The Coconut Girl is Whitney Morrill, an architect, writer, and mother of two. Her blog offers new mothers equal doses of understanding, humor and utility through her quirky creative offerings. Music videos about late night feedings, essays about thwarted work projects and wise insights from her children speak to the ups and downs of parenthood. A running meal ticker and suggestions for partners provide hands-on tools for helping families get through the joyous but tiring days.
I love this blog because it’s a helpful reminder for moms and the friends and family of all moms with new babies that they need our support. It’s also a charming, humorous look back for me at those tough days and nights you never forget, but that somehow fade with time.
My next-door-neighbor is about to have her third child — I will make sure that Coconut Girl knows about Whitney and her blog — and remember to still be a helper past the early weeks of a new baby next door.
For about a year now, I’ve been providing a community service — not to work off any convictions, just out of the goodness of my little blogger heart. Many of you are aware of my weekly appearance on WCAV CBS-19 where I’ve provided the extremely popular Blog of the Week segment.
Once I got over my shock that there WOULD NOT be a private, fully furnished trailer with my name on the door and that there WOULD NOT be a hair and makeup team, I settled into a weekly routine that went something like this:
Tuesday, 5pm – stop working, sprint upstairs and put on TV-worthy clothes. Slather on more makeup. Fret over hair. Add more powder. Change top again. 5:45pm, get in car, drive to station. 6:30pm, start paying attention to what’s going on behind the door at The Newsplex. 6:40ish – enter studio, take seat, and provide LIVE commentary on a featured local blog. 6:55pm, call home to see what they want for dinner. 7:15pm, pick up dinner. 8pm, arrive home, watch video clip of segment. Fret over hair. Start thinking about featured blogger for the next week.
I really loved every minute of it. I loved being recognized by people all over town. I loved that my far-flung family and friends could watch the video clips no matter where they are. I loved the chance to improve my live TV broadcast skills and to have the opportunity to get better with each week. But mainly, I loved that the segment gave a well-deserved focus on local bloggers, many of whom are friends or became friends through the Blog of the Week.
Past tense, eh?
Yes. I’m hanging up my Blog of the Week TV hat — I will provide one more week of Blog of the Week coverage and then the segment will live on with two very worthy replacements, Jason Hull of OpenSource Connections and Amy Eastlack of SuzySaid Cville. I want to thank everyone who was featured in this segment, who watched it on TV or online and who helped promote the segment via their blogs, Facebook and Twitter. It’s been a great ride.
I will miss the many friends I’ve made at The Newsplex; Dan Schutte, Sara Ross, Travis Koshko, Brantley Ussery, Jim Hanchett, Brad Ramsey, John Rogers, Mark Tenia, that guy that always opens the door for me, Cheryn Stone, Jennifer Black , Tim Free, Tom La and Liz Palka just to name a few (gosh, I hope I haven’t left anyone out). Beth Duffy was my friend even before the TV segment, and I enjoyed having the chance to see her every week.
I’m taking the step back from TV to get some time back to focus on My Gift of a Year and to better accommodate my full-time day job at Standing Partnership, which has added a lot of travel into my schedule for 2010. (Also? I’m running out of fabulous TV outfits and do not want to do any repeats).
Also? It’s time to let someone else sweat under the lights of live, weekly, local television. I’ve had my 15 minutes. Now if Oprah’s people call, that will be another story entirely.
And now, here’s some link love for all of the Blog of the Week’s I covered in 2009 and a few from 2010.
I asked Gillian to tell us a little bit about her blog:
“The blog came about as a way for me to keep track of my own projects. I’ve always loved writing and blogging offered a great outlet to get my writing willies out and chatter about my various projects. I had actually been writing it for a few months before I even told anyone about it. Originally I focused mostly on cooking but these days I also write about crafts and the renovation projects we are doing on our house. The best part is that, on top of allowing me to write what I love, it’s led to some great professional writing opportunities for me as well.
I have between 20 and 40 readers per day and try to post something at least three times a week, although I shoot for four or five. I’ve had some great feedback from readers. Several of them email me directly which has been fun, almost like having a modern day pen pal.
