I’ve started a new website and I’m curious about how long it takes to make various search engines and have traffic build. I’m not linking to it on purpose, because I don’t want to taint the experiment.
The site was put on the Internet on January 2. On January 4, I submitted the URL to Google and created a Google Sitemap.
The site appears to have first entered the results of a targeted search on Google the morning of January 8. It also appears to have made MSN and Technorati at about the same time.
Feedster may or may not be dying - their bot has made 82 requests at the site, but I cannot get anything but null results when searching for the site. Will check back later.
A couple of other bots I’m not sure about have crawled the site.
For what it’s worth, the site is dynamically generated via Wordpress and has about 8 URLs, excluding feeds, that are valid.
Update: Feedster is now returning the site when doing a Feedfinder search (sample). It looks like they crawled the site just slightly before I posted. So, from crawl to results in less than 18 hours (I was not checking frequently, so it may have been quicker).
I’m actually impressed that the site was found at all or so quickly by them, since I gave them no help like I did Google.
Continuing from the previous post, here are the other menu selections for each of our dinner themes:
Pork
- Orange Pork Chops and Sweet Potatoes
- Ham and Cheese Stuffed Potatoes
- Cranberry Roasted Pork Loin
Seafood
- Grilled salmon
- Grecian Stuffed Flounder
- Sweet and Sour Shrimp
- Greek Shrimp Salad
- Greek Style Scampi
- BBQ Roasted Salmon
- Grilled Tuna with Tropical Salsa
Pasta
- Lemon Chicken Pasta
- Pasta with Ham and Artichokes
- Lasagna
- Rotini with homemade sauce
- Jalapeno Chicken and Pasta
- Colorful Pasta Medley
Bonus - Snacks and Lunches
- Buffalo Chicken Fingers
- Tavern Carrots
- Texas Caviar
- Ann’s Cookies
So, now we have a theme for dinner each night. That still doesn’t prevent getting bored with meals - after all, if you only have 7 meals in your repertoire, you’ll be bored within a month. We went through our multitude of healthy food cookbooks and pulled out several meals to fit each category. As a starting point - I’m sure we’ll add or delete meals over time.
Here are some of our initial choices:
Beef
- Tamale Pie
- Taco Soup
- Sheperd’s Pie with Sweet Potato Topping
- BBQ Meatloaf
- Beef and Bow Tie Pasta
- Basic Grilled Flank Steak
Chicken
- Bachelor’s Prize Chicken
- Chicken with Stuffing
- Deviled Chicken Breasts
- Carolina Casserole
- Chicken and Cheese Enchiladas
- Tex Mex Chicken plus Corn and Black Bean Salad
- Chinese Orange Chicken
- Spinach Stuffed Chicken
- Yogurt Chicken
Vegetarian
- Rapid Ratatoille
- Black and White Salad
- Spinach Ricotta Stuffed Shells
- Linguine Florentine
- Spinach Apple Salad
- Taco Bean Soup (not vegetarian, but oh-so-close)
On a diet, how do you keep from eating the same old thing day after day? By forcing yourself to create a varied list of menus to choose from.
Our first concern is not defaulting to chicken 5 nights a week. So, we actually scripted out the main ingrediant of each meal, based on the day of the week. We won’t be strict with this necessarily, but it will help us plan our meals ahead of time each week. Having an actual list of ingeredients that you know you need is a key to not buying the unhealthy foods.
So, what does our initial plan look like? Glad you asked…
| Day |
Main Ingredient |
| Monday |
chicken |
| Tuesday |
vegetarian |
| Wednesday |
leftovers |
| Thursday |
pork or chicken |
| Friday |
seafood |
| Saturday |
pasta |
| Sunday |
beef |
Wednesday is a busy one for us - bowling night for me and choir for the kids, so we’ll hopefully have some good leftovers to use up. Breakfasts for me will primarily be breakfast bars and lunches will either be leftovers or Smart Ones meals.
Snow Crash
by Neal Stephenson
One part Neuromancer, one part obvious inspiration for Max Barry’s Jennifer Government, results in an enjoyable read. The insistance of making it happen on a grand scale makes it hard to suspend disbelief - a pizza delivery guy ends up being Schwarzenegger, Willis, and a ninja combined…give me a break.