Welcome to Drink Dogma!
March 14, 2008
Thanks for taking the time to visit Drink Dogma, the new and improved version of Explore the Pour. The old site was fun (and free), but it was time to move on and figure out this Wordpress thing. For the technically-challenged, efforts like these can be somewhat daunting, so I am pretty proud of my new site and am glad all my old content finished the journey safely. I have been making efforts to really improve my blogging lately (especially with my photographs) and reached a point where Blogger was limiting my potential. Drink Dogma is going to be bigger and better than ever.
I would greatly appreciate if those of you who were kind enough to link to me previously would switch your link to this site. I plan to continue to update Explore the Pour for a while to avoid losing any readers, but helping me to get this blog started would be very helpful. Some might wonder why I switched the domain; well, it was just too similar to Eric Asimov’s New York Times blog, The Pour. I should have thought of this when I started, but like so many others, blogging was just kind of an experiment at first. Some how it became a time consuming activity of mine. When did that happen?
Drink Dogma has far more to provide than Explore the Pour ever did. Video is coming, and I hope to do monthly cocktail video posts. For now, you can just check out a quick snip I took of Maker’s Mark sour-mash in the works while I was at the distillery. Additionally, Drink Dogma will have posts contributed by three authors, including myself. I will introduce these fine individuals later, but for now, just know that posting and perspective will be far more numerous. Finally, the layout rocks. I love this template because it displays so much at once. From an aesthetic and functional point of view, I am really happy with the site. I tried to update the blogroll with active bloggers only; if I missed you, send me an e-mail.
Let me know what you think and make sure to switch your RSS feed to Drink Dogma. I still have a ton of work left to do to the site, but its time for an introduction has arrived…
Well done. I like the site a lot.
Darcy
Sorry to start the comments with a complaint, but please consider providing the full text contents of the blog in the RSS, like “Explore the Pour” did, to make it useful in tools like Google Reader. I very much doubt that you lose any visitors by allowing people to read the blog as a feed, and if you don’t you simply lose RSS geeks like myself as your readers.
it looks great, and i like the name too! (yeah, i’m a rss feed whore myself… ) happy st paddy’s day : ) gwen
Providing a full RSS feed pretty much kills any hope of get ads to support the site. I avoid it and “may” loose a half dozen people, but I gain a couple thousand page views. Small price to pay for free content.
Thanks for the feedback everyone. I hope this site is much more informative and fun for everyone. I hear ya on the RSS feeds everyone. I am going to be sure to keep this all in mind and make a decision about it soon. I see both perspectives as both a reader and blogger, so it can be a tough call. Anyway, I am glad you like the new blog. Anyone have any other suggestions or feedback?
Historical comment - I ordered some Northshore gin and have been having lots of fun making the perfect Negroni. Also thanks for mentioning the availability of creme de violette, my mom loves aviations and I expect to score some big brownie points when she gets her bottle for Easter (she gives up drinking for Lent) even if it does cost a fortue to ship.
Mondiu from AGrandioseblog.com checking in - I’m in a similar boat Robert so I know how it goes. Moving domains is a pain in the you know what … but i like this theme a lot. I’ve updated your bookmark, please update any you have for Agrandioseblog.com to http://www.flenjo.com/drink/
Mondiu
I like the new site too!
Welcome to the world of WordPress — isn’t it fun? The site looks awesome, and I’ve just added you to my cocktailian blogroll at the new location. (We finally got off our butts and figured out how to have multiple blogrolls.)
Add my voice to the full-post RSS request chorus. I am far less apt to read an article (and, therefore, to develop a sense of investment in the blog, not to mention getting caught up enough in the material to comment) if I have to click through every %*&$ time. I have 250+ blogs in my reader, and time is short.
We don’t run ads, though, so take this for what it’s worth, but Cameron and I provide full posts in our RSS feed and we have plenty of traffic to our site. I can tell from FeedBurner that a lot of our subscribers click over to see the photos, and (especially) to read and write comments.
If you create good content, you’ll get people coming to your site through natural search, too — it will take a while to build up our page rank, but it’s cumulative: the more content you have, and the more frequently you post, the better it works. Check out the stats of full-feed and partial-feed sites on Compete.com and you’ll see there’s not much difference when the quality, longevity, and post frequency is the same.