There are other problems with the piece. You unfairly malign caterers, seemingly oblivious that many caterers are talented cooks. Also, the piece is couched as a set of “tips” to the readers as to how they should cater their own affairs. That’s useless advice, since virtually none of them could ask a gang of chefs to cook their wedding meal, and probably couldn’t afford it if they did. As a fellow food journalist noted, “It’s really a ‘let them eat cake’ kind of move.”

As a guy who has been helping plan his own wedding*, I can’t help but nod along in agreement. Even though I blog at a not-insignificant food website myself, there’s no way I could dream of roping in a bunch of NYC chefs to cater our affair.

I can’t say that Josh didn’t have a grain of a good idea here. Who wouldn’t want to feed their guests some awesome top-notch food? But when I read that column knowing that Ozerksy’s relationships with those chefs would make procuring their services substantially easier for him than it would his readers, I felt the whole thing was a bit disingenuous.

*Credit where due: The fiancée has taken most of the lead on the planning, and I am eternally grateful for that.

Full disclosure: I know Josh IRL and have met Robert a couple times but mostly know him through email correspondence and blogging.

Click screen shots to view larger.

On Gothamist the other day, I was a bit sad to see how this post on Slice was credited to Serious Eats instead.

Sure, they’re from the same “family” of blogs, and, sure, “The Food Lab” posts generally live on the Serious Eats homepage, so maybe this isn’t the best example to whine about, but it seems like more and more these days, Slice is referred to as “Serious Eats.”

In the end, I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. It’s good that people are viewing what Slice does as part of the Serious Eats mission. But when something you’ve worked on for six years (and that predates Serious Eats by three years and was in fact among the first wave of food blogs) is sort of overlooked, it kinda blows.

Oh well, it’s from some dude whose name I don’t even recognize on Gothamist. Probably some new young turk there.

Some of these people are annoying.

I’m not going to name names, but you know who you are.

Basically, if all you’re using your Tumblr or Microblog for is to “reblog” something you saw elsewhere, you should not be auto-retweeting this crap.

I don’t want to click on a shortened link in your tweet only to be taken to your microtumble that in turn links to the primary source.

You should have just tweeted the link to the original material in the first place, asshat.

Actually, I’ll use @romensko as an example (chart after the jump), since he’s not a friend of mine whose feelings I might hurt—and because he does this ALL THE TIME.

Hello,
How much does it cost to eat out in florence?
There are so many factors to consider. Would you be kind enough as to give me some pointers as what to look for or avoid?
Any help appreciated. Thank you very much. yours truly, Fred

The first time I got one, I got snookered and ended up posting it as a Dear Slice letter on Slice.

But then I started getting more, all from the email address petrov.gazprom@gmail.com, all signed with different names:

Hello,
How much is the cost of a cheap meal in italy? Before I go ahead, is there any pointers you might have?
A little advice would go a long way right now.
I really appreciate your help. Thank you,
James

Hi,
How much would a greece fantasy vacation cost?
There are so many factors to consider. Would you be kind enough as to give me some pointers as what to look for or avoid? Any help appreciated. Thank you so much.
Terry

Hi,
How much does schooling cost to go to johnson and wales culinary school? I am trying to figure out what is important. I was hoping you might be able to give me some insight. Any info much appreciated.
I am very grateful for your help.
Thankyou,
James

How many euros for a sandwich in italy? There are so many factors to consider. Would you be kind enough as to give me some pointers as what to look for or avoid? Any info much appreciated. Thank you so much. Kind Regards,
Lacey

What is the cost to eat in italy in dollars?
It has become obvious I need help with this. Any ideas you have would be very much appreciated.
Please help me.
I really appreciate your help.
Sincerely,
Janet

Hello,
How much cost breakfast ny?  Your insight into what would be the best way to proceed would be much appreciated.  Please point me in the right direction.
Thank you very much.
Warmest Regards,
Terry

I have no idea what kind of spam this is or what the purpose or desired result would be. Figured I’d post them here if anyone else is getting them.

Update: Commenters here suggested as much, and The Spamhaus Project confirms it—if you respond, your answer will appear on one or more websites that appear to be using the Q&A content as fodder to serve up Google ads against. So it’s a cheap way for the spammers to try to generate content for their pageview farm. —8/4/2009

I can relate all too well with this tweet by Jason Kottke.

Being first is always nice, but it is equally nice to get some sleep, to actually go out and do things IRL, and to not worry about ephemeral crap that no one will care about 24 hours from now—or indeed two hours from now.

