Happy New Year! Oink! Oink! It’s time for Seollal, the Lunar New Year, and did I mention that I love this country? Example: I’m walking down the street from home to catch the bus to work. I pass a Seollal party next to a building. I assume it’s some type of office party. But I could smell wonderful pork grilling. When I passed them, they called out to me, motioning for me to come and join them. Free meat? I’m there, dude! I love this about Korea. Just walk down the street, and you’re invited to a party. The only problem was that the guy in the black jacket insisted that I drink soju with him. Remembering that drinking before going to teach children is not a good idea, I politely declined. He insisted and poured a wee dram of soju into a paper cup for me. Fortunately, the ajumma to my left told them to pour some plum juice in there too. I was able to toast without really drinking any soju since there were minute amounts diluted in the plum juice, and I only took little baby sips. Damn, that was some good meat. BIG ANNOUNCEMENT Since it’s the new year, and I have been doing these sites for three years on, I think it’s time for another major overhaul. I’ve prided myself on being one of the last people to actually program my blog from scratch without any help from Blogger. The Food Journal is done on Blogger, which leads to what I’m planning to do. I had been planning to create yet a third blog, creating a separate video blog from the personal blog the same way I created the Food Journal from the personal blog. I went in to Blogger to make the new one, since the NEW Blogger had all these features. Yet I ran into three problems:

• New Blogger doesn’t support FTP blogs. In other words, I have to host my blog on Blogspot to use it.
• Blogspot only limits free accounts to 300 MB– there goes loading a lot of pictures
• No Flash ActiveX support–THE BIGGIE–Since Microsoft lost some case about something or other, Flash doesn’t work easily on Internet Explorer. It requires some extra Javascript files (my solution) be loaded in the same folders. Blogspot won’t allow me to do that.

So I went hunting for other blogging platforms. I’ve honestly grown tired of programming blogs using my MacGyver chewing gum and toothpick jury rigging. I experimented with Word Press, and I LOVE IT!! It lets me control much of my blog and still do my own programming. It works off my own database, so posting and changing the blogs will be faster. (Blogger actually uploads separate files for each entry, making a big blog too unwieldy). It’s lean, mean, and has tons of features I can add. Nonetheless, it still involves a lot of tweaking to do what I want it to do. So I’ve been working all weekend, porting things between Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, and Word Press. So here’s what the new ZenKimchi will have:

• ZenKimchi.com – The main blog will become a news site that will post the latest entries from all the ZenKimchi blogs, as well as news and commentary from other blogs about Korea.
• ZenKimchi Korean Food Journal – I’m trying to port this big mammoth into Word Press. I hope it works. I’m going to do away with numbering the categories. I created that to deal with the fact that Blogger didn’t have categories. That issue is moot now.
• ZenKimchi Adventures – The good ole personal blog spruced up and neater with extra features (I’ll actually have a comments section, finally).
• ZenKimchi Video Hunt – Original videos from ZenKimchi, as well as other Korea related videos and media
• ZenKimchi Fun Store – The store is there. Buy something.
• Centralized Navigation – All the sites will be integrated together with tabs to navigate between them
• Improved Syndication – I’m running all the feeds through Feedburner and cleaning them up

Supposedly, the Food Journal can be imported into Word Press. The personal blog, though will have to be updated one entry at a time. I may just go ahead and unveil the new ZenKimchi before completing my updating of all the posts. Oh well, this gives me a chance to do some long needed spelling correction and uploading of photos that have never been up there. So it will be ZenKimchi Special Edition. I promise, though, Greedo will not shoot first.