August Monthly Roundup at Bengali Cuisine

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August has been pretty awesome here at BengaliCuisine. We had 7 new posts, loads of traffic improvement and corresponding comments. Here’s a summary of activities last month at the blog.

5 Authentic Bengali recipe

1. Patishapta – The most popular Pitha (Pithe) prepared during Makar Sankranti (Sankranthi)
2. Mishti Doi – A very popular dessert, yet rarely prepared at home
3. Bhat Dal and Bhaja – A no frills carb rich bong meal
4. Chanchra – One of the very few bong delicacies untouched by foreign culinary influence
5. Rasogollar Payesh – Buy Rasogolla and prepare pudding (the post also gives out a couple of links on how to make rasgulla)

Festival – For the first time, Sudeshna celebrated Ganesh Chaturthi. Here’s how a  Bengali celebrated Ganesh Chaturthi . Recipe for Narkel Nadu is still awaited though. [Update: 3 days later, Sudeshna posted how to make Narkel Nadu]

Top 7 Bengali Recipe Blogs – Bookmark the list of 7 most popular blogs on Bengali recipes. To give a personal touch, we’ve kept out links of Sulekha and other community food websites whose focus is on collaborative food community building. We have also kept out Sutapa’s site (it being way ahead of any other website on Bengali food) and Cook like a Bong (for obvious reasons you see J).

Events participated

The recipes here also participated in some food events. Here’s the quick list:

1. Mishti Doi to Linda’s event on Got Milk?
2. Chanchra to Indrani’s event on Spotlight:Fish and Haalo’s Weekend Herb Blogging (originally started by Kalyn)
3. Rasogollar Payesh to FIL: Milk hosted by Sanghi of Sanghi’s Food Delights

August Traffic Report

August witnessed 15000 + Pageviews, i.e.  almost 4 times that of July. Now, this HUGE difference is partly because WordPress pagestats plugin was installed only in July 10 and the site was down for a couple of days due to hosting issues. But mainly, the increase in traffic is due to return of the original readership of bengalicuisine. Now let me explain this.

Sudeshna’s earlier blog was fairly popular till January 2009. But she broke her hand in Feb and that’s when the post frequency reduced dramatically. Sudeshna still managed a couple of posts per month, but it was nowhere close to her earlier average of 8 recipes a month. Now most readers who came there saw only a couple of posts in ONE Month! Naturally, they kind of almost forgot about the blog.

As posts became regular in the second version of bengalicuisine and Sudeshna started commenting on several blogs, original readers returned. In fact, one of our earlier regular readers Tulip, commented – I had visited your blog long time back, i guess the blog design was different then. Suddenly i got this link from my bookmark…and visiting again !! Thankfully.

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