AUG 2011: NEW BLOG TEMPLATE

There has been issues with a plug-in I used called “PrintFriendly” which allows visitors to turn the pages on the blog into clean, printable versions. You’ll find it at the end of all post pages where it is shown with this icon:

Scroll down a bit and you’ll see a real working one right here just before the Comments section. Give it a shot and see what it does.

Well, it seems that the plugin and my previous blog template weren’t playing nicely together at all and caused the final print out to look particularly ugly and not useful at all. Since this had not been an issue in the past – it had always printed very neat, slick looking versions of the page in question – I had to see what was causing the problem.

Once I had concluded the problem was with the template itself and not the plugin, I went in search of a new design for the site and, as of Aug 2011 and until further notice, Yumarama! now sports a slick new WordPress template called “twenty eleven“, their flagship template for, you guessed it, 2011.

I’ve done a few tweaks to the design so we have a different background and my photos don’t stack up all wonky but I think we have a nice result here. The style is also mobile-ready, meaning it automatically realigns and resizes itself to fit things like iPads and iPhones.

And the Print Friendly plug in works swell! (Thanks, Taylor!)

And yes, I took this opportunity to update the site’s official title from the previous cumbersome
“Yumarama Bread Blog – My (mostly sourdough) bread playground”
to the more concise and descriptive
“Yumarama! A Bread & Baking Blog”
which will reflect a slightly changed focus as I embark on a Professional Baking course at University.

 

JULY 2011: NEW CONVERTER PLUGIN

I’ve just installed a new plug-in for the blog, “Unit Converter” which automatically converts some basic units between Imperial (US only) and Metric. For example:

13.4 oz, 8.9 ounces,
732 grams, 439g, 267 g
18.3 fl oz, 34 fluid ounces
167 millilitre, 93 mL
374F, 247°C
21 inches, 2ft 7 in
3.7 meters, 0.21 m

Each of these will have an underscore and if one hold the pointer over the unit for a moment, a conversion will show up, giving the ‘other’ equivalent.

The plugin cannot handle cups and teaspoons as there’s too much variation due to the confusion of dry or liquid substance and “C” is already used for Celsius:

2 cups, 5 c, 3 teaspoons… nuthin’.

So from here on, I’ll be using just one measure and leaving the equivalency to the plug-in which will be a whole lot more accurate than my own calculation and possibly typing errors. Where needed, I’ll still use volumes where the original recipe doesn’t include the associated weights and giving an estimated weight as best as ingredient converters online can give.

Smaller units like teaspoons I’ll retain as these usually are too small for my scale to get precisely. Unless some nice baking pal chooses to supply me with a pocket scale accurate to 0.1 gram, that is… (whistles nonchalantly)… or I get off my duff and go get me one.