Since this year is the 15th anniversary of my writing this blog,
and because I did not celebrate the 10th anniversary five years ago, I
thought I would put up a brief anniversary post. Back in 2009, I had
not yet been discovered by Clarissa Wei and turned into a celebrity diner,
so Chinese food and restaurant topics were only a part of the content on
this blog.
Furthermore I wasn't particularly
knowledgeable about some of the workings of the internet, I treated my
blog as a personal diary, just to keep track of some events and thoughts
that I might otherwise forget. I was happily uninformed about what it
meant to have a blog on Google's Blogspot/Blogger product, until one
day when I decided to see a search of what kind of Cantonese food blogs were on the internet. Yikes, to my surprise I saw my own blog listed on the first page of Google hits. Up until then I had no idea that anybody might have seen blog posts except myself. I then did a little digging into the workings of the blog itself and found a tool called stats, and that yes indeed, my blog was attracting a small amount of traffic. Not that I had posted anything inappropriate, but now I was on notice that I would have to write the blog with outside readership in mind.
In the Spring of 2012, Clarissa Wei's article came out and that changed everything. The effect on Chandavkl's Blog was significant, but not in the way that one would expect. Rather all the publicity as the celebrity diner who had eaten (then) at over 6,000 Chinese restaurants led to requests to write about Chinese food for other websites. Consequently, any really serious piece on Chinese food that I would write appeared on these other websites. Of course, I recognized that people would expect that I had my own blog on Chinese food topics, so I did keep Chandavkl's Blog current, largely with less profound articles about where I ate for lunch or what I ate on my vacation. And I would post early summary drafts of my outside articles, too. But the banner on Chandavkl's Blog referred readers to my articles on the Menuism website, where I penned about 90 articles over the course of almost 10 years on Chinese food in America in the context of Chinese-American history, demographics and culture.
My run with Menuism ended in 2022 when their blog editor left, leaving nobody there to shepherd articles onto their website. When I first started with Menuism they had a stable of over a dozen bloggers, each with their own culinary specialty. By 2022 I was their last writer standing. In a way it was a relief in that it was getting difficult to write so many substantive articles on a monthly basis. Shortly thereafter, while the Menuism site carried on, trying to reach the Menuism blog site or any individual articles only generated an error message. To me that was my worst nightmare, since much of my major work was no longer on the internet. On the other hand, I had thought about that possibility, so I contemporaneously saved HTML and PDF copies of all my articles as they were written. While I had no idea of the mechanics of creating a new website with the content, at least I had the raw material. And after some false starts and experimentation, I decided I could start a second Chandavkl blog to preserve all of my Menuism articles. In so doing I wasn't even thinking about people finding my articles on the internet, but rather I just wanted to have them on the internet so I could provide links to my writings if anyone wanted to read them.
Of course you know what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men, and as it turns out some of the HTML copies of my Meniusm articles were corrupted. Furthermore, at some point in time copying and pasting PDF text became a premium item, so I needed a Plan B for some of the articles as I could not copy and paste from the PDF. That came in the form of locating the original text submissions of my articles, and at least I could copy the illustrations from the PDF copies. So it took me just a month to get Chandavkl's Menuism Blog up and running. Indeed, it looks so nice that I've subsequently added some new material to the new blog. So to that extent, the original Chandavkl's Blog is still just a miscellany of less important topics, while the new Chandavkl's Menuism blog is where more substantive items will be found, even where they were not originally posted on Menuism.
And appropriately, in reviewing my first few posts from 2009, this is a good opportunity to make an addendum to one of them. In 2009 I was describing my trip to Nashville, where my son and I were going to visit for a few days. However my son's vacation was cancelled by his employer at the last minute and I ended going by myself. As I said in that post, "I was looking forward to seeing Music Row, since it is the heart of
the country music industry where hundreds of record companies and
country music related endeavors were located. I was imagining it was in
downtown with shops, nightclubs, museums and buzz of activity. Was I ever mistaken. Music Row is two
parallel tree lined streets, four blocks long, and the functional
equivalent of a business park with low and mid rise office buildings.
No retail space, no foot traffic at all."
While this always puzzled me, it's not like it was a question that I had a burning desire to resolve. However, I happened to see that a film on Music Row was being shown by PBS, so I made it a point to watch it. And the show explained everything. Country music was driven in the old days by Nashville radio stations, which had a need for their own recording facility. So one such facility was built in a nondescript residential neighborhood which is now Music Row. This facility was such a success that over the years all the record companies built their own studios here, and related businesses set up shop. While many of the old residences were replaced by office park type buildings, some of the old houses are still there today.
