When I made the decision in early 2015 to combine all my blogs into one, self-hosted site, it simplified some stuff for me, bringing everything under one umbrella.  Which de-simplified things for many of my readers, as I had completely separate audiences for my food blog than I did for my writer’s blog and merging meant they were all mushed together in one big mess.  I did a lot of research on things that would help alleviate that issue, making it easier to navigate through the recipes if that’s the only thing people are here for.  MOST of what I found involved needing to go in and change things in each individual post (which, when you have over 600 posts to edit, is just…crappy).  So nothing got done.

I had seen the Visual Recipe Index plugin before, but according to their site, it requires each post has a featured image (which was a thing I hadn’t done because I just didn’t know).  This morning, I found another blogger’s post that mentioned it will just take the first image in the post if there wasn’t one set.  So I installed it post haste and made the necessary tweaks and TA DA!

Now I have a thumbnail recipe index by category!

[iframe src=”http://giphy.com/embed/11sBLVxNs7v6WA” width=”500″ height=”162″ frameBorder=”0″ webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen][/iframe]

If you head on over to Recipes and click on any category in the list, it’ll give you a nice pretty index of all my recipes in that category, so instead of scrolling endlessly through every post tagged “recipe” (which is still what you get over under the Latest Recipes button), you can see in a jiff what’s there.

I’m ridiculously pleased by this.  There’s still a bunch of under the hood stuff I’d like to do.  I’m in the midst of a slow update to get each post to present as a recipe card using EasyRecipe (not hard, just involves going into every recipe and clicking some buttons and updating it), setting featured images and assigning SEO terms.  But at least people can FIND STUFF NOW.

I have no idea when I’ll pick back up with new recipes.  Definitely not while we’re in the middle of Whole 30 (although the shepherd’s pie I made was kick ass…I should write that one down).  We’ll be (probably) shifting to a mostly Paleo lifestyle after this, and I’m more in the realm of following other people’s footsteps going through my half dozen Paleo cookbooks and really learning the ropes.  But eventually.  Anyway, that’s the update.  The take away is that the food blog portion of the site is now functional!