February. What a whirlwind of a month! Half the team in Tokyo for half the month and so many things to get done! It’s safe to say that this leap year we leaped left right and centre. The result, an unexpected delay in our plans. Yes, we could not release our new version of the RecipeEditor as expected, thanks to 256 new issues that came up. That’s a random number I made up, but you get the picture, right?
But now we are on track again.
We still have a fair few updates on what happened this last month at Cucumbertown.
The ingredient tree mapping, which is a part of the upgrade to the Recipe Index is now complete and available to Cucumbertown Bloggers
When someone had to include fish as an ingredient in their Recipe Index, they would have to manually add the tag to all the recipes. And they had to do this consciously so that even posts which did not include the word fish, would be included in the index. Our ingredient tree mapping feature enables the bloggers to easily categorise recipes based on ingredients and will also help in Google discovering recipes which they haven’t already, because of an efficient internal linking system.
For our monetized food blogs, in February, we experimented with in-image ads.
We tied up with GumGum the leading in-image and in-screen advertising platform, and deployed in-image ads for our bloggers. What are in-image ads?
In-image advertising uses “data about the image, its tags, and the surrounding content to match images with ads that are contextually relevant.” Once a website owner integrates the scripts onto their publishing systems, site visitors can move their mouse over the images or look at an image for a certain amount of time to reveal an ad. — Wikipedia
Cucumbertown gets featured and the love keeps coming in!
Last month we were featured on so TechInAsia and Social Samosa. We have also had a pretty fantastic month thanks to our bloggers. Thanks guys, we need no other inspiration to keep going!
What to Look Forward to
This is honestly the bit I can’t wait to tell you about! As I mentioned before the updated version of the RecipeWriter is on it’s way and soon all of you will have access to a whole arsenal of features, including scheduling. We also have some exciting stuff happening with monetization, and you will soon be seeing some experiments related to this.
And our pipeline of bloggers keep increasing, and how! Thank you bloggers, we can’t wait to have you guys as part of this mushrooming Cucumbertown family.
So until the next we come to you with more tales of what has been cooking at Cucumbertown, stay tuned, and don’t forget to Follow the Cucumbertown Magazine for all things food blogging!