The next big projects around the house are creating a storage and work space for all the projects I’ve always got going and renovating the mudroom. I’ve got some Christmas recipes coming up including a cranberry stuffing and a type of gravy I learned to make when we lived in Ireland. I’m also getting ready to crack open my Christmas fruitcakes in a few weeks and have a whole series of winter crafts in the works. I’m working on a set of modern felt mini trees, a yarn ball wreath and an advent calendar.
As for how I do it all. Well, of course I don’t do it all, all the time. And I have a great family that tolerates all the crazy things I’ve always got going. I do like to keep busy and work best under pressure so I’m generally working on lots of things at once. I try to be organized and have places for everything (which doesn’t always work since we are in the middle of renovating) but as far as I can it helps to keep things going smoothly.”
Thanks again to Gillian for agreeing to be featured on BOTW and for being an inspiration for us all!
I want to be crystal clear about this — there is an online project called Encyclopedia Virginia. It is a comprehensive resource about the culture and heritage of Virginia. It is a project under the auspices of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.
This week’s Blog of the Week is the blog that accompanies the project. Got that? The blog is this: http://blog.encyclopediavirginia.org/ an entirely separate publication from the encyclopedia itself.
I’m fascinated by the project in and of itself, but what I wish to celebrate this week is the all-important blog that helps serve several critical purposes in support of the Encyclopedia Virginia project.
1. The blog helps to market the project — a regularly updated blog is the single, best way to enhance your Web site’s search engine optimization. If you have a Web presence at all, it serves you well to have a blog to share your story: search engines like blogs and without one, your audience may not find your content.
2. Transparency is a social media-era buzzword, but an appreciated and ever-rising way of doing business and serving one’s community. It’s sharing the good alongside the bad — and addressing the bad to make it right is the new, respected way of providing good customer service. The blog (any blog, really) allows the project managers to share the good feedback along with the negative, and to address the negative feedback in a public way, sometimes generating some thought provoking conversation.
3. Cross-promotion – and Brendan Wolfe illustrates this more fully below but in the case of any blog that accompanies a larger Web presence, it’s a way to link, link, link to other related news and information about your organization. See my post about repurposing content – this is a good example of that practice.
4. Building Community and yes, I intentionally left that C capitalized — this is the future, folks — we’ve all started talking about our “audiences” as communities and the new PR job will be a “Community Manager” starting now. Yes, this blog, and all the others I’ve featured on Blog of the Week have Communities and that is a group of people who share a common interest — even if that common interest is so narrow as to attract a very small number of people. As an example, I blogged once upon a time about a significant and rare medical issue we went through with my daughter. Once in a blue moon another parent searches online and we, those one in a million parents are brought together through a common experience and feel better for it and THAT, my friends, is why building community is important.
In summary, I want to applaud the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities for being a forward-thinking organization — and the people involved in the Encyclopedia Virginia project for “getting it” and realizing the value of their blog and keeping it going for the students, educators, history buffs and blog fans out there who they serve every day with their online presence. Way to go, VFH!
Excerpts from my e-mail interview with Brendan Wolfe, associate editor for the project:
HISTORY OF ENCYCLOPEDIA VIRGINIA
Encyclopedia Virginia is a multi-year project under the auspices of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. In 2001, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded VFH a $50,000 grant to study the feasibility of creating a comprehensive online resource focused on the culture and heritage of Virginia. From this planning process, VFH learned it was well suited to bring together the agencies, resources, content, and technology to make EV a reality. The Virginia General Assembly and organizations such as the Virginia Cultural Network, the Virginia Historical Society, and the Library of Virginia have endorsed the project, which is made possible in part by VFH’s amazing ability to foster collaboration among institutions and individuals.
In 2004-2005, VFH garnered $400,000 in seed money to support the planning and early implementation of the project through an appropriation from the Virginia General Assembly and a gift from a friend. Since that time, the General Assembly has increased its financial support for the project and, in 2007, the Dominion Foundation awarded a two-year $100,000 gift to bolster EV’s progress.
We have a staff of five, including a managing editor (Matthew Gibson), associate editor (Brendan Wolfe), assistant editor (Tori Talbot), programmer (Peter Hedlund), and media editor (Donna Lucey). We are also overseen by editorial and technical advisory boards.
