It is a surreal honor to have received word that we were included in the Feedspot Top Twenty List of Gluten Free Baking Blogs. Top of the list was my favorite first guide to baking gluten free: Gluten Free on A Shoestring.
Nicole was the first blogger that gave me hope after finding out we all had celiacs. I have several of her cookbooks and she taught me a great deal about ingenuity and determination when living and thriving gluten free. To be included in a list with a blogger like this means more than I can say, and lets me know how much I have to get back in there and blog.
It doesn’t stop with Nicole’s blog. I’ve read 50% of the blogs listed in that top twenty list of gluten free baking blogs. I have learned something from each. It is not hard to admire the dedication it all takes.
I had Lost my Heart to Blog
Three years ago, after years of diligently working to create informative blog articles and tons of recipes, we lost our site. A catastrophic loss of our site. After hosting issues from full backups of my website, I trusted the hosts who assured me they would have backups for me daily and I just had them available on their backup management system. I tested the backup system. It worked. I let it do its thing and I didn’t think much about it.
When we lost the site, I found all the backups were corrupted. We had nothing. Not a single record was readable or retrievable. Six months of corrupted backups. I honestly don’t know what to say about that. They did not care. It was odd. Unfortunately for me, it was a gutting experience.
What Do You Do When it All Burns Down
You Rebuild of course. I had to do some research to find a more secure robust host. and thankfully found one. Since we were starting from scratch and had to build the website again, we took it as the opportunity to fully rebrand as we already had a new logo in the works. The hardest to get over was the loss of our customer database, our newsletter subscriptions. It took time, but we got over it.
My daughter found copies of our most visited blog pieces on the wayback machine. I think out of 50-60 blog recipes and about 30 posts, she was able to retrieve about 15-18 total posts. Can I tell you the amount of creative energy lost from one outage? It changed the way I approached the website.
Within about a week, we were up and running again. It was a time of change, new host, new logo, new website. As a business, we continue changing while holding onto our long-term goals. We were in three locations over a three-year period. So we are glad to be in a stable place where we can grow and grow and grow.
It feels good to have structure underneath our feet. It is a very nice feeling. We are planning gardens and planting our first rhubarb knowing it won’t be ready that first year. Planning long term fruits for our pies and cakes. It is an amazing gift to have landed where we have landed without the zoning we would prefer. We cannot have a storefront.
There is More to the Life of a Baker than Baking
I did not expect to be running a home bakery in Glens Falls NY. I also did not expect to be listed in a top twenty list of gluten free baking blogs. FreeSpot did that. and I appreciate it a great deal. It inspires me to put the effort into this website that I did in the beginning before the loss. As an indiviual building a brand by simply baking the best products we can within the gluten free industry, I should not lose sight of the importance of visibility while developing that brand.
Important Gluten Free Resources:
Arsenic Levels In Rice are Why We Don’t Use Rice in Our Gluten Free Baking Mixes
Gluten Free Kitchen: A Quick Guide to Cleaning
Dairy Intolerance – an after effect of Celiac’s Disease