See also: You Didn’t Miss Anything

This kinda makes me sad. Brownstoner says that “Serious Eats checked in on the place …” when in fact it was Slice that did the checkin’ in.

I know that Slice is now a part of Serious Eats, but it still sort of hurts seeing your baby get sat on by a big ol’ elephant.

If people are starting to lose sight of Slice and perceive it as merely Serious Eats, it seems like we might as well close down the separate Slice branding and just fold any pizza stuff into Serious Eats and Serious Eats New York.

I suppose blogs sort of have life cycles. I remember a bunch of blogs that seemed unstoppable back in the day and that are now defunct. Perhaps Slice has reached yet another trough in the sine wave of pizza blogging. Who knows.

I’m not picking on Gothamist, because this isn’t really their fault, but the standard password-recovery system that Movable Type (G’mist’s blogging app—and ours at Serious Eats) uses to send you your lost cypher is a bit logic-challenged.

In order to get my password, I have to remember my username and some secret recovery phrase I supposedly set when I signed up.

I haven’t commented in Gothamist in a while, and I wanted to give founder-editor Jen Chung props for her great coverage on the mysterious maple syrup smell. But I can’t for the life of me remember what I set as my password. I’m also unsure of what my username is. And if I can’t remember those things, do you really think I’m going to remember some word or phrase that is not easily guessed by people who know me or can Google some basic info*?

I’ve found that the best system for handling such requests is the email method. An email address is much less likely to change, and tying password-recovery to user email addresses solves both the forgotten-password and forgotten username problems.

*It’s always bad to use mother’s maiden name, street you grew up on, first pet name, etc., as a passkey phrase—especially if you’re a blogger. Chances are that you may have divulged that info unwittingly in some long-forgotten blog post or somewhere else online.

This bad Russian food styling item on Serious Eats was probably my favorite weird-ass thing on the site all day. I only wish more people would have been into it. I mean, look at it. WTF?!?

saw your wing comparsion….you are sooooooo STUPID and clue-less when it comes to chicken wings….comparing kfc and other stupid places. Your an idiot….try BWW or wing stop or some where “real”! Gives a lot of credibility to your serious eats place….doesn’t it?!

Sometimes I wish we didn’t have a contact page.

For the past couple of weeks in Serious Eats Talk, I’ve been meddling with Talk topic titles, trying to help make them more precise and reflective of what’s being asked in the thread.

In some cases, I truly think my meddling is helpful. For instance, “Need a butcher in Phoenix” is a better title than “Need a butcher.”

Well, the Serious Eats community is sharp, and they’ve noticed. I’ve been called out a couple times now on it, the latest in this thread that SE member PerkyMac started early Tuesday morning.

I’ve been following the conversation and commenting there over the last two days and have realized that maybe a large part of my headline meddling had to do with some of the recent off-topicality in Talk. We’ve gotten more than a few emails in the last couple months about threads going off-topic and becoming too filled with chit chat. And now I’m wondering if my playing with Talk titles was a way to try to correct that and steer things in a more serious direction.

Anyway, I have more to say about it in this comment on that thread. What I’m blabbing about here is my Style Bites site, which I’ve now taken out from behind its privacy wall.

SE member dbcurrie, who works at a newspaper, brought up AP style in the abovementioned thread, and it reminded me that I had been keeping Style Bites to myself. I really love talking about copy-editing and blogging and writing for the web (which is also why that Talk topic has been so fun to participate in). And now that I’m sharing the Style Bites blog, I hope to do more of it on Kublog/Style Bites.

You may wonder if some of the stuff that goes on in SE Talk drives me batty as a copy editor. And I have to admit that, yes, yes, it does. When people don’t put spaces between sentences—or between a comma and the following word—it just burns my eyeballs to look at it. When people use five exclamation points where one will do. Or five question marks. Or ALL CAPS.

We’ve always corrected excessive punctuation in titles and have lowercased ALL CAPS, but I think I’ve gone overboard with setting Talk titles in title casing and in changing them. But for the most part, I do try to leave the body of the Talk threads alone. I don’t expect that everyone has had the same copy-edit training that I have, so it’s sort of a live and let live thing. (Although if I do see obvious typos, I will fix them (“peal onions” to “pearl onions” in SE Talk is a recent example I can think of).