We create the site by sections — so far, we’ve nearly completed all of literature, twentieth-century history, and the American Civil War. And we are beginning work on pre-colonial and colonial Virginia history, as well as folklife.
Transparency — The blog can be used to illuminate some of our processes. We use the blog to print any feedback we receive about the encyclopedia — both good and bad, and where appropriate, explain the thinking behind some of the decisions that we make. Here’s an example:
http://blog.encyclopediavirginia.org/2009/06/24/waiting-for-lee/
Cross-Promotion — It’s a means of reminding readers that we are plugged into other things going on at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and indeed the entire Virginia humanities community. We’ve done a lot of posts on the VFH radio show BackStory with the American History Guys.
We’ve also posted video from the VFH Folklife Showcase and a remembrance of Mike Seeger by VFH Folklife director Jon Lohman. Here are some examples:
Building Community — The blog can create a community of readers who can then become a community of encyclopedia users. Beyond that, though, the blog can be good as a community of ideas and discussion, both in terms of the encyclopedia, but also in terms of Virginia history and culture.
See the last link above for an example of that kind of discussion.
Anything we’ve run related to Sally Hemings has generated (relatively speaking, of course!) a firestorm for us.
VISITOR BASE FOR SITE/BLOG
EV is still in its infancy in terms of the amount of content we have up.
Most of our visitors will come from people using search engines to find text or images. (For instance, someone looking for information on Massive Resistance or Edgar Allan Poe are likely to stumble upon our
site.) Those “searchers” are already coming from all over the country and the world — a testament to how rich Virginia’s history and culture are.
We hope that a large part of our audience will eventually be students and educators. (To some extent, they already are. Our numbers drop off noticeably when the school year ends.) No resource quite like ours exists in Virginia, and we think that teachers, especially, will find EV really useful when preparing lessons on Virginia history. We’ve spent a lot of time talking to teachers and have some interesting ideas about how to tweak the site to make it more useful for them.
WHO THE BLOG ATTRACTS
The blog is eclectic, sometimes a little brainy, sometimes a little confrontational. We hope that it attracts anyone interested in Virginia history and culture — everyone who might want to use the encyclopedia and more.
My interview with Andrea Hubbell, author of Bella Eats, appears below:
When did you begin Bella Eats?
Bella Eats was born nearly one year ago – October 31, 2008. It began as a food diary – a way to hold myself accountable to my healthy lifestyle goals and to track my training for the Charlottesville Ten-Miler. I never intended for the blog to be public, but I didn’t realize that when I commented on other blogs people could link back to mine. Suddenly, I had readers, and found myself diving headfirst into a supportive but demanding community.
How has it evolved over time?
While I enjoyed the support of the food diary community and the wonderful emails I received from readers who were inspired by my training and eating habits, what I really discovered about myself in those first four months was a renewed passion for cooking, writing and most of all, photography. I am a bit of a perfectionist, and was putting a lot of pressure on myself to have beautiful photos, unique recipes and clever writing in each post; a difficult task when you have a full-time job and are posting daily. I made the decision last March to transition Bella Eats from a daily journal to a 2-ish times per week logging of specific recipes and stories, giving me more time to experiment in the kitchen and with my photography, while also working on my skills as a writer. It was a great move for me, and I’ve really enjoyed browsing through posts from the last year to see how each of those areas of the blog have improved.
What do you hope to achieve through the blog?
There are two food issues that I feel passionately about and would like to push more on the blog: daily cooking at home and using seasonal and locally-sourced ingredients. Home-cooking seems to be a luxury of the past as parents and children have become busier and convenience foods (drive-thrus and frozen dinners) have become more abundant. I try to provide my readers with healthy recipes that are manageable even for those who are working 40+ hour weeks as my husband and I do. By testing out recipes in my own kitchen and then posting them on Bella Eats, I feel like I am a filter for the countless recipes available in cookbooks, magazines and online that can sometimes be overwhelming for those with little kitchen experience.
