- Submitted by Dahlia
(History and Major Milestones of SimpleIndianRecipes.com)
October 1st, 2017 marks the 10th anniversary of our website simpleindianrecipes.com. We have come a long way with lots of ups and downs. You, our visitors and followers have given us the encouragement to move forward. During this special moment, I would like to share our past memories with everyone. Here is the timeline of SimpleIndianRecipes.com
2007 (The Idea)
In May 2007, I accompanied my husband to USA leaving my job as an Associate Professor at an engineering college in India. With my infant daughter and relocation, it was difficult to continue my career. I was not comfortable staying at home either. After lot of thought, I decided to do some creative work from home. Being a computer graduate, I always wanted to create my own website. So I decided to start my own website and write about some topics that I was good at.
On searching the web, I found that Microsoft was providing domain and hosting solution for small websites. As a newbie to website, Microsoft's solution was attractive and I decided to use that. I started to write and document the recipes of the dishes which I was cooking daily. During those days, I used to call my mom and friends frequently for basic recipes. So I figured that documenting them will help me to use it in future. At the same time I started experimenting with the new fruits and vegetables that I found in US. It was thrilling to share about those with my dear ones. Thus come the idea of recipe website.
Next I had to come up with a suitable name for the website. I was looking for a name which exactly represent the contents. I always like to keep things simple and easy. The main content was going to be Indian recipes. Putting these ideas together, I identified the name Simple Indian Recipes. Fortunately, the domain name SimpleIndianRecipes.com was available and slowly my dream of owning a website started becoming a reality.
Version 1.0: October 01, 2007 (The Beginning)
This was the day SimpleIndianRecipes.com was publicly available for visitors. Everyday after cooking, I used to take photos of the dish I made and added the recipe to the website along with some pictures that I clicked with my small camera. No fancy camera, no professional photography, no culinary training or catchy writing skills but with just my own trial and error. The website had a brownish maroon color theme. It was hosted on Microsoft Office Live Small Business service which was available free of cost at that time.
I added few recipes to start with, which included Indian Style Pasta, Tuna Pasta, Herbal Pasta, Broccoli Bajji, Capsicum Fish, Mushroom Cutlet and Chicken Biryani. My first set of visitors were of course my family and friends. They instantly motivated me and appreciated me for the unique dishes that I had shared. I continued adding more and more recipes with different ingredients in the months that followed. I would also like to mention that some of my friends Eliza, Rani and Sabina not only encouraged my work but also volunteered to contribute to my website. Their recipes can also be found in the site.
Version 2.0: May 10, 2012 (First Migration)
After nearly 5 years Microsoft was planning to discontinue Microsoft Office Live Small Business service. We received a notification to migrate the website to other hosting providers within 6 months. By that time I had created around 600 pages in the website. There were no tools to do automatic migration form the Microsoft service. After some research along with my techy husband, we identified a robust and flexible Content management System (CMS) for our website. It is DotNetNuke (DNN). We also identified a hosting provider and started migrating the content from our old host to the new host manually.
It was 3 months of hard work to get the migration completed on time. To make things tougher, I was pregnant with my second baby at that time along with my Ph.D. work going on. Finally on May 10 of 2012 we redirected the domain to our new hosting provider. The website was live again with a new look and feel.
Around this time I had Inara, Raji Ramakrishnan and other more friends contributing recipes to my website. The number of visitors were increasing day by day. Everyday I used to receive number of comments and queries. I enjoyed spending hours together replying to comments and adding new content. I also joined the Google AdSense program. I loved every moment of my work which not only gave me job satisfaction but also gave me time flexibility to be with my family.
Version 3.0: September 19, 2014 (Responsive Theme Change)
By this time, I had relocated back to India with my kids. I was pursuing my PhD in Computer Science and Engineering along with managing my website. Around this time, we started noticing that the number of readers for simpleindianrecipes.com from mobile devices were gaining momentum. So we thought of making changes in the website to enhance the user experience in mobile devices. We changed the theme of our website with responsive design and an attractive orange color. This design gave flexibility to the website and provided excellent user experience in both small screen mobile devices and desktops.
Version 3.4: April 17, 2015 (Server Upgrade)
The website was growing steadily with number of readers increasing day by day. The shared hosting we were using was not sufficient to balance the load. So we moved to a higher capacity virtual private server. This upgrade gave the stability to the website and improved it’s performance.
Subsequently we also started being in touch with our viewers through our social media like Facebook, Google Plus etc. We also started a YouTube channel for more interactivess with our viewers.
Version 4.0: March 23, 2017 (Look & Feel Change)
There is a famous proverb 'Nothing is permanent except change'. Myself and my dear followers got tired of seeing the same old orange theme for long. So I decided to change the website’s theme color to a more pleasant one. This time I choose brown shades with white background. This theme allowed to add bigger images.
Version 4.1: August 24, 2017 (Secured with HTTPS)
Now we have implemented SSL/TLS security certificate to have HTTPS in the url keeping privacy of the readers in mind. With this security, any communication like comment or search done by our readers will be transmitted securely to our server.
Getting to what we are today hasn't been an easy one. Today I manage my website as my career, which is really great. I'm sure I will have more stories to share in the next milestone anniversary. This journey will continue.......