Anyway, for anyone not working for/with Serious Eats, Style Bites is more a behind-the-scenes look at what we do. For SE staff/contributors, it’s strongly suggested reading. And for other foodbloggers, it might be a helpful resource.

I’ll have to play around with the templates behind Style Bites to tweak some functionality, but I hope to add some more entries sooner rather than later.

I guess I should tackle the tool I use most often, my browser. I’m on a Mac, and I know Safari is faster, but for me, Firefox has it beat for two good reasons: add-ons and the ability to easily view selection source code.

Add Ons

There are a variety of add-ons and plug-ins you can install on Firefox to help you do more. I find them helpful but not super necessary. I have the Greasemonkey add-on installed, which in turn allows me to run certain scripts. For instance, on Flickr, Greasemonkey allows me to use Auto Page, an enhancement that eliminates the “next” links on Flickr and just allows you to scroll infinitely, loading new photos as you approach the bottom of the page.

At one time or another, I’ve used the following add-ons, but since starting this post as a draft, I’ve pared down so Firefox runs faster. (My discontinued add-ons are in italics):

• TwitterFox: A handy in-browser app that lets you Twitter from Firefox. I like it because it can handle multiple Twitter accounts with easy switching among them. (This is my No. 1 most-used add-on at the moment)
• Google Toolbar: A variety of tools I rarely use. I mostly like it because it reveals the Google Page Rank of whatever page you’re on
• StumbleUpon toolbar: As far as I know, this is the only way to really use StumbleUpon
• Web Developer toolbar: I rarely use this in my professional blogging, but it helps me dig into the stylesheets for Kublog
• Flash Video Resources Downloader: Helps you download the Flash video file for many different video players. Useful in helping pull down video so you can load it to your own video-sharing account
• Pearl Crescent Screensaver Basic: Allows you to take a snapshot of an entire web page—even the stuff “below the fold.” I have since replaced this with Paparazzi
  

View Selection Source

Anil Dash showed me this trick. You can simply highlight a block of text, links, and/or images, and right-click and select “View selection source” from the right-button menu. This gives you the source code of what’s highlighted. Handy if you’re copying out a selection with links or formatted text, because then you don’t have to bother inserting links back in. Safari does not have this, and I tell you, kids, it’s a true time-saver.

My officemate Raphael gets on me about how Safari is better and faster, and he’s probably right. If you can get by without “View selection source,” then you might want to go with the Mac-native option, but the time this one feature saves me is enough to keep me hooked on Firefox.

The interregnum between Christmas and New Year’s is a slow one for most daily and weekly news outlets. So’s the case on Serious Eats. We planned an onslaught of year-in-review posts, but readers grew tired of it before I could post about my favorite new (or new-to-me) food blogs of 2008. So I’ll just do it on Kublog.

Grocery Eats: Serious Eats New York editor Zach Brooks discovered DJ Grocery’s General Tso’s Philly cheesesteak on a message board, posted about it, and not long after, the good DJ was inspired to start a blog documenting his (and, later, his contributors’) insane experiments with extreme food mashups. His first post was titled “Fuck, Yes,” and pretty much set the tone for the site. With plenty of cursing and craziness, it’s a great antidote to all the too-precious food blogs out there.

So Good: Though D.C.-based Jon Eick started his blog in August 2007, it really seemed to blow up in 2008, with his coverage of the Papa John’s/LeBron James/”Crybaby” T-shirt controversy. He was totally one top of crazy food-related current events. Thank you, Jon, for highlighting the Shawn Johnson “Makes My Taco Pop” commercial.

Fast Food Critic: Timothy appeared out of nowhere in March with a concept that seemed easily dismissable—reviews of fast food meals. Who is not familiar with the stuff the major chains put out? I thought. But FFC manages to take a seeingly common subject and find great nuggets of wisdom and humor in it. He’s tempermental and has threatened to quit blogging at least once, but we’re glad he’s back. I’m looking forward to more in 2009, Timothy.

Eat Me Daily: This blog popped on the scene in in October, with a smart, funny, wry take on food culture. Lots of great posts about cookbooks, food-related art, food media, and video snippets from popular TV shows. Too often food sites tend to all go echo-chamber on you, covering the same stories in the same way, but the anonymous staff of Eat Me Daily often finds a great new angle on the stories everyone is talking about.

Slapped together the seed of a website for a friend yesterday. He wants a portfolio site for his artwork. I was suprised how little time it took—only two hours of futzing. I found a workable photoblog template for WordPress, hacked it a bit to change it from black and gray to white and gray, and uploaded some of his work to it to see how it would look. Not bad, I might say. I actually like this design more than Kublog here.

