counting pictures!).

Making life easier for our readers! I’ll drink to that.

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Technorati claim

Chuck — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:12:57 +0000

In order to claim this blog on Technorati, I must actually write a post (sigh) with the following code within it:

5is37m2zre

I’ve actually got to clutter the place up with this? I can’t hide some code somewhere? Meh.

Truly nothing to see here, move along, move along … next post is about booze!

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A new Looka! is coming.

Chuck — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:33:25 +0000

Changes are afoot, kids! I’ve finally decided to take the plunge and convert this weblog into one that is powered by WordPress (which you’ve probably noticed, and which probably made you say something like, “What the f…?”).

This horribly ugly and plain page using a basic, off-the-shelf WordPress template is merely a placeholder until we get some codeslinging done. I have to confess, it’s going to take time. My dear friend Marleigh Riggins Miller is building a custom template (which will retain as much of the look and feel of good ol’ Looka! while “moving it a bit into Web 2.0,” as she says) and doing the conversion for me, but it’s on her own time so it might be a bit before we get started. Plus, I’ll be in Europe for 2 weeks starting in the 3rd week of October, so that’ll slow posting down a tad. This temporary template up now will at the very least allow me to get posts up. They’ll be ugly, but readable.

In the meantime, to backtrack and access the archived Looka! weblog for September 2009 (its final month as a dinosaur-like hand-coded weblog) and to read the final post if you followed this from the Networked Blogs link, visit this link:

http://looka.gumbopages.com/archive/2009-09.html

You can scroll down the right-hand sidebar and read any of the archives over the last 10 years as well.

To complicate matters, I’m changing the URL of the weblog! (Couldn’t you just strangle me?)

From now on, please update all links to this weblog to:

http://looka.gumbopages.com/

The old URL, http://www.gumbopages.com/looka/ should still work, but will redirect to this one. All old links to that URL should still work. (*fingers crossed*) If the old URL link includes “index.html” after the trailing slash (i.e., “http://www.gumbopages.com/looka/index.html”), it WILL NOT WORK. I had to throw that one under the bus, but I don’t think too many inbound links are formatted that way.

UPDATE: The RSS feed is changing to http://looka.gumbopages.com/feed/, which I was able to fix from the one I posted earlier … ignore the one I mentioned in the previous incarnation(s) of this post. I’ve rewritten it about ten times while I tried to tweak everything, broke everything horribly and somehow managed to get it all fixed so that, unbelievably, everything seems to work, and

Sigh. This WordPress thing is gonna be good in the long run, but it’s a huge pain to set up. (“The famous five-minute installation,” my fishbelly white Irish ass.)

This WordPress thing is gonna be good in the long run, but it’s a huge pain to set up.

(“The famous five-minute installation,” my fishbelly white Irish as

This’ll be exciting! Stay tuned.

Chuck

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