Another year has gone screaming by, and today my blog is turning 14 years old! I know, I can’t believe it either. Thanks to my faithful readers and followers for making this 14-year blogging journey so enjoyable. I’m grateful every day for the people who visit here and the many ways that blogging has enriched my life!

Kalyn's Kitchen Turns 14 Years Old

Every year when the anniversary date for Kalyn’s Kitchen comes around, I sit down at the computer and write a light-hearted little post about how I never dreamed of the many ways that starting this blog would end up changing my life. And of course that’s still true today when Kalyn’s Kitchen Turns 14 Years Old! Definitely I’m grateful for accidentally discovering what ended up being the best retirement job ever!

But this year I’m going to take a more serious tone and talk to you about the many hours of work I put in daily on the blog, something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I never imagined that having a blog would be a 14 year journey of CHANGE, and how much work it would be to keep up with those changes. Of course, the biggest change for Kalyn’s Kitchen came in September 2017 when I switched Kalyn’s Kitchen to WordPress. After that happened I realized every post on the blog would need to be edited, something I talked about in Thirteen Ways Food Blogging Has Changed for last year’s birthday post.

Making that switch to WordPress was something I should have done ten years sooner, and I’ve paid the price for being stubborn because since then so much of my time has been consumed with the tedious work of editing every single post to switch to the Recipe Plug-In formatting that’s preferred by Google. (That’s what puts the nice box around the recipe and gives you a print button with the thumbnail photo on the printer page.) If I hadn’t been working on adding that formatting for over 18 months you wouldn’t find many of my recipes when you search in Google, so it has to be done. And there’s no doubt the WordPress site is great, and far more functional than my old site, so no regrets about the switch.

But maintaining a successful blog is time consuming, even without the added pressure of spending time every day to edit old content. I don’t mean to complain, because I love the work of creating new recipes and sharing them with you. And updating old favorites with new photos is also deeply satisfying. I’m always focused on doing everything I can to make Kalyn’s Kitchen as good as it can possibly be for the people who enjoy the recipes you find here, and working on this blog is rewarding for me in so many ways. But dear readers, there are only so many hours in a day!

Last year I had a very milestone birthday, and I’m well past the age when most people are retired. And even though I have no interest in retiring for many, many years to come (and don’t plan on shutting down the site ever) lately I’m realizing that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life sitting in front of the computer for hours and hours every day.

Thankfully I’m about 80% done with the needed edits for WordPress. But after that’s finished I want to add nutritional information to the recipes, something I’ve been promising I’d do after all the recipes have the Recipe Plug-In formatting in place. When the edits are finally done, I’ll tackle the process of switching to a newer Recipe Plug-In that will calculate nutritional information.

Meanwhile I want to say THANKS to everyone who has been understanding about the delay in providing nutritional information, and especially to the kind people who calculate it themselves and then share that information in a comment! I appreciate people who accept that I can’t just snap my fingers and have that  done on 2,000+ recipes, no matter how much I would like to have it for you!

And this behind the scenes peek into my blogging workload is a long way of explaining that I’ve decided to celebrate my 14 year blogging anniversary by easing up a little on the (self-imposed) pressure on myself. I can’t keep up the pace of editing and keep up with all the other work of blogging and the posting schedule that’s become the norm for my blog. I need more time off to work on my bucket list!

I want to read more books, go to more movies, take more walks, and have more dinners with friends and family! But most of all I want to go on more trips, without having to spend days preparing posts ahead and time working on the blog every day while I’m traveling. So there are going to be some small but important changes around here. Freeing up more time for fun in my life means new recipes might show up here a bit less frequently. Some weeks there may not be quite as many posts as usual. And occasionally I might even go on a trip and take a whole week off from the blog (GASP!)

Of course my wise brother Rand reminds me regularly that no one notices the schedule and lots of other things on the blog the way I do, so hopefully my slightly more relaxed approach might not even be noticeable to the readers. I’ll certainly do my best to keep the site updated often enough that you won’t ever feel there’s a lack of recipes! And to everyone who’s read to the end in this post that doesn’t even have a recipe, let me say THANK YOU again for your support! I never would have stuck with it anywhere close to this long without the amazing support I’ve gotten from readers and that means the world to me!

Kalyn’s Kitchen Birthdays Through the Years:

Kalyn’s Kitchen Turns One
Kalyn’s Kitchen Turns Two
Kalyn’s Kitchen Turns Three
Kalyn’s Kitchen Turns Four
Kalyn’s Kitchen Turns Five
Kalyn’s Kitchen Turns Six
Kalyn’s Kitchen Turns Seven
Kalyn’s Kitchen Turns Eight
Kalyn’s Kitchen Turns Nine
Kalyn’s Kitchen Turns Ten (!)
Kalyn’s Kitchen Turns Eleven (!!)
Kalyn’s Kitchen Turns Twelve (!!!)
Kalyn’s Kitchen Turns Thirteen (!!!!)

 

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