The boxes on the main page are created by using the WordPress built-in custom fields option and are pulling in the thumbnail version of the artwork. Additionally, I hacked the template to pull in only images from category “featured art,” so that my friend can control which work appears there—an option he mentioned wanting on this site.

What he did want was a way to minimize scrolling if not eliminate it at all, but that ain’t gonna happen. The only way I can fit a grid of images on the main page—and keep individual artwork pages from scrolling—would be to make thumbnails and main images small enough to fit entirely onscreen for a laptop user (the smallest anticipated screen).

I think this, with a few more tweaks, is a fairly stylish solution, if I do say so myself.

Ugh. Seriously. I get this message in my inbox and I’m like WTF!?

We’re using Movable Type Enterprise Version 1.53 to run Serious Eats, and since I’ve been using MT for almost five years, I’m familiar with its quirks and what not. But for a multiuser affair like SE, trying to telegraph all its quirks to the various contributors (all with varying levels of blog- and web-savviness) is tedious.

Here, the problem is that the File Uploader (right) allows a user to upload images into the root directory, where all the index files and MT guts live. That directory needs to be as clean as possible so our web developer can work in there quickly and efficiently. It’s a constant battle to keep everyone uploading images into the seriousats.com/images directory.

This should not even be a possibility, first, because why would you want to crowd your root-level directory with file uploads and second, because there should be an easy way to set up a default directory for all images to upload to. As far as I know, there is no way to do this.

Furthermore, even if a user does know to upload to the “images” directory but misspells “images” (say, “imags” or “imaegs,” I have have been known to do), the system sees no problem with creating a new typoed directory instead of returning an error: “Sorry, ‘imaegs’ is not a directory on this server. Are you sure you’re uploading to the correct place?”

Serious Eats is in the process of moving to MT4, and I can only hope that these issues are addressed in that package.

I started Slice, the blog, in late 2003. It consumed a fair amount of my nonworking life (and, yes, some of my work life, too — whenever I had downtime on the job, I’d answer Slice email or drop in a few lines of copy into drafts of pizzeria reviews). At some point, “Slice” and “Adam Kuban” were pretty much synonymous. Most of what I was doing offline was pizza, and whatever I wanted to say online had to do with pizza, and so the Slice site was just an extension of me and my interests. To the point that I have a certain group of friends who refer to me as “Slice” rather than “Adam.”

But I suppose that changed when Serious Eats bought Slice in late 2006. Still, I registered for Twitter to reserve the Slice username and then started playing around with the service. I Twittered for a bit, then saw no point in it and abandoned it, only to come back to Twitter with a vengeance a few weeks ago.

From the beginning, I had never really Twittered any pizza-related things, and when I came back to Twitter, I still didn’t. And then I started Twittering for Serious Eats, and then set up an A Hamburger Today Twitter account.

It probably made no sense for me to be tweeting personal items on the Slice account, but once SE and AHT were tweeting site-related things, the distinction between the personal and the pizza-blog was even more stark. And then a coworker here pointed out that I probably shouldn’t be tweeting personal items on the Slice account. And that was it. The jig was up. I abandoned the Slice twitter account for akuban, where I can blather pointless things to my heart’s content without fear of confusing new readers who might not be familiar with the Slice blog history.

I was a bit sad to have to let go of that account. As I said, Slice has been a large part of my identity for the last, oh, almost five years. That’s probably a bit pathetic or whatever, but who knows. Having to acknowledge that my baby is all growed up and has left the nest is sort of bittersweet, but the sale of Slice (and Burger) to Serious Eats was seriously good timing for a variety of reasons.

I am not, however, relinquishing my Slice Flickr account. I have way too many photos, comments, and “blogging” invested in that account. Ed Levine will have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.

When I tag on Flickr, I can use multiple words and string them together as one tag using quotation marks, e.g., “New Madrid” will function as a single tag.

On Delicious, tags are “space delimited,” so as soon as you hit the space bar, even while using quotation marks, you’ve started a new tag. Thus, you have to tag such items as “newmadrid” or “NewMadrid.” As a copy editor, this drives me mad. It’s difficult to read a smushed-together all-lowercase tag, and the intercapped smushed-together tag just looks ridculous, particularly if you have three or more words forming your tag.

