About Christmas Baking with SusieJ

Black and white photo of a toddler standing at a counter rolling out dough. A woman stands behind the child, kissing the top of the toddler's head.

A Labor of Love

When the web first appeared and my then fiance-now-husband set up his first webserver, he added an account for me to maintain my own home page. In those days, personal home pages were like bad dating profiles with webrings for all our special interests. Boldly, mine included the most interesting information I had to share: my grandmother's recipes.

When it started becoming popular I bought the domain, had enough recipes for an Advent calendar, got listed on Yahoo, became the first hit on Google for Lebkuchen, spent a recession unemployed while translating and testing recipes, redesigned twice, and landed two web development jobs using this site as a demonstration of my skills.

Content is added as the fancy strikes me. The goal is a new recipe or disaster monthly (not that you'd know it) and skipping NaNoWriMo for AdCalWriMo. Some years I've got it; some years I don't.

Technical Stuff

By day, I am a web and database programmer for one of Philly's many universities, automating my clients' manual processes. Most of my skill are self taught — not least because the web didn't exist when I graduated from college.

What started as hand-crafted, artisanal HTML is now generated by hand-crafted, artisanal scripts or software like CodeKit. Some thing use very modern web technologies, and some things ... don't.

SusieJ, where are you?

The Tweeters

Pinterest

Mastodon

Policies

The site should work without anything but HTML parsing enabled.

Cookies: Only necessary cookies for tracking which day you have viewed in the Advent Calendar, or what you've clicked in the various bingo boards.

JavaScript is used for the Advent Calendar and bingo boards, and to preserve — locally! — any text you've entered while sharing a recipe.

Personal information — name, e-mail, location — is collected when you share a recipe or disaster. E-mails are for my benefit only, and are never published or included in mailing lists. Your name and location will be published with the recipe or disaster; be as vague as you want!

Two black cats looking at each other. One sitting on the floor, the other lying on a chest. There is a pine cone wreath on the green wall behind the chest.