December 2012

My Second Passion in Life – Cooking

Now I know this is an IT focused blog, but it is also my personal blog and I feel like cooking is big chunk of what I enjoy doing in my free time. Recently I’ve crafted a couple of my own recipes that I feel I’d like to share with everyone. I’ll admit some of the ingredients I found in other recipes but I did add additional things/adjusted measurements and in some cases combined two different recipes. The two I would like to share today include Matt’s Christmas Balls and Matt’s Bacon-Wrapped Jalapeño Poppers.

Lets start with my favorite and newest recipe!

Matt’s Bacon-Wrapped Jalapeño Poppers

Matt's Bacon-Wrapped Jalapeño Poppers
Matt’s Bacon-Wrapped Jalapeño Poppers

Ingredients

      • (8) 2-3″ Jalapeño’s
      • (1) bottle of Red Bone Alley Pineapple Ginger Teriyaki
      • (4) tablespoons of fresh chopped chives
      • (1) 8 oz. Philadelphia Cream Cheese – Softened
      • (1) 12 oz. package of center cut bacon
      • (16) Toothpicks
      • (2) plastic non-powered gloves

 Directions

      1. Warning: Wear gloves while handling jalapeño’s
      2. Wash outside of jalapeño’s
      3. Cut stem and slice jalapeño’s in half
      4. Cut out the seed and membrane from the jalapeño’s
      5. Be sure to wash all of the seeds off of the jalapeño’s
      6. Place in plastic bag and let marinate with the entire bottle of Red Bone Alley Pineapple Ginger Teriyaki, place in refrigerator.
        1. Note: How long you let it marinate is at your discretion, overnight would be ideal I just did an hour on my first attempt.
      7. Place softened cream cheese and 4 tablespoons of fresh chopped chives in small mixing bowl, mix until it looks like it is consistent throughout.
      8. Preheat oven to 375
      9. Warning: This gets messy
      10. Fill the marinated jalapeño’s with the cream cheese and chives mix, wrap with an entire slice of bacon, top with a little bit of the teriyaki sauce and place on baking pan
        1. Note: I used stone ware for my cooking so depending on your tray baking times will vary.
      11. Once all jalapeños are completed use remaining teriyaki sauce and top all of the poppers
      12. Bake for 25 minutes
      13. Insert toothpicks into each popper and consume while warm!

Matt’s Christmas Balls

Ingredients

  • (2) Green Onion Bunches
  • (3) packets of Carl Buddig Beef
  • (2) 8oz. Cream Cheese – softened
  • Garlic Powder – Guesstimation

Directions

  1. Chop the green onions into medium mixing bowl
  2. Slice beef into cubes, separate the bunches as you dump into bowl
  3. Add all Cream Cheese
  4. Begin to mix together, add your guesstimation of garlic salt (My guess is I use about 3-4 tablespoons)
  5. Once mixing is complete shape into two small balls and place next to each other, serve with your choice of crackers

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Backup Linux using PowerShell

As a follow up to Backups are Important! Here is How I do it! I decided I should let everyone know how I am handling remote backups on my blog. It’s not hard to see that I am obviously a Windows guy, I am also glad to admit that I personally prefer Linux Servers for my blog, it’s a smaller impact, and much much cheaper; although I have considered Azure more than once.

Weapon-overkill

So as I have listed on my last blog post I was bit in the rear on backups and decided to go for overkill. I already have a ton of storage at home so I figured there had to be a way for me to utilize that storage and have a remote backup that isn’t in my Dropbox and isn’t a manual process. So I began researching ways to interface with SFTP, I found out that WinSCP has .NET Assemblys available, and I’ll admit I am far from a programmer and didn’t want to try to hook into that using PowerShell. So I let it sit for a couple of weeks and by god an example of exactly what I wanted to do was posted, and all I had to do was minor tweaks.

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Sharing is Caring

I’ve been running websites for nearly a decade now and I’ve always been interested in what brings in actual consistent visitors. In my early web days I was doing things just for fun, then I jumped into providing services. Eventually I moved back to fun and running a gaming news website. I noticed that with gaming news what was so important was being the first to post a release and getting it out there.

Well I started blogging about my career just over a year ago and I have always had very minimal visitors, after all it’s a nitch market and I do not post very frequently. I always dedicated myself to useful information or at a bear minimum original content that was completely off topic of my blog. I would get a spike in visitors obviously because I share it on Twitter and Facebook.

Something very odd happened recently though, I began getting a bunch of comments on a post that was over a month old, the first thing I thought was well maybe I’ve gone up in Google search results, I checked Google Analytics and that wasn’t it but I definitely saw an increase.

I continued to dig deeper and found where the traffic was coming from, a site called WinSuperSite. I had never heard of them so I figured I’d take a look, I saw nothing in recent news mentioning my blog so I did a search on their site and found the article. It was basically the one that was receiving all of the hits and I thought sweet they shared my original content!

After reading through the article I saw no mention of me. So I searched on the page my blog, boom a comment that was just one off where someone was explaining a way to accomplish what the article’s purpose was using my method.

google_analytics

After the user posted this information I have consistently been receiving more than triple my average visitors when I am not posting new content. I let this go throughout the holidays and I am still seeing the same results. So I finally came to the conclusion that Sharing original content you find online is truly the best thing you can do if you are a reader. So I would like to thank woodyu388 for being a reader and even better sharing my blog!

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