Kalyn’s Kitchen is turning 21 years old today, and I’m sharing thoughts about that journey and how food blogging has changed! And if you’re a long time reader who’s finding this post, thank you for the support!

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Kalyn's Kitchen Turns 21 Graphic with birthday cupcake and sprinkles.

Every year on April 24 I acknowledge my blog turning another year older, and share thoughts about that. I’ll always be grateful that my talented brother Rand inspired me to start a food blog! But I did write a lengthy post last year for my milestone twenty year blogging anniversary, so this year I’m trying to keep it shorter.

I will always be grateful!

I still want to emphasize the deep gratitude I feel for the many, many people who have supported and helped me. And my barely tech-savvy senior citizen brain has been depending on smart younger people to help me with technology for many years! I’m also more thankful than ever for the many faithful readers who have followed my blog for many years and sent me kind feedback.

I’m not planning to retire, but . . .

People ask me regularly when I plan to retire from the blog! But I’m still working on the site almost every day editing recipes and adding improvements, so I’m not really thinking about that! But I’m not going to lie; the internet has changed in many ways that make running a website harder and less rewarding.

I miss the days when the food blog world was a kinder and gentler place, with less competition! Now search engines demand specific formats that can make navigating recipes confusing to readers. And these days operating a website means paying for lots of monthly services to stay current and keep things working. Those costs keep going up while earnings keep going down. Social Media is a challenge to keep up with, and sometimes people aren’t on their best behavior there. And AI now can people the full recipe (often inaccurate) without them even coming to the site.

With all those concerns I want to repeat that it’s the support from readers that makes sharing recipes on this site so rewarding. I feel a deep sense of loyalty to my long-time readers. And the older I get, the more people have expressed concerns about the recipes going away. I want to repeat my pledge from last year that “I’ll do whatever I can to keep Kalyn’s Kitchen online as long as possible.”

Three Easy Ways You Can Support this Website:

  • If you follow Kalyn’s Kitchen on social media, please like, comment, or share one of my recipe posts every so often. That type of engagement tells the algorithm that people want to see the recipes. That makes a huge difference!
  • If you’re not already doing so, you can Subscribe to Kalyn’s Kitchen by e-mail. You’ll get three e-mails a week featuring a seasonal recipe I think you might want to try.
  • And if you try one of my recipes and really enjoy it, leave a star rating on the website (down under the little thumbnail image in the complete recipe.) Th0se ratings get featured in search engine results and also encourage other people to try the recipe.

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

If you’ve managed to read  this far, thank you again for the support; it really does mean the world to me! If you feel like joining the birthday celebrating, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments about how how the internet has changed during the time you’ve been using my website!

Kalyn’s Kitchen Through the Years:

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