Site changes

Just Hungry has had yet another site makeover. This is the fourth incarnation of the site in 3 years, and I think by far the biggest one. Besides a cosmetic facelift, it's been converted to a new backend engine, Drupal [1]. Although Drupal is tad more complicated (for me, not you I hope!) than the blogging platform the site was running on previously, Movable Type (or the version before that which was on Movable Type's sister Typepad), I think it's going to make the site even better. Here are some of the changes that are in place right now.

Recipe (and other) indexes

• There's finally a recipe index [2] (after being a 'coming soon' feature for ages!) sortable by title or date. There are also separate indexes for Japanese [3] and Basic [4] recipes. I'll set up more category-specific recipe indexes shortly.
• Longer posts are now classified as features [5], and shorter posts as blog entries [6] (each with their own indexes).
• Since I use free tagging on posts, there are quite a lot of categories. These can be browsed in the alphabetical directory [7] of categories.

News feeds

Drupal allows for RSS feeds of just about anything, but the two major ones are the following:

• The 'everything' [8] feed contains excerpts of all new articles, blog entries, images, recipes, etc. If you're already subscribed to the site it's basically the same as what you are getting already. (The only change is that I am no longer doing daily postings of my del.icio.us [9] links to the on-site news feed, but rather using Feed-burner's [10] wonderful Link Splicing feature. All del.icio.us links will appear as soon as I enter them on the front page of the site.)
• New is a recipes only [11] excerpt feed, if you'd like to skip the other entries.

See more subscription options on the Subscribe [12] page.

There are some more new features such as a real contact form [13], a better - and internal - search form [14] (replacing the Google search, which was a legacy from the Typepad days and dependent on how and when Google indexed the site) and a simplified advertising and promotions [15] page, including requests for link backs, with more to follow. Please take a look around, and let me know in the comments what other features you'd like to see. One thing I'm still undecided about is having member registration with member-specific features or content. (Membership will always be totally free). Would that be a good idea, or unnecessary? What kind of member-only features or content would you like to see? Let me know!

(I should mention that some things on the site may not quite work totally properly...I should put a 'beta' mark on the logo, Web 2.0 style, but oh well.)