Be Fed Recipes

I haven't blogged about cookbook in a while although I have been updating the version history post. Anyway I've added enough new features that I thought it was worth a separate post. There are two things I wanted to mention: comments and feeds.

Firstly comments. If you are logged in you can now comment on any of the recipes. A comment includes a star rating and some text. The star ratings from multiple users will be combined to give a rating for the recipe as a whole. Please feel free to cook the recipes and then rate them.

Possibly more interesting is the fact that you can now choose to be fed new recipes. I've added an RSS feed that will notify you when new recipes are added to the site. Most modern web browsers will show the feed icon in the address bar but if you want to access the feed directly then it can be found here.

Bon Appétit!

cookbook: Version History

As with TagME I think the time has come to stop blogging about every little change/improvement I make to cookbook. The number of comments with each successive post has dropped to the point where the last post (announcing v0.2) got no posts at all -- I don't mind but I also don't want to bore you all.

So from now on I'll simply update this post to reflect the new versions. Of course if there are major changes or things I do want to shout about then they will get their own post. So...

v0.6 - 22/02/2009: We now keep a track of the edit history of each recipe by puttig the XML versions and the photos under SVN. This should allow us to look at old versions or roll back should things get messed up.

v0.5 - 19/02/2009: You can now keep up-to-date with new recipes by subscribing to the RSS feed. There have been quite a few other changes behind the scenes that should make page loading faster and lead to new features in the future.

v0.4 - 13/02/2009: You can now customize the ordering of homepage items and give them sensible names. Added a whole bunch of URL rewriting which means images can now be cached better. The major change though is a comment system.

v0.3 - 04/02/2009: The major updates since last time are the ability for each user to set tags separately on the recipes. This should allow for more helpful filtering (i.e. show me all recipes that I tagged with chips). More importantly you can now customise the home page. Basically once you have crafted a suitable filter over the database (I still need good UI support for this) you can add the result to your home page. This allows you to create something similar to the contents page in a traditional cookbook but tailored to your needs.

v0.2 - 01/02/2009: Lots of updates detailed in this blog posting.

v0.1 - 28/01/2009: The first release with style -- detailed in this blog post.

v0.0 - 25/01/2009: The first very basic release, which was discussed in this blog post.

cookbook v0.2: Now with Shopping Lists!

So just four days after I announced v0.1 of cookbook I'm back to blog about the changes and new features that you can now play with in v0.2. So in no particular order we have...

1. More sensible printing support: If you print any of the pages you will no longer get the common banner and footer on the printed page. I may do more work to change the layout etc. for the printed page so if you have any suggestions you know where the comment form is.
2. Favourites: You can now mark a recipe as a favourite (click the little heart below the recipe title), and can view a list of your favourite recipes.
3. Customise how many a recipe serves: You can now change how many people a recipe serves using a drop down list. This updates the ingredients list and the directions so you don't have to calculate the new amounts.
4. To help with the customizable serves feature I've added a new markup symbol to the recipe editor. Any amount that changes based on the number serving, but that isn't an ingredient, should be surrounded by ~. So for example, "divide the mixture int ~4~ equals amounts".
5. Shopping List: You can now add recipes to a shopping list which will combine all the ingredients into a single list (for shopping, obviously). This also makes use of the customisable serves feature so when you add the recipe to the shopping list it uses the amounts currently displayed.
6. Free text search: There is now a search field in the banner which you can use to search over the recipe titles and directions. It currently isn't too accurate due to a feature of the database. Words that appear in over 50% of the records don't appear in the index. So because there is only a small number of recipes searching for chicken returns no results as 4 out of the 7 recipes involve chicken. This feature will improve and become more useful as more recipes are added (hint, hint).
7. My Account: Currently the "My Account" page is just a place holder but it should soon allow you to update your personal details and customise your home page.
8. Lots of database changes that are not apparent yet but should make adding the remaining requested features easier -- so watch this space!
9. All the ways of filtering the recipes (tags, user, free text, and favourites) get displayed using the same page which allows for any combination of filters. This is implemented on the server but I haven't figured out the best way of doing the interface yet (you can play with the URL though and see what happens).
   
