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Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

showcase.onlyrecipe.app

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Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#151
Slightly off topic, but a hack that i have found to read recipe websites on my phone is to use the "Print Recipe" link that most websites provide. It gets rid of most of the annoying ads, autoplaying videos and unzoomable text (or text tapping on which takes you to some random link because the page resized and you accidentally tapped on an ad).

The "Print Recipe" page usually contains just the recipe in a format which is easy to read without any clutter.

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#152

What is the reason that every single recipe site, without fail, follows this same horrible pattern? I.e. the twenty paragraph "When I was a child growing up in Atlanta..." followed by a crappy in-house video player followed by, finally, the actual recipe? My assumption is SEO? For some reason, Google must really like having tons of text on your page, and dislikes simple "here's the recipe"? etc? Second question - any…

Exactly. I've never been as frustrated with the modern web as I am when I try to find a recipe. It's the most infuriating experience. I'd pay money if I knew I could access a very large database of recipes, where I know I just get the recipe itself.

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#153
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The copyright around the recipe itself is a challenging issue [1], so a simple way of guaranteeing that the site is not scrapped and published elsewhere verbatim is to include also non-recipe material that falls more clearly under copyright law. [1] https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-protection-recipes/

Not sure about the US or the EU in general, but in Germany at least databases - even if they solely consist of trivial, non-copyrightable data - are still copyrighted. This law was put into place after a company in Germany just hired people to type of physical copies of Phonebooks and the yellowpages, and sold a "phonebook" on CD. A name+phonenumber pair isn't copyrightable, but the collection as a whole is (at least…

I think there are two separate things here:

* database rights, which are similar to but distinct from copyright; in particular they last for only 15 years;

* copyright in a particular collection of public-domain things.

Case C-304/07 Directmedia Publishing GmbH v Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, which was about an anthology of poems, seems to have involved both things. See if you can make sense of it because I'm not sure I can!

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#154
post #114
post #110

It is interesting that there is not yet a Wikipedia of recipes. It would be the perfect use case for a wiki. People would love to share their recipes variations and improve/fix existing one. There would be a standard layout, introduction paragraph would explain the history of a recipe and link to other similar recipes. That would be interesting to read. And there would be an endless number of recipes. For-profit site…

The edit wars would be horrible. Everyone has their own recipe for any given food item, plus endless variations.

Make it a namespaced wiki. Every user can only create and edit recipes in their own namespace, or the namespace of groups they’re a member of (like GitHub treats repos for example).

Then you could, as user, follow users you like. Each recipe would be in structured format, but could also have rich text introductions / explanations, if users wish to add such information.

You could even let users add custom styling to their own namespaces/subwikis, as tumblr, myspace, wordpress, youtube and reddit used to do / still do (with a way to turn this off as user, if you just want the plain content)

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#155
In the same vein, I made the Recipe Filter extension for browsers:

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...

FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recipe-filter...

Source code (there's Safari in there if you don't mind building it yourself): https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter

I was spurred into action by a comment here on HN back in 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15755378

It got demoed to the world during WWDC 2020, which was really neat: https://youtu.be/Kwh2y6VkzoA

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#156

It would be amazing if there was something that would convert recipes to the format used on Cooking For Engineers. It’s so intuitive and easy to read. I never want to look at steps to make a recipe again. Scroll to the bottom to see what I’m talking about: http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/108/Banana-Nut-Bre...

I use CookBook which scans websites, and OCRs cookbooks with good success! I have all my regular recipes on there now https://thecookbookapp.com/

Looks cool but did a very poor job of importing the first recipe I tried.

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#157
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...How do you follow the recipe? Or are we talking simple recipes where the steps are simple?

For me, at least, I typically don't follow the recipe. Very rarely am I looking for cooking instruction. I'm familiar enough with most typical cooking techniques that ingredient list and proportions, plus sometimes a quick glance at the steps, is all I need to get the job done. I'm usually modifying the ingredients on the fly as I cook the dish anyway. When I am looking for cooking instruction, I find my existing lib…

I wish there were some “intermediate” websites for cooking. There seems to be a missing middle, where I don’t know exactly to do, but know enough basics to only meed a little bit of direction.

Ie, not step by step, but more general. Let me improvise, but still guide me.

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#158
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI, you are about to get eaten alive by foodies. https://www.eater.com/22307633/why-are-people-mad-at-recipea...

They're full of shit, though. Crack open the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook and find a cookie recipe, then search for the same recipe name online. You're going to find 1000 word essays about Dear Meema's Secret Snickerdoodle recipe... followed by the same damn recipe as the BH&G cookbook.

This is an anecdote which clearly does not cover all cases. I think the presumption is that cooking sites are nothing but spam, but the fact that so many high-profile cooks complained about this perviously shows that this is not the case and that their livelihoods would be affected by apps like these.

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#159

What is the reason that every single recipe site, without fail, follows this same horrible pattern? I.e. the twenty paragraph "When I was a child growing up in Atlanta..." followed by a crappy in-house video player followed by, finally, the actual recipe? My assumption is SEO? For some reason, Google must really like having tons of text on your page, and dislikes simple "here's the recipe"? etc? Second question - any…

Ratings for recipes never make sense anyway because if one reads the reviews they're always of the sort, "I LOVE THIS RECIPE! I used buttermilk instead of Milk, doubled the sugar, used almond extract instead of vanilla. This recipe is AMAZING!"

Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the WP article: But it’s even more complex than that. The stories are personal. They’re cultural. They’re often told from the perspective of women, immigrants and people of color who have created and invested in a platform to share their stories. The recipe aggregator sites, bloggers note, basically tell the creators that their stories have no value. It’s the same message America has told immigrants and women fo…

I’ve got to be honest: those stories hold no value to me. That’s the truth. I don’t know why the WaPo wants those us who are like me to pretend otherwise.

Same. If you're only telling the story to fill time then write a blog post, keep it separate from the recipe.
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