I do enjoy a challenge, so will sometimes tackle a more difficult recipe on the weekend to share on the blog, but oftentimes will discover that even a recipe that appears at first to be very time-consuming is actually quite manageable. And there’s not much more satisfying than making your own pasta, or bagels, or layer cake and having family and friends fawn over your accomplishment.
I feel very lucky to live in Charlottesville, a community with its eyes wide open to local food issues. While I have a very broad reader base that has only recently started to include a significant number of C’ville residents (I was shy about sharing the blog for the first, oh, 8 months or so…) I’d really like to provide a stronger focus on eating locally and seasonally. I always try to give credit to the source of ingredients in my recipes, and have started a “Local” page with links to area food providers and businesses that support local food. While I realize that these Charlottesville-centered features may not be as helpful to my non-local readers, I hope that they will be inspired to learn more about their own local food communities.
What benefits have come from blogging?
I’ve learned so much since starting Bella Eats – about photography, writing, cooking and baking. I have no formal training in any of these areas and have certainly had my share of disasters over the last year, but have found that there is no better way to learn than to practice. The food blog community is strong and supportive and I’ve “met” some really amazing people through our blogs. People who are happy to answer questions about camera technology or the amount of tapioca you should use in a fruit pie filling. There is an amazing amount of knowledge out there to tap into, and I’m excited to be providing a fraction of it to my readers.
Who is reading your blog (any surprises?)?
I have a pretty broad readership, everybody from high school students who enjoy experimenting in their parents’ kitchens to busy moms and dads looking for simple healthy recipes to make for their families. My readers come from across the globe, and its fun to receive comments from people as far away as Australia. I am always excited when I receive a comment from another food blogger whom I admire greatly, or realize that I’ve been added to the list of recommended sites on a well-established blog. I love that friends and family are starting to consider me their go-to person when they have recipe questions or want a recommendation for a special dessert to make for a loved one’s birthday. I never imagined that Bella Eats would become so popular, so I’m honestly surprised each time I check my blog stats and see how many people check in on a daily basis…its thrilling!
Tell us about pie month and other “months” or series you establish on the blog – how does it work and what other examples are there?
Bella Eats Pie Month was an idea born after I made a last-minute decision to participate in C’ville Pie Fest, and then discovered that my pie repertoire was nearly non-existent. Pies are an area of baking that I really haven’t experimented much with, usually preferring cakes, breads and cookies. I find that I learn best when I tackle a specific type of recipe multiple times in a row – I’ve done the same (not on the blog) for rugelach, banana bread and eclairs in the past. The timing for Pie Month was perfect since November and December contain holidays that are pretty pie-centric, and I thought that my readers could benefit from my experimentation with some classic autumn pies. I’ve already shared the Italian Plum Pie that I had planned to enter in C’ville Pie Fest, and have a Chocolate Mousse Pie up next on the agenda. Tune in on Thursdays through the end of October (and maybe a week or two into November) for a new pie each week. I’m hoping to still share another recipe unrelated to pie each week as well, but so far pie-baking is taking up all of my time!
This summer I posted bi-weekly updates about my husband’s and my home vegetable garden, a series called Bella Terra that was well-received by my readers. I featured produce that was ripe in the garden at the time along with a recipe that showcased that fruit or vegetable. You can find them all on the Recipes page on Bella Eats. Next summer I’d like to continue Bella Terra but also throw in a weekly “At the Market” post showcasing produce that Charlottesville residents can find at the City Market that week, with recipes using that produce. I’ve also had the idea to do a series of “Better Than Delivery” posts, where I focus on recipes that are easy to make at home in the same amount or less time than it takes to pick up the phone and have less healthier food delivered to your door. I’ve done something similar in the past, and you can find those “Healthified Comfort Foods” on the Recipe page as well.
The Coconut Girl is Whitney Morrill, an architect, writer, and mother of two. Her blog offers new mothers equal doses of understanding, humor and utility through her quirky creative offerings. Music videos about late night feedings, essays about thwarted work projects and wise insights from her children speak to the ups and downs of parenthood. A running meal ticker and suggestions for partners provide hands-on tools for helping families get through the joyous but tiring days.
When did you begin Bella Eats?
