January Monthly RoundUp

Follow me on Twitter. Fan us on Facebook . Visit my Flickr photostream.

You can alsoSubscribe to BengaliCuisine by Email

9 new posts, traffic improvement, bloggers interview series, events initiation and community engagement (both here and at Facebook page) made January 2010 pretty exciting at Cook Like a Bong. New year, Republic Day, Makar Sankranti and Saraswati Puja marked the month.

Posts in January

1. Microwave Chocolate Honey Spiral Cookies – Enjoy the crunchy and colorful cookies as an appealing snack. This one was Sudeshna’s first wonderful baking experience (thanks to Indrani).
2. Dim Posto Sarse – Enjoy Eggs with Poppy Mustard paste and a memoir of Sudeshna’s trip to the Himalayas; Vaishno Devi to be precise.
3. Potpourri : The carnival of Bengali Cuisine – A biweekly series on several interesting aspects of Bengali food – influence of popular culture, bengali food in bengal, outside bengal, heritage and history and issues of the day.
4. Bengali Food Bloggers Interview: A series that plans to ‘bring out’ the personal side of your favourite Food Bloggers. Part 1 features Jayashree Mandal of Spice and Curry. Know her favourite food blogs, why she started cooking, what was her first dish and lots more.
5. Monthly Mingle Roundup Part 1: Meeta’s celebrated monthly event was hosted at CLB this time. Theme being Winter Fruits and Vegetables. Part1 talks to Bakes and Soups – savour 6 different soups, Ukranian Borscht, butternut squash and chestnut soup and some more
6. Monthly Mingle Roundup Part 2: Part 2 talks about Fruits, Sides and Others. Indulge in 4 winter fruit recipes, 13 mouth watering side dishes and 5 potpourri winter recipes from 9 countries.
7. How to People find this blog: 5 keyword goof ups – A funny take on how Google sometimes goofs up while sending traffic to CLB. Sample these – mishti doi food poisoning, how to color diya crafts, Which Beatles record started as egg and bacon etc.
8. Carnival of Salads – Celebrating a month of non-spicy, non-greasy yet tasty food. Rush in your entries by 14^th February. Also, check the rules.
9. Policies – There are sections on Disclaimer (follow the authors’ suggestions at your won risk), Picture policy (don’t borrow stuff from CLB without authors’ consent) and Privacy Policy (no misuse of your info with CLB).
10. About – The about page has now sections on Sudeshna and Kalyan. You can know more about why Sudeshna started the site in April ‘08 and why Kalyan joined her in July ‘09.

Events participated – Malar Gandhi’s Kitchen Disasters.

January Traffic Report

Cook Like a Bong crossed 100,000 pageviews this month (applause!). We’ve achieved this in first 6 months of bengalicuisine version 2.

Pageviews varied widely in January, with weekly stats standing at 5403, 6419, 5014, 4848 i.e a variation of almost 33%. However, the spike in second week can be attributed to Makar Sankranthi. Suddenly, loads of visitors landed at CLB looking for recipes like Pithe, Patishapta and (surprise!) how to make cake in pressure cooker.

This is evident from the spike during 13^th to 15^th January.

Some other facts

1. Most Popular keywords – Bengali cuisine, bengali recipes, chicken kasha, mishti doi, egg sandwich, Mughlai paratha and Shukto
2. Comments – 123, Facebook fans – 238, Feed subscribers – 100

Hope you liked this roundup. Any suggestions on what else should we include?

If you like this post, please consider linking to it or sharing it with others. I’ll love to hear your comments too.You can also Subscribe to BengaliCuisine by Email, or  Subscribe in a reader