A guide to the Journal's electronic food goodies

Thanks to the Internet, I quickly know when I have published a popular recipe. I get a lot of e-mail about it.

Some of that e-mail, though, is from people who want the recipe but can't find it on the Winston-Salem Journal's Web site, www.journalnow.com.

Most of the time, the recipe is there. People just don't know where to look.

So this column is an explanation of how food copy is stored on our Web site -- and how to get to it.

In the past few years, the Journal has made more and more content available on our site. In addition to all the articles in the paper, we have blogs, videos, databases and more.

All articles now saved

When the Journal's Web site was redesigned last spring, we changed our archive system so that all staff articles now remain on the site permanently. So anything we have published since last spring is there -- and it's free.

Even before then, we archived recipes from the Recipe Swap column online. So every Recipe Swap recipe since 2000 is online in one place, the Recipe Swap Database.

Other food copy is organized in several different ways. There's a general Food category within the Lifestyles section of the site. My columns are organized as a subsection of that.

So if you are looking for food articles, you can start by pulling down the Lifestyles menu on the journalnow.com home page. Hold a mouse -- without clicking -- over the Lifestyles heading near the top of the page until the menu drops down. Move the cursor over the word Food (again without clicking) and a new menu will appear on the right. That menu lists Michael Hastings and the Recipe Swap Database.

Different paths

At this point, you have three choices:

□ Clicking on Food will take you to the main food page, which contains all the food articles that have run in the paper. They are listed by their headlines and organized by date, starting with the most recent articles. Click on a headline and it will call up an article. Any video associated with an article will be adjacent to the article. To look just for a video, go to www.journalnow.com/video.

□ Clicking on Michael Hastings will produce a list of the columns that appear with my photo every week -- such as the column you are reading now. Other articles that carry my byline, such as the feature on Anna Lappé that appears on this page, are filed under Food.

□ Clicking on the Recipe Swap Database will get you to the all the recipes that have run in the Recipe Swap column.

Restaurant reviews by Laura Giovanelli are filed under Entertainment. Pull down the Entertainment menu on the home page and click on Dining to see the reviews.

The Dishing It Out and Veggin' Out food blogs can be accessed by selecting the Blogs category in the Community section. Users may also click on the Blogs icon that's underneath all the breaking-news summaries on the home page.

In many cases, you have more than one way to get to a recipe or article.

For example, say you want to find the recipe for Donna Upchurch's no-knead bread that was published Jan. 21.

One way to get it is to use the Search function on the home­ page of journalnow.com. Select the Site option of the Search function, then type in "no-knead bread" and click on Go.

Note that you will get more than one category of results. Also, you probably won't see any of the results without scrolling down. Scroll down past the Shopping Results to get to the News Search Results.

A search for "no-knead bread" turns up two News results: my Jan. 21 article and the Jan. 28 follow-up column. The results display the headlines, dates of publication and a paragraph or two. Click on the headline for the Jan. 21 article, and it will call up the article, which includes the recipe at the bottom.

Searches for "no knead bread" without a hyphen, "Upchurch bread" and "yeast bread" will yield slightly different results, but still turn up the Jan. 21 article.

You also can get to the article by entering the Food area of the Lifestyles section. To find the no-knead bread article this way, start at the home page of journalnow.com. Select Food from the Lifestyles menu as explained above to get to the main Food page.

Scroll down to the bottom and click on "Older articles." Each time you click on "Older articles," the computer calls up about two weeks' worth of headlines. So you may have to do this more than once until you get to the date and articles that you want.

This second way is more useful when you want to browse or search for several articles, or if you know the date but are unsure of what keywords to use in a search.

The first way, using the search function, works better for older articles -- such as the Jan.21 bread article. It also works well articles for which you don't know the publication date or when you're looking for something specific.

Of course, you may want to create bookmarks or favorites for certain places on the site that you visit often.

Here are links to various food content on journalnow.com:

□ General food articles: www. journalnow.com/food.

□ Recipe Swap Database: www.journalnow.com/swap.

□ Michael Hastings' columns: www.journalnow.com/hastings.

□ Dishing It Out blog: www.journalnow.com/dishingitout.

□ Veggin' Out blog: www.journalnow.com/vegginout.

□ Restaurant reviews: www.journalnow.com/dining.

■ Michael Hastings, the Journal's Food editor, can be contacted by phone at 727-7394, e-mail at mhastings@wsjournal.com, or mail at c/o Winston-Salem Journal, P.O. 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27102. His most recent columns can be read on our Web site at www.journalnow.com.