Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Opensource.cooking: A simple, bloat-free cooking site

opensource.cooking

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 169 posts

Re: Opensource.cooking: A simple, bloat-free cooking site

#151

Post by aimor »

samdafi wrote: post #73
aimor wrote: post #62

In general I've given up on recipe aggregate sites. I have to be half-familiar with the dish just to fix all the things wrong with the recipes I find. In my opinion, divorcing the recipe from the curator is a huge mistake and no amount of user reviews overcomes this. What I really want to see are the recipes that some specific person actually makes in their daily life. Not icons who publish more recipes under their n…

Shameless plug but I tried to do that at https://www.sammakesfood.com . I made videos for the recipes too, but you do not have to watch those. It was a hobby project (not monetized) so no garbage. If somebody did this with maybe 30-75 mainstays and added search, is that kinda what you’re looking for? I stopped because I wasn’t sure if it would help anybody. My family enjoyed the videos during the pandemic as an alter…

Actually I enjoyed the videos I watched. I'd say your site is spot on: one person's collection of recipes they like to make.

My suggestion is to add a concise index. I didn't like browsing the paginated images.

Unrelated to your site, what I find most difficult with my own collection is resisting the urge to add new recipes. I want to be able to pick any recipe from my box and know that I think it's absolutely delicious. Of course everyone has different goals, that's part of the charm of personal collections.

Re: Opensource.cooking: A simple, bloat-free cooking site

#153

Post by berkes »

slow_donkey wrote: post #31
neaden wrote: post #8

So as someone who cooks a lot, and gets frustrated by long blog like posts that lots of recipes have this day, this website is probably even less useful for me. The tagging system isn't being used correctly, Ham Sandwich is tagged with Banana for some reason. Speaking of Ham sandwich some of the recipes are just way too simple, this just tells me how to assemble a sandwich which I don't think anyone really needs. Tho…

I'm building a search engine for this exact issue - there's 10000 recipes for every dish but they have to be contextualized: Do I want mac and cheese in the next 30 minutes or am I serving this for Thanksgiving? Those are 2 different experiences and recipes. Even the base issue of at least ranking recipe blogs by quality isn't solved by other aggregators such as Google / Yummly which are more of a recipe dump. If you…

My unsolicited advice: try to split up basics, common-recipes and specialties.

Basics are "how to bind soup", "choosing and cooking pasta", or "frying onions". Common recipes are then "bound vegetable soup" or "maccharoni with tomatosause (and fried onions)". Specialities would be those recipes you try for christmas, or when the in-laws come over next month.

It's highly frustrating to find a recipe that says "bind the soup with starch" without going into how to do this (or even worse: what ingredients this needs!). But for someone more experienced, it is highly frustrating to have to read through five lines explaining how to fry the onions.

As with most education, cooking is layered: you build on top of existing knowledge, without repeating it each and every time. I presume this is partly a classification issue and organisation challenge. You don't want "how to bind soup without milk or eggs" to turn up when someone is searching "vegan tomato-soup". The web has hyperlinks, which would probably be a very good way to organize recipes.

Re: Opensource.cooking: A simple, bloat-free cooking site

#156

Post by roel_v »

duxup wrote: post #46
neaden wrote: post #8

So as someone who cooks a lot, and gets frustrated by long blog like posts that lots of recipes have this day, this website is probably even less useful for me. The tagging system isn't being used correctly, Ham Sandwich is tagged with Banana for some reason. Speaking of Ham sandwich some of the recipes are just way too simple, this just tells me how to assemble a sandwich which I don't think anyone really needs. Tho…

I just started moving my recipes all to ... github. I find it easier to manage a bunch of markdown files than anything else. Also rewriting them lets me list ingredients as groups as far as what goes together in a bowl or whatever ...the laundry list of ingredients so many sites list drives me crazy. Outside of America's Test Kitchen... I've never found a blog's exposition on why they did what they did helpful. More…

I have a system based on Markdown-formatted (along with some custom markup for metadata) recipes on Dropbox, and some Python code that generates a formatted (as in, nice looking, like a proper cookbook) PDF cookbook. I then print the cookbook, make my notes in it, and once it gets too greasy/scribbled on, I consolidate the notes into the Markdown files and re-print. Every time I add a new recipe to my regular 'rotation', I add it to this cookbook (along with some tweaks for my ingredient availability and equipment), to not let it become just a random stack of disjoint recipes. This way I grow a proper 'family cookbook' that I hope I can pass on to my kids when they move out. It's also somewhat integrated with a broader meal-planning system, think GTD for keeping yourself fed.

