Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by littlecranky67 » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 4:24 PM UTC

Rygian wrote: post #18

2bitencryption wrote: post #11

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…

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 now).

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

#92

Post by infini8 » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 4:24 PM UTC

Love the standardised layout. Another step towards simplified digital consumption this year.

Reminds of Tandoor: https://github.com/TandoorRecipes/recipes

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

#93

Post by mvexel » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 4:26 PM UTC

As some other commenters have said -- often, the "print" function will give you a more concise / readable version. I keep a recipe folder with PDFs "printed" from recipe web sites.

It would be nice if this app would support printing. It does a great job reducing this recipe page to its essentials: https://onlyrecipe.app/?url=https://cookieandkate.com/best-v... but when I try to print, the preview shows a blank page (Safari on Mac).

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

#94

Post by seanw444 » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 4:26 PM UTC

hedgewitch wrote: post #59

gamerDude wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is true. Is there any harm in putting the recipe at the top and the story below?

Yes. I worked at a site that had an SEO-obsessed boss and basically the keywords, placement of keywords, formatting of the page, everything...all affected SEO. However, that all likely paled in comparison to him gaming the system by paying to host separate sites that linked back to his in an effort to boost legitimacy during the times when SEO was a make or break thing.

The more I read about SEO, the more dystopian it sounds.

"Please, I'll write whatever you want. Just list me!"

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

#95

Post by ROARosen » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 4:28 PM UTC

AwkwardPanda wrote: post #51

shaneprrlt wrote: post #22

Is this a real service, or just a portfolio project for your resume?

For now it's just a project. I learned Flutter and wanted to build something with it. If enough people like it, I will make this a full-fledged service. And focus on adding features like dark mode, server-sync, sign-in, account management, export/import of recipes, sharing screenshots of recipes like this one directly with your friends https://i.redd.it/kk1goqsswo981.png

Really nice! I wonder how you get the parsed recipe to load so fast, much faster than say outline.com (though they prob have some more server-side stuff going on)

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

#96

Post by mdaniel » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 4:29 PM UTC

JonathanBuchh wrote: post #30

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...

It actually seems to mix visual metaphors though, since "Butter and flour a loaf pan" and "Preheat oven" are temporally top-to-bottom, until it gets to the ingredients, when it switches to (depending on how one interprets it) temporally left-to-right or a dependency tree, but without any visual indication that change has happened

I would actually expect the whole process could be laid out in graphviz since all of those are dependencies of the ultimate outcome (heh, "enjoy"). I originally thought it may be a DAG, but I can recall a few recipes that explicitly have a looping step in them

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

#97

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 4:29 PM UTC

tiborsaas wrote: post #82

floatrock wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because "Recipes" are one of about a dozen categories for which google defines special Structure Data formats, which allows presumably-high-clickthrough results page features like the rich media carousel previews, etc. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure... If you want to know what categories of things will have especially horrendous (ie clickbait-optimized-to-hell) results, look at the other…

I don't usually search for recipes, but I got these just to test: "pizza pocket recipe" 2nd result is decent: https://foodnetwork.co.uk/recipes/pizza-pockets/ "lasagne recipe easy" 1st result is good: https://www.spendwithpennies.com/easy-homemade-lasagna/ "sushi recipe chicken" 1st result is to the point https://www.tegel.co.nz/recipes/teriyaki-chicken-sushi/ Note that I have adblocker so I don't know how many ads y…

The lasagne recipe page would be one I count as bad. There's a lot of useless text before the recipe. The other two result pages are good.

Interesting enough, the big name recipe sites: Allrecipes, food network, NYTimes, binging with babish etc. all are short and to the point. But for some reason the crappy recipe sites outperform them on Google.

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

#98

Post by AwkwardPanda » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 4:29 PM UTC

Oh shoot. I did not expect this huge a response. Any more load and my backend server is going to collapse.

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

#99

Post by SAI_Peregrinus » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 4:30 PM UTC

danychok wrote: post #41

Ben Awad developed a great little app which addresses this problem also. I believe he developed it with his mother - who is a the designer. https://www.mysaffronapp.com/

I've been using that app for a while. It's pretty nice.

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

#100

Post by js2 » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 4:30 PM UTC

The comments on recipe sites are often useful. Things like: pre-heat your mason jars before pouring in the caramelized sugar or they'll crack. You can find clarifications, or things people have substituted, or just how a recipe has failed for some folks.

There's a handful of recipe sites I tend to stick to. Smitten Kitchen, All Recipes, Serious Eats, NYT Cooking. I also have a few favorite cooking books: On Food and Cooking, Joy of Cooking, The Art of Simple Food. Then I have some speciality cooking books for desserts, ice creams, and soups.

My wife transcribes recipes we really like to 4" x 6" index cards. The recipe box is up to probably about 200-300 recipes we've collected over our 25 years together.

FWIW, on current iPadOS, Only Recipe isn't showing up in the Share menu for me.