In The Event Of An Actual Emergency ...

And now, a little public service announcement from your kindly author and publisher here at Exploring Food My Way. Remember, this is only a test.

In the course of eating my way, errr, ahem, researching the subjects that eventually find their way onto my blog, I have come upon an unusual problem. I often get asked by readers how long it takes for something to be posted on the blog after experiencing it in real life. When I first started writing this blog, I generally posted a review within a day or two of the experience. However, over time, I have settled in on a Monday - Wednesday - Friday publishing pattern. This has meant that if I have more than three food experiences in one week, finished posts get added to the publishing queue. While it is always a good idea to have a few posts written and ready to go, things here at Exploring Food My Way have gotten a little out of hand.

To understand what I mean, tomorrow's entry about the Chowder House Cafe in Cuyahoga Falls actually happened on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009. Normally, I would write up my entry and drop it on the end of the queue. This means it more than likely wouldn't get published until sometime in late December or early January of 2010. Yes, gentle reader, you are reading that correctly. I currently have about three months of queued up posts just sitting around waiting for their appointed publication day. Of course, since I am the author and publisher, I can move publication dates around willy-nilly, and I often do, but Blogger doesn't make it particularly easy to rearrange dates. However, if a post is time sensitive or particularly poignant, I am certainly not above doing a little date rearranging.

"But, Tom," I can hear you saying in your head, "why don't you just publish more often than three days a week? Wouldn't that help to alleviate the long wait between you eating it and me reading about it?"

Yes, in fact, it would. The problem that worries me, however, is that if too much information is published too quickly, it would dilute the importance of each entry overall. In other words, if my readers know to check every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday because they know that they will find something new (and hopefully interesting), there is a routine to that. If I started posting on random days of the week, or several days in a row, I can't expect that the average reader has the time or patience to start scrolling through the article archives to see what they've read and what they've missed.

The other problem with publishing too often is that I will whittle down my existing queue of ready-to-go entries. While I whole-heartedly agree that a three month wait is certainly a bit too long to go from table to blog, I also enjoy having the buffer. It gives me sufficient time to revisit each entry several times to make sure that it is what I want to say and how I want to say it. Perhaps if I simply cut it down to about a one month queue, it would work out better.

In that vein, I have decided to introduce a new feature to the blog, at least for now called "Extra Helpings." In addition to the normal publication schedule I outlined above, I intend to do one extra blog entry per week highlighting a food experience that is time sensitive or blogworthy in some fashion. A perfect example of this will be tomorrow's entry on the Chowder House Cafe. Having only opened up within the last two weeks, I feel that they could use a little help right now to bump up their customer base. Another example might be if I attended the first day of a two-day food festival and wanted to let readers know about the event in time so that they would know about it in time to attend the second day.

Extra Helpings entries will continue to be written in the same manner and voice as my other blog entries. However, by labeling them as such, you will know that I feel they are important enough topics that they deserve to be bumped to the head of the queue and not have to sit for a few months in some dark, dingy, stinky place before seeing the light of day.

Alright, I think I made my point. Go on about your day and enjoy the cold but sunny Ohio weather. Remember, this was only a test.