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I’ve tried to figure out what’s going on here, but it seems to be beyond my area of expertise. To further confuse matters, the reader is using the Firefox browser, which I myself use, but I’m not experiencing any problems. If you are running into the same problem, or if you think you might know what’s going on, email me at blog (at) pastaqueen {dot} com. Thanks!

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 of spam I’ve been hit with served to remind me how clunky and difficult it is to do some things in Movable Type that are embarrassingly easy in WordPress. So I packed up my database and moved!

The only real functionality change is that I’ve gotten rid of threaded comments, even though WordPress offers support for them. I found the threads a bit hard to follow. I prefer it when the latest comments are all on the bottom of the page. You can still click a “reply” link, but all is does is add an “@commenter-name” at the beginning of your comment text.

If you run into any problems with anything, email me at blog [at] pastaqueen (dot) com

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 the guy was a douchebag about it. I truly appreciate the support of everyone who’s bought my book, but the decision is totally yours and isn’t something you need to extort out of me. I tried to find the comment, but after fifteen minutes of combing through search results I gave up. All I remember is that the comment was phrased as if I would only be worthy of having him purchase my book if I stayed skinny (or in my case, less fat). As I said before, I am very thankful to everyone who has purchased my book. But I think whatever happens to my weight in the future is somewhat irrelevant in regards to my memoir, which is the story of what it was like to lose a lot of weight, which will remain as true now and in the future regardless of whether I lose 100 pounds or gain 100 pounds. So if you want to buy it, thanks! And if you don’t, well, ok. Just don’t be a douchebag about it, all right?

By the way, did I say I was grateful? I am grateful!

With that in mind, happy fativersary and farewell to those 150 pounds gone!

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 away, don’t freak out. If you are a real person and not a dirty, rotten, spammer, I’ll approve it within 24 hours.

Update: Eww, I just Googled “blog commenting service” and discovered there are lots of companies offering this spam service, spinning it like it’s not unethical, annoying, and destroying the spirit of the Internet.

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 to subscribe to my Twitter posts, you’re already doing that. There’s no need to duplicate info you already have. I did this update for the people who read the blog by visiting the web site every day. The tweets only appear on the home page, not in my archives (though I might change that eventually, when my eyes aren’t burning from staring at my monitor). You can’t comment on the tweets like blog entries either, because that’s a bit more complicated and I don’t feel like figuring that out right now, because as I mentioned before, OMG my head is gonna’ explode!

Please let me know what you think of this new feature. Do you like it? Is it annoying? Do you not care one way or the other? Is it displaying funky on your computer? Thanks, and I hope you enjoy.

The falcons are back!

Every year a pair of Peregrine falcons make a nest and lay some eggs at the top of the Market Tower building in downtown Indianapolis. The Indy Star has a pair of webcams in the nest box so you can watch the lil’ birdies in 30-second updates. You can also take bets on when the first eggs will be laid and when the fuzzy lil’ birdie babies will be born (probably in a week or two if you look at previous years). All the updates are reported on the falcon blog.

I’ve had the webcam up on my computer at work, watching as the falcons come and go, making circles digging out their nest, and generally wishing I was a bird who could just fly around as I please instead of a woman sitting behind a computer all day with a constant headache. Do birds even get headaches?

In the spirit of full disclosure, my full-time job is in some way connected to the falcon blog. However, I mention it because I love to watch the little birdies and not just because I’m trying to rack up our pageviews. (Although that would be nice too! PQ would like to keep her day job!)

Sometimes though, I get sent an offer to review a product that genuinely intrigues me. It could be for a product I’ve heard about or something I think my readers might enjoy. This has always caused an ethical pickle for me because I don’t want my blog to become one long infomercial, but sometimes I’m human and I want to accept the free stuff. In the past, I’ve done the occasional book review and given away products for free, but those situations have always been an ethical gray area for me that I’ve never known how best to deal with.

So, I’m going to try something new. I’ve created an official review policy and I’m going to start occasionally reviewing products. I suspect the majority of you will not care one way or the other about this. You’re already sick of reading this entry and wish I’d get my nose out of my navel and stop blogging about the blog already. A small group of you will be so pissed off that you are right now composing emails to me debating whether I am a five-dollar whore or a two-dollar whore before you storm off in a huff. And another group is probably looking forward to seeing what I’ll review.

Before I do anything though, I thought it best to set some ground rules which I’ve also posted on my advertising page.

PastaQueen’s Official Review Policy – Updated December 13, 2008

1. I will only review products which I might consider purchasing or that I believe my readers would find valuable.
2. I will at maximum do two reviews a month, but am not obligated to do any in that timeframe.
3. I will disclose any payments or exchanges that occurred, including whether I received the product for free. I will also disclose any other partnerships with a company whose product I am reviewing, such as past sponsorships or past exchanges.
4. The full text of the review will not appear on the front page. Only the title will appear with a link to read the entire entry. Uninterested readers will be able to easily ignore these entries. People who read via RSS will see the full review. The review will clearly be marked as a review.
5. I will give my honest and complete opinion. I will not leave out negative comments I have about a product.

