News and Updates

Happy birthday to Wolfgang, who turns 12 this summer. Don't know the exact date, just that he was born in June or July back in 1998. Some say that he's merely the last in a long string of random pairings among stray mutts. Others claim that his mother was a coyote and his father was the western wind. Either way he's been a faithful member of the household lo these dozen years.

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I've done a bit of housecleaning here at old BWR, cleaning up some dead links on the left and making a few tiny design changes. Some of the sites listed in my Memphis and National/World blogrolls have died off or have changed URLs, so those have been updated. And just so everyone knows, I'm not going to delete the link to your site if you go on vacation for a week. In my experience I've found that if a site hasn't posted in four months, it's probably dead and gone.

Speaking of other blogs, I'm still maintaining a lengthy list over at BWR's sister site, Winebloggers in the South. There are about 45 sites listed there, and while I rarely post new content there, I have a few brief profiles of newly listed sites. (And I'm still looking for wine blogs from Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, so drop me a line if you hear of any.)

A new feature here: static pages. This is something I've always wanted to see implemented in the Blogger software, and while it was rolled out earlier this year I'm just now noticing it. Unlike regular blog posts, these are undated informational pages that will be linked at the top of the page or on the sidebar, where mine currently reside. I might move them later, or incorporate a graphic of some sort, but for now I've made three: Sample Policy (what kind of products I'm interested in reviewing, and a standard disclaimer), Press (interviews with me as well as other media mentions), and Favorite Posts. I'm most excited about that last one--this is my 820th post, and while I've tagged the archives with keywords, it's still a lot to dig through. If you're new to this blog, I've picked out some of my favorite past posts, including a bunch of the weird and funny cooking stories. Anyone up for frog legs?

If you use Blogger/Blogspot and are interested in creating static pages like this, here's an introduction.