I think the main problem with 'recipe websites' is that people don't want 'recipe websites'. They want 'cookbook websites', i.e. some editorial oversight over recipe quality, some standardization in units, style of directions, have a picture with each recipe, etc. What am I going to do with 100k crappy half-asses notes on everything someone somewhere ever threw together in a kitchen somewhere? I'd much rather have 2000 quality recipes that I know I can rely on.

Re: Opensource.cooking: A simple, bloat-free cooking site

#157

Post by marksbrown »

oakesm9 wrote: post #147
patrickk wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I blame google more than anything. Unfortunately, stuffing the content to hit minimum word counts is what ranks in google, and google obviously has a monopoly on search. Without this annoying blah blah, these websites would never rank and it wouldn’t be worth the authors time to make a recipe website. Maybe google should make a blog post on a “recipes” algo update that punishes filler content (of course they will nev…

BBC Good Food is actually a commercial company rather than being publicly funded. It comes from the commercial arm of the BBC (BBC Worldwide). BBC Food was the publicly funded website, but I think that was shut down a few years ago.

You mean this website has been shutdown? https://www.bbc.co.uk/food

Re: Opensource.cooking: A simple, bloat-free cooking site

#158

Post by acomjean »

robotpony wrote: post #50
HaloZero wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Platejoy sounded like what I want but they don't even list the price of their service on their site which seems sketch.

The price isn't even that bad, but it produces so much more packaging waste than cooking from scratch. We enjoyed the recipes, the price was good enough, but our recycling load doubled or more.

I think you may have this mistaken for another meal kit company.

Platejoy just gives recipes. You buy your own groceries(or at least that’s how we use it)

It’s mainly about meal planning.

Re: Opensource.cooking: A simple, bloat-free cooking site

#159

Post by samdafi »

aimor wrote: post #151
samdafi wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shameless plug but I tried to do that at https://www.sammakesfood.com . I made videos for the recipes too, but you do not have to watch those. It was a hobby project (not monetized) so no garbage. If somebody did this with maybe 30-75 mainstays and added search, is that kinda what you’re looking for? I stopped because I wasn’t sure if it would help anybody. My family enjoyed the videos during the pandemic as an alter…

Actually I enjoyed the videos I watched. I'd say your site is spot on: one person's collection of recipes they like to make. My suggestion is to add a concise index. I didn't like browsing the paginated images. Unrelated to your site, what I find most difficult with my own collection is resisting the urge to add new recipes. I want to be able to pick any recipe from my box and know that I think it's absolutely delici…

Thanks for the feedback! When I get back to the project I’ll look into an index. That “feels” better than search to me, for a collection < 100 recipes.

Re: Opensource.cooking: A simple, bloat-free cooking site

#160

Post by samdafi »

owyn wrote: post #120
samdafi wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shameless plug but I tried to do that at https://www.sammakesfood.com . I made videos for the recipes too, but you do not have to watch those. It was a hobby project (not monetized) so no garbage. If somebody did this with maybe 30-75 mainstays and added search, is that kinda what you’re looking for? I stopped because I wasn’t sure if it would help anybody. My family enjoyed the videos during the pandemic as an alter…

Watched one video, and the recipes are good and the video production values are really high, and yet the views are really low. I have no great advice on how to fix that, all the ingredients (ha) seem to be there. I guess having watched a bunch of other food videos it seems like the gimmicks come first and the basics come second? Like babish with the TV food reproduction and emmy with the vintage MRE's. In the great w…

This is basically the reason I stopped, I psychologically cared too much about attention, but was completely uninterested in learning how to game the system for views or market it, because in comes the garbage. It was a fault of my own imagination but still felt bad. Posting here has rekindled my love for the project itself though, so that makes me happy. Thanks for your kind words!
Post reply on HN