New Year’s Greetings to All – Sybaritica

Hey Folks … I hope everybody survived the New Year’s Eve’s festivities relatively painlessly. This month commences Sybaritica’s seventh year of publication and I thought I might usher in 2019 by introducing a few changes I will be making for the future …

By the way, before I begin, the picture I chose for today’s post shows the view from my front door. The picture was actually taken on Christmas Eve two years ago, but I rather think it captures the season. As you can see, there were ‘sun dogs’ when I snapped the shot, although you can only see one of them… I’d have to be out in the middle of the road to see both…

Anyway, I have decided to revamp some stuff around here … My graphics library at WordPress finally became absolutely jam-packed with images, and I had hundreds of posts that were basically read once and never looked again. Accordingly, I started a major clean-out and have already got rid of a lot of stuff. I will be continuing with that process and have also begun making changes to my ‘Menu’s … already, they reflect the new simplicity I will going for as I continue blogging …

After these many years, it has become clear to me that the posts that people keep coming back to are the ones I have done on various foodstuffs. My posts on things like Chinese dried Squid, or Dried Scallop, get visited again and again, week in and week out. My recipe posts, in contrast, tend to get looked at once by my regular readership, and then never again. With that in mind, along with a few other things, I am going to change my blogging focus just a little:

I began Sybaritica mostly to post restaurant reviews, and only started with recipes and foodstuff posts later. The reviews are still my favorite blogging activity (both of restaurants, or single dishes I have been served), and I will continue doing that for as long as I can still type. I am still going to do the odd recipe post, but I think, after over 6 years, that I will slow that down quite a bit. I know other food bloggers will be familiar with the work that that entails … I must say that, of all the difficulties, delaying eating because you have to take picture after picture gets a bit tiresome.

I will continue doing foodstuff articles, but I am also going to redo some of my earlier posts. Some are to be rewritten so that they can be expanded but others, especially the older ones, because they could really be improved. Similarly, I started a series of posts that I called ‘Dim Sum Identification’ that I added to only sporadically and half-heartedly. I am going to restart that project again and make it a bigger ‘thing’.

Finally, for a while, I was doing reviews of wines… I stopped though, mostly because it was quite time consuming due to the way I was doing the graphics. I also got a bit tired of rating and writing about the wines I didn’t very much like. I am going to start that again very shortly, but I am going to limit myself to writing only about the wines I really enjoy and worry less about ‘rating’ them rather than discussing their respective backgrounds and technical information.

Anyway … it will be interesting to see how things develop and I look forward to having my readers stay with me