10. More layout changes, although many of the pages still have only a very basic layout.
    

Well, I think that is all the changes I have made. As usual let me know what you think and feel free to start adding your own recipes and making use of the site.

cookbook v0.1

WOW! I thought a few people may read my previous posting concerning storing (and finding) recipes, but I never expected so many comments -- I'm guessing it's not just me that has this problem. Thank you all for the helpful comments and feedback (both the comments left on the blog and other conversations I have had with some of you) they have been really helpful. Hopefully you will soon start to find the site useful rather than just something to play around with.

Since that first post I've done quite a bit of work on cookbook (does it need a better name?) the most obvious being the layout and style of the pages. So you don't have to click away from this post (yet) to have a look, here is the new navbar.


Nice yes? Anyway there have also been quite a few functional changes which I want to document (and here seems as good a place as any).

1. Tagging of ingredients has changed slightly. In the original version you simply encased each ingredient within two = symbols. You still do this but each ingredient can now have three attributes; amount, unit, and item. For example, lets assume we originally had =2 tablespoons olive oil= we would now write =2:tablespoon:olive oil=. Simple really, but this allows me to easily combine multiple mentions of the same ingredient which is rarely useful on a single recipe but will be needed when I support shopping lists combining the ingredient lists from multiple recipes. You don't need to specify all three sections, so =onion= is treated as 1 onion, =2:onion= is two onions or you could be greedy and have =2:large:onions=.
2. I've added user accounts. You can continue to browse through the recipes without creating an account but to add a new recipe you have to be logged in. I needed user accounts for building shopping lists (which will appear in a later version) but I decided I would also use them to restrict what each user can do. All logged in users can add new recipes but you can only edit or delete (another new feature) recipes which you have added. I decided this was the best way of making sure that recipes didn't get messed around with. Later I might add a feature where a user can gain edit permissions for other recipes if they have submitted a number of recipes which other users have rated highly, i.e. if your own recipes are considered good then you should be trusted to fix mistakes in other recipes.
3. As I mentioned before I've done quite a bit of work on the style and layout although there is still a lot to do, so any feedback would be appreciated -- I'm definitely not to be trusted with colour schemes!

I really do want more feedback and I've decided that the database design is stable enough that I'm going to support the site as it is. This means that I don't intend to make changes that would mean deleting all the data so it is safe to start adding recipes they won't disappear. I'll keep pushing regular code updates but I'll make sure they are stable as well so the whole site should stay usable but periodically will gain new features. So consider this v0.1 of cookbook.

Enjoy and please keep do leaving me comments letting me know what you think so far.

Storing (and Finding) Recipes

As you may have gathered by now, I like to cook. I've lost count of the number of recipe books and food magazines I own and this is beginning to be a problem. When I (or Bryony) randomly stumble across a nice sounding recipe it will get put on one side until I have the time to cook it. If it turns out well and we want to eat it again then the name of the recipe gets added to a list that Bryony maintains. We then use this list to help us to decide when we are stuck for what to eat. This works to a point, however, the list is getting long. While a long list gives us choice it also means a greater (on average) time between each successive cooking of a meal. As the time since I last used a recipe gets greater the chance of me finding the recipe again gets smaller. Eventually I have a recipe name without a recipe and only a few days to sort through the recipe books would fix the problem. I've already shared some of my favourite recipes with you, my faithful readers, a) because I think you will enjoy them and b) so I can find them again later, but I don't think that flooding this blog with recipes is the best solution.

Being a software engineer the obvious solution to this problem is to use the computer. I've been pondering the problem on and off for a while and have made a start on a webapp, which for want of a better name I'm currently calling cookbook! The problem is that I'm not entirely sure how it should work, so I'm going to ask for your help.

Please have a play with the latest version of cookbook and let me know what you think. Obviously the style and layout (what style?) is currently a long way from perfect but what I'm interested in is what features I should add. There currently isn't a search facility as I'm not sure it needs one -- being able to browse a list of recipes or a list of tags (like labels on a blog) make moving between related recipes relatively easy. I guess one possible feature would be to be able to see all recipes which include a given ingredient, but I'm not sure how often (or when) that would be useful.

Feel free to try out all the features you can find -- the version you can access is running on a separate database to my version so you can't mess anything up (I'll probably set a script to reset the copy you can see to a sensible version once a day so that it doesn't end up in an unusable state if anything goes wrong). The one thing that isn't currently available is the ability to upload an image for the recipe but that should get added soon.

If you have any comments, suggestions, or ideas please leave me a comment.