If you’re reading this post, congratulations! You’ve successfully followed the blog to its new home. This weekend I switched from the Movable Type blogging software to Wordpress. You shouldn’t notice that many changes except for the big one: any links you have bookmarked for http://www.pastaqueen.com/halfofme/ should be updated to http://www.pastaqueen.com/blog For your convenience, any links to the old site are redirecting to their counterparts on the new site automatically, but it’s best to update your bookmarks as well. The good old http://www.pastaqueen.com/ link works the same as usual.

Attention Feed Readers!

If you read my site via the feed, make sure you are subscribed to my latest feed address: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/pastaqueen

If I’ve moved everything over properly, you shouldn’t notice much of a difference on the front end, although Wordpress will make things much easier for me on the back end. I’ve wanted to switch to Wordpress for over a year, but didn’t want to hassle with importing 5 years of entries, converting all my templates, and redirecting all my old links properly. However, the current barrage [...]

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Photo by gerrysnaps / CC BY-NC 2.0

I had completely forgotten this until I read DietGirl’s blog this morning, but today is my five-year fativersary! It was five years ago today that I started my big fat weight loss attempt. DietGirl and I have the same weight loss anniversary, which would seem weird if not for the millions of people who start losing weight in January.

So, it’s five years later and I’ve maintained 75% of my highest weight loss. I’m working on making that percentage higher, but for now, I’ll take it! Woot! Some people think the five-year mark is a statistically significant indicator of your likelihood to keep the weight off. A quick Google search couldn’t find any articles that stated this, so it might just be folk wisdom or a total figment of my imagination.

All I know if that there was a guy who commented on the blog about two or three years ago saying he wouldn’t buy my book until I’d kept the weight off for five years. I only remember this because [...]

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I’ve turned on comment moderation because the blog keeps getting hit with spam 2.0. This kind of spam is left by actual people, not computer programs, so the spam filter doesn’t catch most of it. They leave comments that sound real and refer to my posts, but they fill out the link field of the comment form with sites that are obviously spam sites. I’ve been filtering it out by hand for the last few weeks, but it keeps coming, so I’m turning on comment moderation until it subsides.

But, PastaQueen, why don’t you just use a captcha?

I didn’t want to use a captcha because 1) they’re annoying and 2) the spam is being left by humans who would be able to get past it. I suspect these spammers are third world citizens being paid a couple bucks a day to leave spam on blogs, sort of like what happens in that Cory Doctorow story Anda’s Game. Once their comments stop getting published, they’ll eventually go away. (I hope.)

So, if your comment is not published right [...]

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Not all of my readers follow me on Twitter. Either they don’t understand this whole Twitter thing or they don’t care about tweets and retweets and twittermania, or it’s just too much work to keep up with a blog and Twitter and Facebook and OMG my head is gonna’ explode! That’s cool. I get that. Millions of people were texting before I sent the first message on my cell phone, and I still don’t know what Google Wave is or what it does or why I should care.

However, I wanted to share my tweets with the segment of my blog readers who don’t subscribe to Twitter, but I also wanted to incorporate them in a more organic way than that widget in my sidebar allows. So I’ve updated the home page of my blog so my recent tweets appear in the stream. Both the blog posts and the tweets are sorted in descending chronological order in regards to when they were posted.

The tweets do not appear in my blog feed. I figure, if you want [...]

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Hello, dear readers. I wanted to apologize for the fact that I’m posting two reviews less than a week apart from each other. The Fage review has been in the works for weeks, and I forgot it was finally going live this week, otherwise I would have posted the Home Trends review sooner or later. I have a bazillion things going through my head these days (including the ever-present headache) and I futzed up the timing on this. I don’t want the blog to turn into a big advertorial, so rest assured I will hold off on any more reviews for several weeks. Please bear with me!

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