Ben Benner’s Blog

For the few folks that read my blog, I would like to announce that a friend of mine, Audrey Montgomery, recently asked me on Facebook to become a fan of her Pampered Chef consulting.

I did that and will do one better, I will link to her Pampered Chef site from my blog here. Yup leveraging the potentially dozens of folks that read this.

Sarcasm aside, I have been blessed with the opportunity to attend some parties where Audrey has performed her magic using the Pampered Chef accessories and her cooking skillz.

While, I tend to get my supplies from the Mission Restaurant Supply company here in town, I took a look through her wares and saw a few items that I may purchase.

Stackable Cooling Rack

Pastry Cutter

Measure-All Cup (like Alton Brown’s)

For those too lazy to click through to her site, here are some quick links.

Contact Audrey

News (recipes too)

New Products

I will go ahead and throw out my professional 2 cents (in terms of web stuff).

I think that it is very cool that The Pampered Chef company enables their agents/consultants with a relatively customizable site that they can personalize and brand a little bit. I would say that anyone doing any sort of reseller/agent type business model needs to be able to offer out that type of functionality.

That would be the good part of the critique, the bad part is that the application that their developers put together is in my opinion not ready for the ‘public web’. The URL structure that they use has query string data (being the stuff after the ‘?’). The first thing that you should learn these days about the query string is that indexing robots typically do not like URLs that have that, so using ModRewrite or what not to create clean URLs will greatly help with that kind of thing.

www.pamperedchef.biz/cookingwithaudrey?page=products-category&categoryId=22

With a little bit of reworking of their code they could use a structure like

www.pamperedchef.biz/cookingwithaudrey/products/category/22

or even a little bit more coding, they could give category 22 a name

www.pamperedchef.biz/cookingwithaudrey/products/category/new

Now for me. I am a HUGE fan of sub-domains. Though, I will admit the general public find these confusing, but there are tricks to get around that (little bit of header redirecting after the .com/, will make it easy for folks to be sent to the proper subdomain). The link could look like.

cookingwithaudrey.pamperedchef.biz/products/category/new

While, I am not sure if The Pampered Chef application knows to detect if it is being executed in an iframe, there are things that consultants, like Audry can do to add their own branding to these types of sites.

Register the domain ‘CookingWithAudrey.com’, setup a GoDaddy hosting account (the cheap one). Setup a simple HTML page that does an <iframe> and is set to pull up http://www.pamperedchef.biz/cookingwithaudrey?page=home

That would would allow you to go to the CookingWithAudrey.com and keep her private URL in the address bar. Would have to test it to see if there are any warnings that come up from the SSL layer when you try to do a checkout. If there are, then rather than doing an <iframe> the CookingWithAudrey.com domain name can do a simple redirect to her Pampered Chef site.

I would probably say that she might want to try and do a splash page, that has some photos of some of the stuff she has cooked and then has a graphic/button/link to take the user to her Pampered Chef site.

So ends my professional 2 cents bit.

Again, congrats to Audrey on the Facebook fan stuff and The Pampered Chef site.

back to the grind.

laterz

bdbenner business, coding, friends Cooking, friend, programming

I think that there are some songs that I like from the 1970s, but the title of this post is in reference to my Netflix ‘Watch Instantly’ queue. I have been loading my queue with Doctor Who, a series near and dear to my heart.

I have mainly been focusing on the Tom Baker years, which were filmed between 1974-1981. I am not entirely sure why some of them are available via streaming and some are not. I mean, it seems like everything that old should be available, but who knows, maybe someone’s estate is refusing to allow the content to be streamed due to royalties or something.

I have found that I need to have the TV on in the background when I am coding at home. There are times when I prefer to just have music, but it is just not the same. I have been trying to figure it out, I know that I am more productive without TV, but only from the standpoint of me not occasionally looking up at the screen. Without some sort of  background noise, I cannot focus.

When I am here at the office, I find that the listening to music is the perfect thing. But when I am at home, I prefer the TV. Not sure what it is, but unless Gina is home, then listening to music and coding just feels, I don’t know how else to put it but, lonely.

Anyway, the streaming quality of Netflix on the (xbox) 360 is superb.

In terms of this weekend though, it was not just coding and watching Doctor Who. I also had to clean-up the kitchen. As usual, I started falling back into my bachelor tendencies and not cleaning up all of the dishes I had used the day before. After that was done, it came time to mop up. I want to try and make sure that the house is clean for when Gina returns for Florida.

Let it be known that little dogs, have little bladders. And that while I do take them outside regularly (or leave the dog door open, provided the neighbor dog is inside), they occasionally make a mess. I had spot cleaned these messes, but it was time to mop the floor. I mopped, the kitchen, dining room and the living room. One of the benefits of having mostly tile, is that provided your back is strong, cleanup is easy.

I also did what Gina would normally start doing on a Sunday, dog laundry. Our dogs have an assortment of dog beds (many of which have been recently constructed by Gina herself), blankets, sweaters/shirts and what not. I am thinking that tomorrow night (because I will be too sore from Camp Gladiator tonight) the dogs will be getting bathes.

Another thing I did was cook dinner. Yup, amazing feat right?

I bring this particular cooking experience up, because I tried out a couple of new things.

1. I used our small Dutch Oven for the first time, I think Gina might have used it before, but I myself, had not. My in-laws have been giving us Le Creueset for Christmas the last couple of years.

2. I braised some beef short ribs. Never done that before. We buy them all the time to feed to the dogs, I had bought two packs of them and decided that I would cook and eat the second set myself.

3. I followed the recipe that came on the meat packaging. I think the recipe on the meat packaging is fairly universal and not just HEB. But they usually have some sort of recipe / cooking instructions on the sticker that tells you the price and weight. I followed the recipe and it turned out OK. In retrospect, I should have tasted the sauce/gravy that I made out of the broth before applying it to the meat, it could have used a little bit of salt.

I took the meat off the ribs, which was not a hard feat at all, they had cooked long enough that it fell off the bones. The carrots that I had put into the dutch oven with them turned out great. To be honest, it was kind of like pot-roast, but with short ribs.

I never remember how long to cook the Brussels sprouts for, so I had to call Gina. Afterward, when everything was plated up, I sent Gina a picture of what I had made. I opted not to put it up on Twitter, maybe I will post it up here later.

Unfortunately, the whole cleaning the kitchen, dog laundry, etc cost me a few more hours than I had wanted to, as I didn’t complete all of the coding that I had been planning to do this weekend. But I did manage to get a significant portion of what I am working on done. To which, there were a number of things that I was not familiar with how to make the framework do what I wanted to, but after a few hits with the sonic screwdriver, everything started to work just fine.

I hope to be able to do some more coding after I get done with Camp Gladiator. But, honestly I will likely end up eating dinner, taking a hot bath and passing out.

Back to the grind.

Laterz

bdbenner XBox360, coding, tv cleaning, coding, doctor who, Dogs, netflix, xbox