vegnews 2020 veggie awards nominee

Hey ya'll! Happy New Year! I hope things are off to a stellar start for you. If you have a second I would love if you would VOTE for hot for food for BEST VEGAN BLOG in the 2020 Veggie Awards here. By voting you'll be entered to win some amazing vegan prize packs that include trips and catered dinners! More on that excitement, momentarily.

You've noticed I updated the look and feel of hotforfoodblog.com and for gosh sakes, I hope you find it faster? That was the whole point of optimizing the site. But it certainly hasn't come without a slew of headaches. I've spent the first days back to work cleaning up a lot of things around here. And my work is still not done!

I started this blog in 2010 on WordPress and it was janky as hell. I had photos on it that were taken on a blackberry! A blackberry... do you even know what that is?! I also wasn't even vegan when I started blogging under the pseudonym hot for food. None of that is visible anymore, but when things started to evolve (and I finally got a smart phone) I was growing the @hotforfood IG account and decided to relaunch the blog in 2014. I designed it myself on squarespace. It was pretty easy and straight forward. Then I started YouTube in 2015 and quickly out grew the limitations of that website and started to get hip to the words SEO and metadata! So I thought moving it back to WordPress would be a smart move. And it was, but it's been a huge learning curve for me.

On top of getting hacked in 2019, I've now redesigned the site twice in about a year and a half and spent a shit ton of money getting technical help with all of it. It's ALL good and goes with the territory, but I can tell you the last thing I enjoy doing is sitting in front of the computer scrolling hundreds of posts for html errors and broken image links 🤦🏻‍♀️

Anyway, all this to give context to the fact that I was SHOCKED to see the blog was nominated in the 2020 Veggie Awards from VegNews magazine! I have a BEST VEGAN BLOG nomination and it's nice to be recognized amongst all the chaos I feel this blog has been going through in the back end. So I would love and appreciate your vote if you're a regular visitor to the site and while you're filling out the survey (which only takes about 2 minutes) you'll have your say on the best in vegan food products, snacks, beauty, fashion brands and more.

Thanks so much to VegNews for always supporting hot for food too. I've been mentioned in the magazine a few times now and you might recall the 2018 Veggie Awards where I won best cookbook... THANKS TO YOU GUYS!

If you didn't know I'll be off the YouTube channel for a while as I'm planning a new series for you that will come out sometime this year. This bit of info and more was announced in my last video of 2019, but keep your eyes on my instagram accounts @laurentoyota and @hotforfood for any updates and news in my life!