AHA Award Winner: The Raw Chef

Russell James gets this week's AHA award for his blog, The Raw Chef. Using just a few of the hacks I've documented here, Russel has put together a beautiful and highly functional blog to share his love of raw foods… I'm a dedicated carnivore (who likes his meat medium well) but the photos at Russell's blog have definitely got my mouth watering. And since I'm learning to cook for my vegetarian fiancé, I'm sure that I'll find plenty of food for thought by subscribing to The Raw Chef.

Russel is a great example of many of the readers here who have been able to customize their blogs even though they don't have much experience in coding… He tried out a few of the tutorials, ran into a snag here and there, but ultimately got just the look he was looking for. I provided some help via email, but on the whole he was able to figure things out on his own. Here's a comment he left on my post about creating custom landing pages.

Just thought I'd let you know about the landing page that I've been working on.  Actually, it's more of an 'about' page to replace the Typepad one.  I did it by creating a new blog and completely stripping it down.

It's at http://therawchef.blogs.com/about/

I've then added a top nav bar for my other sites.

Check out the 'contact' tab.  To do it I created a new index template and took out the content, then I composed a post for the contact details and got the code(done in another 'practice blog' so it doesn't interfere with my main sites and means I can get rid of it after I've got the code) which I added to the new template page.

Thanks for all your hacks and info, I can't believe I'm doing this stuff!

He also left some great feedback on the post about How To: Create a Dynamic Horizontal Navigation Menu. It's always great when readers post comments on the tutorials that provide details of their experiences which might be handy for other readers trying out a hack!

I'll be posting more AHA Awards to point out examples of well-tuned blogs that have implemented hacks. Want me to take a look at yours? Leave a comment with the URL of your blog below, or send me an email from the contact page. You can also nominate other blogs than your own.

Comments

[Posted: Nov 30, 2006 3:33:56 PM]

I have got to read your entire blog from start to finish, like a book. The top nav bar hack is something i've been thinking about for, oh, about 100 years. It looks great.

I've yet to play around much with altering the Typepad templates, but I think it's time...

[Posted: Nov 30, 2006 6:05:05 PM]

Kristen,

One of these days there may actually *be* a book…

Glad you're diggin' the blog! Let me know when you try out some of the hacks and I'll come check it out.

[Posted: Dec 1, 2006 8:59:28 PM]

Will do! (I hope you do get a book out of this.)