I assume that, because tags eventually wind up in URLs, Delicious doesn’t want spaces in there, which can sometimes be problematic. But Flickr has a solution for this; when it goes to render URLs from its tags, Flickr simply removes the spaces, lowercases the word(s), and smushes things together. But the tag displayed on-page remains nice and neat.

It only bothers me because Delicious just went through a redesign, and I was hoping they would address this. They have not. The only thing I found on the Delicious site regarding tag protocol was this unhelpful bit of advice:

What are tag descriptions?
Many people use the same word to tag, even when they may mean very different things. Tag Descriptions allow you to describe your tags for yourself and others visiting your bookmarks. To use Tag Descriptions, go to one of your tag pages there will be a link to “create tag description” at the top right, which leads to the interface for creating a Tag Description. Please note that Tag Descriptions are always public. To edit or delete your tag description, visit that tag page while logged in and you will see links to edit and delete.

If Delicious simply allowed me to tag like Flickr does, I would not need tag descriptions to remind myself or others what I meant by “newmadrid.”

Still, I use Delicious to build my daily(ish) link dumps via the Postalicious plug-in for WordPress. Maybe I should look at the other social-bookmarking services that Postalicious works with (ma.gnolia and Reddit).

he sings, originally uploaded by raphael_brion.

Robyn’s friends from Norway arranged to have her rickrolled via singing telegram for her birthday. The guy showed up at Serious Eats HQ just a little bit ago. Unfortunately, I am working from home and missed it. Fortunately, Raphael shot video of the craziness, so we all will get to see that soon enough. (And by “we all,” I mean me and my one reader.)

UPDATE
Here’s the vid:

[Serious Eats's YouTube]

I love MT. It’s what I started blogging with. And the people behind it are great. But with MT4, things just got too complicated. For one, I have no idea how to tweak the stylesheets. There are several nested ones, and to propagate changes in the right places, I have no idea which template to edit. I thought about simply stripping it all down to one very simple CSS file, but then I’d be missing out on a lot of the features built into MT4.

And then I thought about what I needed for this site. I just wanted a very simple introduction page at adamkuban.com. With basic “About” info and links to my resume and to this blog. And I wanted to offer a quick glimpse at my other online incarnations at Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

I could have done that all with MT, but it involved setting up multiple blogs and “pages,” and then I was still stuck with themes that I wasn’t really happy with. So I poked around on WP, found this NinjaMonkeys adaptation of Hemingway, and boom. I was up and running.

It still doesn’t have everything I want. But it’ll do for now. It looks clean and simple, and until I have time to really delve into customizing a site, it’ll work.

Snip:

Copy editors were fine-tuners, fixing basic but important things that a first line of editing might’nt catch: Typos, errors in facts, spelling, syntax, punctuation, clarity, word usage, style, parallelism, and not letting sentences run on. They would also bear principle responsibility for headlines, photo captions, story jump lines, as well as catching the occasional, inadvertent cultural insensitivity. Because the job requires patience, maturity, intelligence, attention to detail, and an extremely sedentary workday, fat old Jewish ladies have often made good copyeditors.

As I told the staff at Serious Eats when I harangued them with yet another copy-edit-related email, “That sums up what we all have to do with our own posts before giving the queue editor the OK on them. It sums up what the queue editor then needs to do again before hitting the publish button. And it’s what we all need to do while reading over our colleagues’ work after it’s gone up. (But I hope at that point there’d be nothing to catch.)”

Worth clicking through to the whole thing. Bonus: It’s a quiz! See how well you do.

That’s like a reporter filing a story and telling his editor he that his “newspaper” is ready for editing.

Ariana Huffington is one example who comes to mind, but I’ve caught some fairly tech-savvy people making the mistake.

The term for a single item posted to a blog is “post” or “entry.”

The Cons

Since I’m more a pessimist than anything, I’ll list drawbacks first:

Losing Blog Cred
Blogging , as I see it, is supposed to be a freeform, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kinda thing. Setting up calendars and deadlines smacks of old-school, mainstream media convention. Will readers respond as well to something that seems to be morphing into more magazine format, with recurring columns and features?

Creating Unnecessary Pressure
If I’m tired after a long day of work or am spending the evenings or weekend days with friends or “Girl Slice” (aka “The Hamburgirl,” as she’s known on AHT), am I really going to be able to stick to a self-imposed structure? If I set a certain day that readers can expect reviews to appear, will I have the energy to always publish them, even if I’m dealing with writer’s block?

