A new look for Mostly Eating!

I’ve been really busy in real life and a neglectful blog owner of late, not posting much at all, and even worse, missing its first birthday at the end of January (and even then I only realised when Wendy confessed to missing hers!). The best way I could think of to make it up to my blog was to give it a whole new wardrobe ready for spring.  You can see the new design for yourself, but here’s a quick summary of what’s new:

• I really wanted to keep the overall feel of the old site (the logo hasn’t changed much), but the original design didn’t always feel like it was very easy to move around.  I’ve added a lot of little touches intended to make the site easier to use, like a way to browse backwards and forwards through all of the posts in sequence, quick links to skip straight down the page to the recipe and comment formatting that makes it easier on the eye to read a long thread
• My posts have metamporphosed shape of their own since I started writing them last year – you know that there’s normally a recipe hidden in the depths of each post, but it isn’t always easy to find one that you saw earlier.  Recipes are now super easy to find through the new Recipe Index.
• I used to be a librarian in another life, so it was predicatable that the categorisation would be top of the list for a revamp.  Posts about environmental issues are filed under Eat Green, nutrition matters under Nourish Yourself and those that try to make sense of the boundaries between the two are rather grandly filed under Econutrition.  The recipes from the posts are also categorised with “what do you fancy now?” foodie headings under the afore mentioned recipe index (baking, beans and pulses, these sorts of things).
• The RSS feed now has little niceties like paragraph breaks and a proper link to click-through to read the rest of long posts.
• People who don’t use feed readers can opt to have new posts to Mostly Eating delivered straight to their email account.
• New visitors have a little note at the bottom of each page just for them, to give a feel for the kind of topics and recipes they will find around here.

Let me know what you think! Oh and do write and tell me if there is anything that is just plain confusing, or if I’ve left anything out from the old site that you’d like to see back.

p.s I delegated the redesign task to my cats initially but this is all they could come up with, so in the end I had to do it all myself.  A big thanks goes to my lovely husband Nik who helped with that really scary swopping over bit at the weekend!