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Show HN: Cinc – GitHub for recipes

cinc.kitchen

41–50 of 159 posts

Re: Show HN: Cinc – GitHub for recipes

#41
The idea for this has been around for a for a while. http://forkthecookbook.com/ goes back to 2012.

And its an interesting idea. Recipes can't be copyrighted and and recipes are generally derivative. The data is generally well structured, and fairly standardized (ingredients, equipment, instructions, photo, with optional fields for prep & cook time, servings, notes, difficulty, etc). But there are two primary issues:

1. Recipes don't really have a single inheritance. For example, I cook a lot & really enjoying cooking, but when I'm trying to make something new, I won't follow a recipe. I will read a bunch recipes, and try to understand the underlying ideas & steal the ones I think are interesting, then implement my own. So say I look up Tufo Matar find 3 recipes the make my own, if I want to contribute which recipe do I fork?

2. This may have been dealt with by the use of stars. when I was using forkthecookbook, there was no way of "bookmarking" recipes and the so users forked them, which lead to the results having huge number of identical forks. That being said it seems like the star system may resolve that. But currently it looks as though unmodified copies of the recipes still appear in the Forks list, which makes it harder to find benifical changes. Also it would be nice to have a history section with a message summarizing what changed.

All that said this does look nice.

Additionally, a nice feature to have would be to "import" a recipe, though since phrasing of a recipe is protected this gets a little bit legally complicated.

Re: Show HN: Cinc – GitHub for recipes

#43
post #41

The idea for this has been around for a for a while. http://forkthecookbook.com/ goes back to 2012. And its an interesting idea. Recipes can't be copyrighted and and recipes are generally derivative. The data is generally well structured, and fairly standardized (ingredients, equipment, instructions, photo, with optional fields for prep & cook time, servings, notes, difficulty, etc). But there are two primary issues:…

Thanks for the great feedback.

Yeah, the version history, etc will have a UI at some point. You're also right that needs to be some sort of indication for the diff between forks. We'll get there. People haven't been going crazy with forks yet (turns out if you post to hacker news, that changes :), so that will be worked on.

There is an importer already! It's not perfect, but it works with most recipe sites.

Thanks for pointing out forkthecookbook.com. I hadn't seen that, and it's definitely relevant.

Re: Show HN: Cinc – GitHub for recipes

#45

This looks promising and fairly well done, but it's lacking a few critical features IMO. The first obvious one is a way to Diff a recipe and it's Forks (unless I missed that). The harder and maybe more important one, is an issue that GitHub itself still hasn't figured out how to solve either. There should be a process for a fork of a recipe being able to explain why it is better than the original, and have the fork b…

> There should be a process for a fork of a recipe being able to explain why it is better than the original, and have the fork be able to be voted on so that the 'best' fork as voted by the most users becomes the canonical 'Chicken Noodle Soup' recipe, or at least display the forks on main recipe ranked by popularity.

A combination of popularity and the ability to choose to merge changes back into the original seems sufficient.

Re: Show HN: Cinc – GitHub for recipes

#46
I'm a huge fan of the fact this does weight conversions (cooking by weight is now my favourite, and I've been looking for a site that is just weights, so this looks like a win to me :-) ).

One note I'd make, though, is that US, UK and Australian cups are all different sizes. (and possibly others?)

And from the one recipe I saw it looks like you're using UK cups? But, possibly not as well... Either way, it might be worth calling that out, or allowing for cup-type specification similar to how you do for weights?

Somewhat related, some sites call out egg weights too, and that might be something to try and do here too? (Because, if nothing else, egg weights are often written on the carton which acts as a guide; even if people don't actually weigh them.)

Another thought, again... Some kind of showcasing? A la Github's explore, or even "awesome" pages? I might be off, but to me discovery is really important for recipes and I love browsing "cookies" or "desserts in a hurry" or similar; and pages akin to that with community curation could be nice?

Hmm, another random idea... Some kind of more granular forking to facilitate things like "do you have a stand mixer?" and that kind of distinction? (Coupled with "equipment switches" maybe?) In the past I've done recipes that required something I didn't have, and I've had to tweak fairly aggressively to make it work, but when/if it did work, maybe adding that feedback into the recipe would be valuable? e.g. user ticks "don't have a dehydrator", and recipe tweaks to "use your oven and set it low", etc.

Anyway... It looks awesome! Keep doing what you're doing, and I'll use it :-) Just some random thoughts that came to mind :-)

Re: Show HN: Cinc – GitHub for recipes

#47
post #8

neat idea! A weird piece of feedback: Something about the UI gives me a substantial feeling of loneliness.

I don't think it's loneliness -- I think it's a stark contrast to most of the other major recipe collection sites out there that are visually cluttered. I think that's a refreshing change for this type of site; You may want to consider a means of allowing users to curate and discuss recipes on sub-domains, some kind of API or some other means of splitting it up? A kind of crisp, clean social platform for food prep ..…

I don't seek more flashiness or colors. I actually appreciate the simplicity.

Thoughts on what the feeling could be rooted in:

I Think it would help with more than 3 recipes on the front page. That gives a feeling of emptiness that can be confused with loneliness.

I also think there could be a better choice of image cropping. One that does the trick of making them all one size, but that also lets me see the food and thus inspires me.

Re: Show HN: Cinc – GitHub for recipes

#48

I'm a huge fan of the fact this does weight conversions (cooking by weight is now my favourite, and I've been looking for a site that is just weights, so this looks like a win to me :-) ). One note I'd make, though, is that US, UK and Australian cups are all different sizes. (and possibly others?) And from the one recipe I saw it looks like you're using UK cups? But, possibly not as well... Either way, it might be wo…

Thanks! All useful thoughts.

Re: Show HN: Cinc – GitHub for recipes

#49

This looks promising and fairly well done, but it's lacking a few critical features IMO. The first obvious one is a way to Diff a recipe and it's Forks (unless I missed that). The harder and maybe more important one, is an issue that GitHub itself still hasn't figured out how to solve either. There should be a process for a fork of a recipe being able to explain why it is better than the original, and have the fork b…

> There should be a process for a fork of a recipe being able to explain why it is better than the original, and have the fork be able to be voted on so that the 'best' fork as voted by the most users becomes the canonical 'Chicken Noodle Soup' recipe, or at least display the forks on main recipe ranked by popularity. A combination of popularity and the ability to choose to merge changes back into the original seems…

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Re: Show HN: Cinc – GitHub for recipes

#50
post #8

neat idea! A weird piece of feedback: Something about the UI gives me a substantial feeling of loneliness.

Agreed. It looks very good, but there needs to be some play with how items flow on the page and a little more contrast.

Some of the white areas can be filled in with some nice text on how to use the product or ideas of what to do next?

This is mainly on the home/list pages. The page for the recipes looks pretty balanced

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