Marie, Let's Eat!: 2012

Sunday, April 1, 2012

...and it's goodbye from us! Hello!

After a little bit of thought and a whole lot of hard work, we've realized that the time is long past to leave Blogspot behind, get our own domain and make this here blog of ours look more amazing - well, amazing, period - and easy-on-the-eye and generally professional-looking. Plus this should stop those annoying "service unavailable" 503 errors that people keep hitting.

So, it's with a heavy heart, heavy mainly because of all the hard work behind the scenes coding and copying and pasting and migrating 450-odd posts over to the new site, that we have to ask our friends, fans and followers to update their subscriptions, RSS feeds and bookmarks, because the post that you thought you might be seeing here today will instead be seen at our shiny new site over at Wordpress. The address is simply http://marieletseat.com , which, for those of us who just had business cards printed three months ago, is a bit of a pain in the neck, but that's the trouble with progress, I guess.

The new site gives us just about everything that I want at this time. One unfortunate sacrifice is the CommunityWalk map that you are used to seeing at the bottom of each page, as Wordpress and that java-thingumajig don't play well together and the new site does not support it. But what we lose there we more than make up in other functionality, including quick links at the top of the page to our most frequently-visited cities and states, and nice, shiny sticky posts of the most recent three entries. We've also dropped some of the less-frequently used labels or tags, and given you an easy way to follow our silly tweets, which also alert followers to new posts over at The Hipster Dad's Bookshelf and Thrillpowered Thursday.

The blogspot site will remain here, since that'd be kind of rude to the sixty gajillion people who have linked to chapters here to just delete it. And, in truth, many - many - of the links at the new site will point back here to blogspot until I find the time to update them all. (Just doing the barbecue page and Urbanspoon's data has been a chore enough!) But it won't be updated anymore, and comments here are turned off.

I do want to take this opportunity to publicly thank all of our many readers, supporters and commenters. We've received several emails and comments from complete strangers telling us that our adventure in eating more interestingly has inspired them to do the same, and that makes it all worthwhile. We've received some compliments from people like Creative Loafing's Cliff Bostock who've been doing this for years, and some playful teasing from the likes of Tom Maicon, who showed off how a dyed-in-the-wool sushi snob would respond to our inexperience with the cuisine. We've made the acquaintance and friendship of several fellow bloggers who share this wacky hobby, and enjoyed the spirited competition of Urbanspoon's leaderboards - did you know that, as of today, we're ranked # 59 of 6194 blogs, worldwide, and only one other blog in the Southeast, The Cynical Cook, is ranked higher than us? - and taken back roads we'd never have thought to take if we weren't encouraged to share what we find with our readers. This has been a blast, and I can't wait to see what will happen next. Thanks so much for making this so incredibly fun.

That address again is http://marieletseat.com . Don't delay, click now! See you there!