Jounce

Introducing The Humble Gourmand

Yes, your feed readers are right, I’m actually making a post on here. Though I have about nine partially-finished articles in the queue, all sorts of things have interfered, but I promise not one, but two posts in the next couple of days!

Since moving to DC after college in Maine, my college friends have become among my best. I sang for a few years with Alison and Lauren, and brought Lauren in to work with me when I was at Grassroots, and now we meet up at least once a month or so over dinner for great wine and great conversation.

Alison has spent her still-young career as a journalist writing for financial publications, covering bonds and government regulations (as I understand it). Apparently, she’s damn good at it, but she has long wanted to be a food writer. One night, as we were discussing such things, she proposed starting a food and wine blog with Lauren, who loves her wine. Her goals were to generate a bit of a portfolio and hopefully attract a little bit of attention to either get a job writing or editing a food column/magazine/whatever.

I put on my “I think about this kind of thing all the time” hat and suggested that rather than launching a food blog (Technorati says there are at least 50,000 of those), that she instead launch a little online magazine. Not only would she be able to write, but she could also develop her abilities as an editor and publisher as well, and the publication schedule could keep her motivated moreso than the often fluid/non-existent publication schedule of a blog (obviously, I speak from experience).

Three days ago, we launched the first issue of The Humble Gourmand, which is a monthly (though it may become bi-weekly) online food magazine for the younger, urban demographic — complete with features, recipes, reviews, a wine column, and a blog. I produced the site front to back, and Alison and Lauren wrote the content, with Alison of course taking on the publisher/editor responsibilities.

Even though it’s only been three days, it’s already been a success in almost every way. We’ve had a few hundred visitors, who average about six pages per visit (even organic google referrals average four pages per visit), and we’ve gotten incredibly positive feedback. Several people have volunteered to write articles for an upcoming issue, which can help expand the geographic base for reviews. Most importantly, Alison has been offered opportunities to write for major publications… about food!

From the perspective of a web designer/developer, there were a few interesting things about this project:

• I did it end to end. Since becoming a strategist at Viget, I haven’t gotten to do as much of the designing and developing as I had in the past, so it was nice to be back in the saddle again. I have to admit, some of my IE6 bug-hunting chops were a bit rusty. Hopefully, it’s easy on the eyes, and not devilishly broken.
• I used Django. I’ve been watching and toying with Django for months now, but hadn’t actually done anything of real substance with it. This is exactly the type of site that Django was made for, and it’s been working out swimmingly. I don’t feel like I have many JV hacks in my code, even though I’m pretty much a newbie, so that speaks volumes for the Django book by Adrian and Jacob (seriously, it’s great to have in hard-copy), as well as the rest of the Django documentation. The CMS, which was a major part of most of my PHP-based projects, took up about 1% of my time on the project. After launch, I realized I hadn’t made an RSS feed for anything. Five minutes later, we were all set. It’s great.
• We used Mingle. For project and task management, we’ve been using Mingle, which is geared toward agile-like processes, and it’s been nice. It was recommended in a Viget context by Clinton, and we gave it a go here. Going forward, we may use it for the actual content parts of the site, which could be a cool way to work toward both publishing and development goals. Best of all, since there are only a few of us, it’s free.

We’ll be doing more with it in the coming issues, and it should be a nice fun side project for a while.

I encourage you to check it out, subscribe to the feed, comment on things you like, send private email about things you don’t like, etc. ;) Suggestions are always welcome.