A Digital Food Diary on My Own Website

Food and Drink on my own website

I’ve been wanting to do it for a while, but I’ve finally started making eat and drink posts. The display isn’t exactly what I want yet, but it’s getting there. For myself and those reading, I’ll try to continue tweaking on templates, but with the start of the new year, I wanted to at least start capturing the basic data. Most of the heavy lifting will be done by David Shanske’s excellent Post Kinds Plugin.

I’m hoping that, much like the dieting advice about getting and using a clean plate for every single thing you eat, consciously posting will help me to subconsciously eat better too. I’ve already begun to notice some of the subtle effects, and not just for composing better photographs of my food.

I probably won’t post everything publicly after some time because, really, who really wants to see all this (perhaps aside from others interested in doing the same thing themselves)? Eventually it’ll probably devolve into only the more fabulous looking restaurant meals and specialty cocktails while I’m out.

🍴 Ham sandwich with muenster on rye, strawberries, oatmeal and raisin cookie with Coca-cola zero sugar

Since the ham sandwich post is so vaunted and maligned in the social media space and I can more properly support it, I’ve already made my obligatory first personal ham sandwich post.

Previous Food related posts on Silos

Back in the day, I’d used services like Eat.ly and Foodspotting. The former was bought out by the latter and development and customer acquisition seems to have died altogether. These did a reasonable job of melding eating and checkin post types, but the genre seems to have died out for lack of interest and or development. Since some of what they did was interesting and useful to me, I’m recreating portions of it on my own site.

Courtesy of David’s Simple Location Plugin, I’ll also be able to add location data to my eating-related posts to also make them checkins in a sense much like some of the functionality of these older silos.

I did like some of the health related and calorie data that Eat.ly made possible, and might consider adding some of that into my site in the future as well. I’ll have to take a look at services like WeightWatchers that I would expect might add that type of functionality as well. This also reminds me that Leo Laporte has a wi-fi scale that Tweets out his weight every time he stands on it. That sounds like useful quantified self data, though I don’t think I’d go so far as to post it publicly on my site (or syndicate it) in the future.

Feeds for these posts

I can’t imagine that anyone but potential stalkers would care, but for posterity, here are the feeds associated with these posts:
Eat: http://www.boffosocko.com/kind/eat/feed/
Drink: http://www.boffosocko.com/kind/eat/feed/
Eat & Drink (combined): http://www.boffosocko.com/feed/?kind=eat,drink

If you’re subscribed to my full feed and don’t want these in it, it’s possible to redact these posts from your stream, just drop me a line and I can help you subscribe to just the content you desire. Those subscribed to the “Food” category needn’t worry as I don’t expect to be clogging that category up with these posts.

Home office

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Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

5 thoughts on “A Digital Food Diary on My Own Website”

    1. Aaron, there is an upper limit of about 30 which is roughly documented here: https://indieweb.org/posts#Kinds_of_Posts. I’ve got reasonable support for about twenty at the moment, but don’t anticipate actively adding too many more. I think there are only about 10 that I use with reasonable frequency. Some I might experiment with once or twice, but if I don’t have a regular and direct need for them, I’m unlikely to use them or document them seriously.

      I’m experimenting with the eat/drink posts for a bit to see what, if any, effect they have on my habits. We’ll see how long they last and how worthwhile (or not) they may be. I could certainly imagine people wanting/needing them as a benchmark for their health the way some might have exercise or workout related posts that they might track. Others in the quantified self movement may find these particular ones worthwhile as well.

      I’m sure somewhere I even have a chicken post just for fun, but it’s probably not as built out as some and it’s certainly not something I post frequently enough to bother building infrastructure to support. For the rest, I don’t mind serving as the canary (or chicken) in the proverbial coal mine so you don’t need to.

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