Those are all the ground rules I could think of. If you can think of anything else that might be relevant, feel free to suggest it on the comments of this entry.

I contemplated creating a whole new blog just for reviews, but the amount of time it would take to design a template that I liked and set the whole thing up made my brain implode. It’s easier to post everything here. We’ll see how this goes. If the reviews don’t fit into the flow of the blog, I’ll stop doing them or post them somewhere else. However, I hope you’ll find them useful and also entertaining (This is me we’re talking about. I inserted Sailor Moon analogies into my freshman English papers.) I typically appreciate it when a blogger recommends a product they like or steers me away from something that is awful. I’m not going to be reviewing the Flowbee here. It will only be stuff you might possibly be interested in or will laugh your ass off hearing about. I promise to give you my full, honest opinion and hopefully not annoy you in the process. The first review is posted right before this entry. Enjoy (or not)!

I was in an earthquake! In Indiana! Finally!

I have always wanted to be in an earthquake, just to know what it feels like. I know people sometimes die in earthquakes, so I didn’t want to be in one of those earthquakes, just a safe little earthquake where the ground moved and the plates rattled and perhaps a picture fell off of the wall. I don’t live in California though, and I don’t have any plans to move to a major fault line, so the possibility seemed slim. But here I was, at 5:36am, experiencing my first earthquake and it was awesome. I couldn’t wait to blog about it.

Then I realized, wait, no, I can’t blog about my first Indiana earthquake because I run a weight-loss blog and even as clever as I like to think I am, I couldn’t think of a way to reasonably connect my earthshaking experience to health or fitness. Maybe the shaking burned calories? Um, no.

That’s when I decided – I’m going blog about more than just weight loss. So, instead of just blogging about fitness, health and the size of my ass, I’m now going to blog about fitness, health, the size of my ass, and whatever else I feel like talking about if it’s funny, informative or worthwhile in any way. Let me repeat that and put it in bold for those of you freaking out about my booty – I will still blog about fitness, health, and the size of my ass. I’m going to expand the scope of the blog to my entire life, and those topics are definitely a part of my life. I’ve actually started doing this already, blogging about a gay pride parade and a blogging conference to see if anyone would notice. No one gave me any flack over it, and they rather seemed to enjoy my parade shenanigans. Now that I’ve dipped my toes in, I’m ready to take the full plunge.

To reflect the change, my blog bought new shoes, put on its prettiest dress and got its hair done. I’ve redesigned the look of the site, though I kept the same colors and fonts. (I wanted to give it a makeover, not enlist it in the witness protection program.) All the same information is here, just better designed and more beautifully presented (hopefully). I’ve tested it as best as I can, but if you find any bugs, email me at with your operating system, browser and a description of the problem. If you know how to take a screenshot, that would be helpful too.

I’ve also changed the name from “Half of Me” to “PastaQueen” which should be easier to remember since that is the actual domain name of this site. I toyed with calling it “PastaQueen Plus,” but that sounded like I was going to start shopping in the women’s department again. If you link to my site, I’d be very grateful if you updated the name of your links so they say “PastaQueen” and so they link to http://www.pastaqueen.com

Why this is a good thing

Again, hopefully no one is freaking out. This is a good thing, ok? My blog helped me figure out a lot of my weight issues and was a vital tool in self-discovery. One of the things I love about blogging is that it helps me figure myself out. I heard a great quote once, “How will I know what I think if I can’t read what I write?” Sometimes I don’t really understand what I think about an issue until I’ve written about it. This was very helpful to me as I was losing weight.

However, I’ve noticed that there are other areas of my life that would equally benefit from some self-analysis and probing. But I haven’t written about them because I only write about health issues here. In that way, blogging only about weight loss has been limiting me from thinking through other topics that I’d like to figure out.

I thought about starting another blog just for non-weight stuff. I designed a template, bought a domain name and posted some entries. Then I nearly collapsed on my keyboard because I could not keep up. There are only so many things I can accomplish in a day, and at this time writing two separate blogs is not one of them. It also felt odd to segment my life unnaturally. Weight and fitness are a part of my life like anything else, and it seemed weird to be splitting myself in two like that.

I’ve always seen this site as a personal blog disguised as a weight-loss blog. When I’ve told people at conferences that I write a “weight-loss blog,” they seem uninterested because they think I only talk about how many Weight Watchers points are in a Snickers bar. When in reality, I think they’d like reading my blog. By opening up the floor to other topics, hopefully more people will feel welcome hanging out here and we can all meet new and interesting people who otherwise wouldn’t check this place out.

