RJG Updates + History lesson

Thought I'd repurpose an old 2011 update that I had sitting in draft. I have just painstakingly completed revamping every single entry in the RJG. I started on this project last year, and had to abandon it. A couple of months ago I rekindled it, and it's now complete (with a few tweaks still needed for the 2021 posts). Sadly I had to mark a lot of these restaurants closed. Many of the chains had to shed locations. Only a few have thrived since 2019.

I finally have a format I'm comfortable with and can move forward on. The blog has evolved many times over the years, and there have been a few times I thought about shuttering it, as I've lost a good majority of my audience. The pandemic was really depressing when it came to eating out, and the subsequent collateral damage that we're still dealing with. Finally the workers came back, only to find mass inflation is now here, making going out to eat an expensive hobby - much more so than prior.

If we look at the history of this blog, it originally was just a place for me to jot down some random thoughts, not even necessarily related to the food itself. I had no audience to speak of. Though in those days (2008), the Google search engine favored their own Blogger app, so if you did do a search for a restaurant or cuisine, your blog had a chance at a high placement. I suspect they ran afoul of government regulations (verticals/monopolies), and Google also likes the pay-to-play model of buying position. All of which doesn't make sense for a non-profit blog like this. 

Things changed dramatically when I got my first iPhone. It was in late 2008. I always referred to the company I worked for as "telecom company everyone has heard of", always cognizant of being anonymous. I can tell you all now that it was AT&T I was working for back then (2007-2016). In those days they had an exclusive arrangement with Apple, which allowed me a heavy discount on the device and the phone service. The primary iPhone app back then for restaurants was Urbanspoon. And that app also was blogger friendly, so you could link posts directly to your site. Over a short period time the RJG became the #1 blog for the Dallas-Fort Worth area. It was crazy. Readership went through the roof. Because of this, I altered the blog format to match the Urbanspoon app. Originally I had planned to bunch chain entries into one post. But the app was about the individual restaurant. Also if you moved posts forward, the link would break (this was as much Blogger's issue as it was US). When Urbanspoon was purchased by Zomato, I tried to make that hapless site work for my blog, but it just never got off the ground. I wanted my readership back, but it was hard to find a mechanism to do that with. I tried TripAdvisor, Facebook, and Google Reviews, but nothing really would stick. And now that we've moved back to Colorado (2018), our primary DFW audience didn't have much reason to read what I'm up to anyway. And we haven't really built much of a Colorado audience yet.

Essentially I've gone back to the original format, and Blogger long ago fixed moving posts forward. This way older reviews are still relevant via recent revisits. Chains are now bunched together again. The dates that you see on the bottom of each post are notable for a variety of reasons, but mostly to me - or represent the updated entry date.

As you may have noticed both Rude Dante and Mr. Music are also far more active than prior. Mostly because we're all older and have more free time lol.  So it looks like the RJG is having a renaissance. I'll have to keep trying to figure out how to boost readership though.

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The other update I'd like to give is that I'm now in a position to give some historical updates. Since the advent of this blog, I've always wanted to highlight great restaurant experiences that I had in the past. Many of these are since the blog started, but I just didn't have the time to get a post up. I will do these (mostly) on restaurants that are still open and have recent high quality reviews via Google or Yelp. This way I have comfort in knowing the restaurants are as good as we remember it, and provides a useful recommendation if you're traveling to that area (and good for us too, if we're traveling there). I won't do this for Colorado, since I can just revisit myself and add at that time. But for anywhere else, including DFW, I will follow this format. It will probably be random, but I have a record of every place I've ever been - and when. Just watch those "last visit" dates so you know it's of the historical record.