Category: Blogging

Prompting – there’s a right way and a wrong way.

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Listen, people can argue and post all they want about the dangers and/or benefits of AI. But whether you use it or not is up to you.

So, yes you can use AI tools if you want but please, PLEASE recognise that you will get out just what you put in. Prompt it in a slapdash way – you’re gonna get slapdash results. And even if you give it the most detailed prompt ever – you still need to check what it throws up in response.

Don’t just tell it to write an essay on… oh I don’t know … challah. “Write an essay on challah” is pretty vague. And you’ll get vague results.

a braided bread, also called challah, with sesame seeds on top.

Give it details:

👨‍🍳 what role you want it to assume: food writer, baker, culinary or social historian, etc.

✍ what the project is: is the essay part of the larger project? Are there existing sections to use as guides? Is the essay for a food website or a social history journal?

👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 who the audience: general educated adult reader, bakers, a local food magazine, kids?
📏 how long should it be: 300 words or 1500 words?

📣 what tone or style: is this a formal report or an informal piece?

➕ / ➖ what to include or not: different shapes, recent trends or historical references? Regional differences or focus on a specific region?

✔ Check and challenge the results.

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And then, use it as a jump off point for your own input. If you leave it as is – trust me, people can tell.

Being Aware of Awareness Days

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I love a good awareness day. Not just because they are a fun way to flesh out a social media calendar – there’s one for nearly everything – but because I always pick up something I didn’t know every time I draft new awareness day content.

But I know they are not universally beloved. Some people dismiss them as a quick crutch if you’ve got nothing else to say. And I cannot deny that there is some truth in that. You can tell when they’ve been thrown in just because someone has run out of time, ideas, or interest.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. If you use them reasonably, awareness days are great for highlighting your brand and encouraging engagement. Just be sure that you:
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Have a Happy Tortellini Day

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Now, normally I’d be here talking about content audits or social media or some such. But not today. Why? Because it’s Tortellini Day and because one of the topics I write about all the time is food.

Happy Tortellini Day! To celebrate, I present just one of the many possible origin stories for this pasta-rific treat.

Lucrezia Borgia – yes, THAT Lucrezia Borgia – was travelling and stopped for the night at an inn in the small town of Castelfranco Emilia. The innkeeper was so captivated by Lucrezia that he couldn’t resist the urge later that night to peek at her through the keyhole. There were only a few candles lighting in the room so all he could see was her navel, and that, only just.

Now this might not seem a lot to you but not a lot happens in Castelfranco Emilia and a new navel was no doubt a noteworthy event. Anyway, the sight of Lucrezia’s navel sent him into ecstasy and he rushed to the kitchen and created tortellini in its image.

Or, it might have been intended to mimic the shape of a turtle – intended to echo the architecture of the area where many 17th-century buildings allude to the turtle motif.

But you know, turtle are fine in their way but they are no Lucrezia Borgia. So, I know which story I’m sticking with.

Want to see more of my food content? Head on over to Fabulous Foodie.

Searching Out Stock Photos

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Does the cost of stock photography sometimes leave you reeling? Join the club! I’ve been shopping for and using stock photos for over 25 years and the price tag can leave me speechless on occasion.

While cost is very often what sends people hunting for free or cheaper sources of stock photography, there’s another reason that becomes bigger as time goes on — lack of choice. Have you noticed the same pics showing up on multiple paid sites? Me too. There’s a particular coffee cup, for example, following me from 123RF to Dreamstime, Bigstock to Canstock, Shutterstock to Deposit and back again.

So I go hunting for something that doesn’t look like the same picture everyone else is using on their content about the same topics. And even if I don’t see them everywhere, shots on the major sites can be perfectly fine but … predictable. Technically good, of course, but safe, cookie cutter … boring.

Not surprising then that we attempt to escape high cost, repetitiveness and blandness by Googling phrases like “free stock photos” or “hi-res free photos.”

Only then we find out how bad some of the “free stock photo” offerings are. Well, maybe not so shocking if you subscribe to the “you get what you pay for ” school of thought. But even taking that into account, some of them are breathtakingly bad. Luckily there are increasingly good places to find high quality, absolutely free stock photos.

All the sites below offer free high-resolution photos under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license which means:

  • you can copy, adapt or distribute the images for either commercial or personal use without requiring creator consent.
  • you can’t claim ownership or resell them as is.

No purchase, permission, or attribution* required. Continue reading “Searching Out Stock Photos” →

Blog Post Written? Don’t Publish Until You Do These 5 Things!

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You’ve written your blog post. Congrats! You’ve tackled the toughest part of the process – getting it written. Take a moment to give yourself a pat on the back.

But wait! DON’T HIT ‘PUBLISH’ YET!

What? Why not?

Because you aren’t done. There are a few more steps between getting it written and getting it out there. And trust me, these steps are just as important as the post itself. They are where snazzy gets separated from sloppy and ‘good enough’ becomes ‘great.’,

These are the steps that give your one-off post gets some legs.

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