Tom Yam beansprout

I used lime leave, lemon grass, galangal and all that, but they were all dried and prepared - the secret is to soak them all in hot water, while you prepare the fresh veg and then mix everything together for a finale-fry. It's a really quick recipe - 15 minutes all together and I'll post it on the cookbook for sure...but that's not going to be today...or tomorrow, coz I got PROBLEMS.

I just registered my own web domain - ashy-macbean.com and moved to another host provider. I thought it was time. What happens now is I have to move all my files to the new host and set up a redirect instruction at the old address so anyone visiting there will automatically be sent to the new site. You might think it would be easier to just leave the old site as it is and have two, but what happens then is that search engine people at Google,  Yahoo, etc. go 'Oh, look! There's somebody trying to do sneaky stuff so that their pages will appear all over our search results for 'crazy vegetarian Scots food-mangler' ' and then they BAN you from their indexes for posting duplicate content.

So you have to set up a redirect. Usually that means inserting a wee file in the root location of your site and that's enough to redirect visitors from any page to the equivalent on the new site....but not enough if you're a skinflint publisher like me who did a minimal upgrade on a shitty free Topcities hosting package - just enough to get rid of the ad banners but not enough to do any webby-techy stuff with redirects and all that.

So, what's the answer? Well, it took a couple of hours trawling through the Internet to find out - and it's grim. All I can do is set up an individual redirect from EVERY page. There's six hundred of them to do. I started last night and wrote about 100 pages of new code. It's only a few lines and most of it can be cut and pasted, but the crucial bit - the address for the new page - has to be different for each page of course, and if there's a wee dot in the wrong place or a slash missing - the redirect doesny work.

I feel more brain-dead and look more bug-eyed than usual today after that. But I'll do some more tonight and by the weekend I'll be ready for the big switch and hopefully it should be seamless.

And then I'll post the recipe for Yum Yum Vegetable and the one for Kharcho (which also came out rather well) plus anything else I can come up with.

Now, where's the valerian...