My recent silence has been the combined result of not having too much to report and of spending significant amounts of time trying to decide how best to publish my recipe collection. After much deliberation and prompted by Rosemary expressing an interest in recipe search facilities, I decided to use WordPress and put the recipes out as posts in a blog. The blogging software would also allow me to categorize the recipes as starters, desserts, mains etc.
I developed a set of my own XML tags to document the recipes some time ago. (How sad is that?) I also had developed an XSLT stylesheet to display them as web pages and another to use XSL:FO (FOP) to produce Acrobat Reader (.pdf) files. Now I was going to have to figure out how to translate them into WordPress blog entries instead. So, I’ve been delving into w.bloggar (a blogging client) which can post entries saved offline as XMLRPC files, XSLT again to translate my XML into w.bloggar’s XMLRPC (.post) files, and PHP to generate scripts to batch process my recipes directory accordingly.
OK, that’s quite enough acronyms. After some effort, the royal “we” are pleased to announce the birth of Gastroblog: if I might borrow a term from the entertaining Mr Keith Floyd, a gastronaut’s companion to Traveblog, helping your taste buds travel the world from the comfort of your own kitchen. Each recipe is also available as an Acrobat (.pdf) file.
Do try it out and let me know how it goes. If you don’t like it, though, I may simply throw in the towel. 😉
I’m quite certain that there are various typos and omissions lurking: I couldn’t face proof-reading 101 recipes so I’ll make corrections and completions as I go. Do bring to my attention those that you find.
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