The Pros

Predictability for the Reader
The first point above is a bit of a straw man. I come from an old-school, mainstream media background, so I appreciate the structures and protocols in place for shoveling content around efficiently and getting it out to people. There’s no doubt that blogs could take a page or two from what some derisively refer to as the “MSM.” One of those things is providing readers with a sense of continuity and predictability. Predictability sounds staid and boring and static, but it’s really not a bad thing.

Let me explain. I like how Eater, for example, has recurring features. I know to expect Bruni Betting on Tuesdays, Listage on Wednesdays, and so forth. If I’m pressed for time and have to make a decision between visiting Eater and, say, some blog whose publishing schedule I don’t know (Slice or AHT, for example) and which might not have been updated that day (Slice or AHT, for example), I’m going to spend my minutes on the known quantity. (Caveat: RSS readers make this point moot to some extent, but not everyone is mainlining feeds the way I—or probably you—do.)

Predictability for the Blogger or Blogging Team
Thinking about, and putting in place, a calendar to publish by helps define goals and gives you and your team something to strive for. Not that I’ve instituted my calendars yet, but I’m betting that when I do, I’ll feel more obligated to meet my own deadlines — especially if people are watching. We’ll see. I know myself and I know I hate being obligated to do anything, but I’m hoping I can stick to the schedule.

Creating Timeliness
If your editorial calendar includes dates (instead of simply listing which days of the week you’ll publish given material on), you’ll be better equipped to anticipate topical and timely subjects to blog on. The most obvious examples being holidays.

Pizza and burger gift guides are obvious blog fodder during the year-end holidays. For Hanukkah this year, I plan to add a little menorah in the banner with the smiley slice guy (right) representing candle flames, each day adding a slice. On Joey Ramone’s birthday, I know to rerun Slice’s Rock ‘N’ Roll Pie School post, with updates as needed.

Weighing the Options, Planning a Calendar
As you can see above, the pros outweigh the cons. And I think there are at least a few more pros but want to wrap up this drivel. I think my own calendars set reasonable goals for the sites. They add a couple new regular features to both blogs, but what I’m mostly doing is adding structure to things I’m already doing. Some thoughts on creating a calendar of your own …

Change Doesn’t Need to Be Drastic
As I see it, you don’t need to go too crazy to make an editorial calendar. Most bloggers are probably already blogging items that could be made into recurring features. Look at your categories, see what type of material pops up over and over, and think about publishing them on a set schedule as a recurring feature — give it a catchy name, and half your work’s done.

Work Ahead of Publication
My aim is to have a certain number of the new feature installments in the can before going live with them, so that I’ll be working a few weeks ahead of publication. Lead time is important in keeping regular, especially if you have to talk to someone for a review or for a piece of original writing or if you’re doing mini interviews. (Sneak preview: I’m working on “8 Slices” and “Grilled” as weekly interview features for Slice and AHT, respectively.)

Looking to the Future
And so this rather long installment of Behind the Slice draws to an end. Tonight, I plan to draw up a list of preliminary interview questions for “8 Slices” and “Grilled” and run the “Grilled” items by “Hamburger” Matty, who works with me on AHT, for his input. With any luck, I’ll send out the first round of emails to prospective subjects tomorrow, and these columns will become a reality soon. As always, we’ll see. We will see.

Until next time, hasta la pizza!

Where Does the Time Go?
One thing that’s been up lately is that I don’t have time to post as much as I once did. I recently took a new position within Martha Stewart Omnimedia, where I’ve been working for the last five-plus years. I’m now online copy chief for marthastewart.com . As such, I’m responsible for all the copy-editing aspects of the site. The new job has other responsibilities, which I won’t go into, but if you follow Slice or A Hamburger Today , you can probably tell I’m being kept busy.

In the past, I’ve used the “busy at work” excuse to explain away lulls in posting frequency, when what was really going on was something closer to blog depression or bouts of laziness. But this time I really mean it. Ai yah. I have almost no downtime in which to read other blogs (from which I draw inspiration) or look for cool new pizza and burger items to post about. And by the time I get home, I don’t want to look at a computer tube at all (I’d rather veg in front of the TV tube, watching Stargate SG-1 or Stargate Atlantis).

But the good news is that things are going a little smoother at work lately, so some of the pressure is off and I have more downtime (a few minutes here and there) to devote to my RSS feeds and hunt for quirky pizza crap. So expect more posts on the sites.

Until then, hasta la pizza.