Since April 4th I’ve taken a break from editing interviews and have been working on both VeganLinked.com and a new sister site soon to be released. I’m finally feel like VeganLinked.com is getting to a point where I can use it! So, I wanted to test out posting with this update.

The pictures are of a house in Asheville, NC I bought in May 2020 for a VeganLinked project doing videos with Dr. Garth Davis. I wanted a studio near him to do videos regularly. I fixed up the house to rent out so I could afford to do this. I put an accessary building on the property and turned it into a studio. Five videos in and Garth had to move back to Houston. So, I switched to doing interviews full throttle around the country. Sometimes I’ll take a break to work on the site hoping one day to have it right enough for the VeganLinked community to use as a tool.

The Posts section of the site is starting fresh with just four category options: Recipes, Science, Stories, and Miscellaneous. I think these categories are a great start and I’m excited to see this section grow from there.

I also started a forum on the site. I’m not exactly sure if people will want to interact there but if they do it’s ready for topics. I’m not exactly sure which forums and topics would be good there yet.

As far as navigating the site, joining, adding listings & events, etc… the user experience should be significantly better than ever now. The login experience should be cleaner and now directs users to their profile. I hope this will encourage them complete their profiles with a picture, banner, and their vegan story.

Stories in the blog will be an opportunity to share more elaborately with pictures, video, and offer a way for people to comment on your story. All types of stories may be shared here. And the stories you post here will link back to your profile where all your stories are archived. The same goes for anything you post here such as recipes, science, and misc..

Notifications seem to be working good now. So I’m a little more excited about actually using social features like “friends”, “follow”, and “messages”. I’m still testing thigs though. And I may have found better options for future upgrades if necessary. But this may be just all we need.

The default categories show on the listings now in searches, archive pages, and the homepage. I’ve been wanting to display at least that there for many years now. So I’m really happy to have that finally. I think that will draw people into the site more deeper and more intuitively.

I also added a much nicer navigation menu on mobile. It’s much more concise only showing a link for “listings & events” instead of having all five of those sections across the navigation. When you select Listings & Events you’re brought to Professionals with a search bar where you can change to the other sections. I had to get the filter to work on the search page before I could do that. So, that’s working good enough now to simplify things.

I am trying to get all I can done before I start working on the homepage. I really want to minimalize it strategically. Once I finish wrapping up all the other functionality and flow behind the homepage I’ll start working on the homepage. And maybe then I’ll be done enough to run with it.

It’s been over a month straight, long days, every day, working on this site and the new sister site. Soon I’ll have to get back to finishing editing and getting ready for the next tour of interviews for the channel. Manifesting this vision, one year at a time…