Beyond all that, I don’t want my weight to be the most defining characteristic of my life. That’s one of the reasons why I lost weight. I did a TV interview a couple months ago and in the green room another guest asked me, “Do you count calories?” I remember staring at her perfectly made-up face and thinking, “Wow, out of all the questions in the world that you could ask, that’s the one you’re asking? Seriously? Who the hell cares if I count calories?” And then I told her no, I don’t, but I probably eat about 1800 a day, and then I got started on that with a cinnamon roll. I’m very proud of all that I have accomplished, but I don’t want to be waving my fat pants around 20 years from now and saying it’s the only thing I’ve accomplished. It is time to evolve.

Of course evolution is change, and change is scary and unknown, even if it is for the better. I’ve built up a great community around this blog and I’d hate to have that evaporate. But, I also know I can’t keep on doing the same old shtick out of fear that I will become less popular or that I may lose readers. I’m not going to pretend that my weight loss didn’t happen. I’m not going to bury it or stop talking about it. I’m just going to talk about other stuff too. So, bear with me as I figure this out. I don’t know exactly what the mix will be. I’m just going to feel my way. Hopefully you’ll feel it out with me, and you’ll find it an entertaining and worthy read.

It’s time for another earthquake.

Follow me

The left sidebar is dedicated to widgets. The first one is the new “Follow me” section which links to my Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook pages if you want to follow me outside of this blog. My last 3 tweets also appear in this box so you can keep up with my micro-blogging.

Better archives and search

Previously, you could only view a complete list of my archives or scroll forward and backward via links on individual entries. You can now view the complete text of all my entries for one particular month on one page in chronological order. For those of you browsing the archives, hopefully it will make the trip a bit easier. The search page also features the full text of a post instead of just an excerpt, so it should be easier to find things.

Blogroll

I used to have my blogroll on a separate page, but now I’ve moved it back into the sidebar. I’ve also added some of my favorite sites that have nothing to do with weight loss. Three sites from each list are randomly displayed every time the page is loaded, but you can also view the entire list if you wish.

Random Amazon links

The product links in the sidebar also rotate randomly, so those of you who were sick of viewing my Pilates DVDs every day will now only see them every fifth day or so :) I’m going to try to update this section with albums, movies, books and other items that I am currently enjoying so it doesn’t get stale.

Improved footer

The footer now includes a tag cloud which shows the most popular tags I’ve attached to entries. It also proves that, yes, food is indeed the topic foremost on my mind, right after exercise, running and weighing-in. There is also a new site map of all the pages on the site.

Improved weight stats on their own page

I’ve moved my weight stats out of the sidebar and onto the weight loss page. I’ve also added a graph of my weight loss.

Related entries

The page for each post now contains a list of up to six other posts with similar tags. I didn’t think you could do this in the Movable Type blogging software, but I found a code snippet here that let me do it.

My own comment style

I’ve added my own special visual style to comments left by me, so they should be easy to pick out.

You didn’t really need this stuff anyway, right?

I upgraded the blog to the latest version of the Movable Type blogging software. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to configure the comment notification plug-in that lets readers subscribe to email notifications of comments to a post. I’m looking into a replacement, but for now that feature is gone. You’ll have to check pages manually, sorry.

Also, when I upgraded I had a big database error. So, instead of doing a traditional upgrade I had to export and re-import the blog data through the blog software. The result of this – all the old nested comments no longer appear to be nested because that data field was not exported. Oops! This only affects old entries, so if you reply to a specific comment from here on out it will appear to be nested.

I think that covers everything. I’ve got a list of lots of other tweaks and improvements I’d like to make, but those will trickle in as I have time. I sure am glad I’m a web developer because there is no way I could afford to pay me for this redesign. I also wish I was a plumber and an electrician. I always forget how much time and work something like this takes. I hope you like it. If you run into any bugs, leave a comment stating the error and your operating system and browser. Or you can email me using the contact page.

ETA: No, wait, that doesn’t cover everything.

Featured series

I’ve added callouts in the middle rail linking to two of my featured series, Lick the Produce and my half-marathon training posts. I wanted to bring these series to the attention of new readers, or to regular readers who are looking for inspiration.

Faster loading

I’ve ordered the site so the content column loads before the ad rail or the widgets. This should facilitate faster loading. The ads are hosted by external scripts, which means they sometimes take awhile to load, which used to delay the whole site from loading. It’s like when you and a friend are going out. You’re all ready to go, but your friend is in the bathroom, doing her makeup, checking her hair, changing her clothes, holding everything up. That’s how the ad scripts can be. In the old site, you and your friend were leaving in the same car so, you had to wait until she was ready before you could leave. Now, you both have your own cars and if you’re ready to go, you can leave and let your friend catch up with you later once she’s done primping.

I also wanted to thank everyone I have worked with at my latest job this year. I’ve learned a lot from you guys and this site redesign is better for it.