ha, I always have to navigate whimsical tales of Italian grandfathers etc to get to the actual recipe so this is a good idea
Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
221–230 of 360 posts
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#222> 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? I lived with a food blogger for six years and might be able to provide some more perspective for these types of comments (beyond just SEO). First, there's actuall…
I have yet to meet or read about a single person who has ever said "I really enjoy scrolling through twenty paragraphs of backstory and embedded auto-play videos and advertisements while I browse for recipes." So while I'm sure there exist bloggers who put care into these things, a tiny minority of people seem to find any value there. In fact it now seems that so many people are aggravated by this style that an app t…
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Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#223What 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…
Its annoying to me too. A lot of fluff. From what I remember, back around 2012, Google was facing a serious issue of content farms appearing in their results. These are sites that aggregate data and auto-generate articles about a myriad of topics. They were ruining search. So Google introduced a significant change to the way that they rank websites. They figured originality and authenticity was the key to identifying genuine sites. And how was this determined? Well, an article is written, it should contain a lot of text, more so and of better quality than an algorithm could write. And the content had to be original. If it was clear that the content was copy and pasted from somewhere else, then it was probably not original. So here we are, where a simple recipe has to tell the person's life story in order differentiate it from the junk of content farms. I am sure someone here remembers this Google change back then. It had a specific name. Everyone on the web who was concerned about SEO at the time was aware of it.
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#224> 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? I lived with a food blogger for six years and might be able to provide some more perspective for these types of comments (beyond just SEO). First, there's actuall…
I have yet to meet or read about a single person who has ever said "I really enjoy scrolling through twenty paragraphs of backstory and embedded auto-play videos and advertisements while I browse for recipes." So while I'm sure there exist bloggers who put care into these things, a tiny minority of people seem to find any value there. In fact it now seems that so many people are aggravated by this style that an app t…
Also the story is one thing but the painfully verbose explanation of each ingredient is ridiculous. I really don’t want or need an explanation of flour, sugar, salt, etc… That’s the content that really makes me annoyed at a blog recipe.
Like many others I have mostly abandoned blogs in favor of tried and true cookbooks.
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#225It can get frustrating skimming through text walls just to find the recipe on blogs/sites. Authors do it to get high ranking on Google. You can use OnlyRecipe.app to extract the recipe information. It works on almost all sites/blogs which follow a recipe standard when they post. You can also save it to your phone directly using the app. Scan recipe QR code using your phone camera and voila. Android: https://play.goog…
FYI, you are about to get eaten alive by foodies. https://www.eater.com/22307633/why-are-people-mad-at-recipea...
Wrong, "foodies" are about to get eaten alive by people sick of their shit. The only people complaining loudly about that were the people propagating the BS. I certainly don't see any complaints from users mentioned in that article.
If your business model relies on people scrolling past a bunch of filler to get to a short list of instructions, be prepared for people to get tired of it and solve the problem.
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#226Freaking nice! It feels sooo good to dump that SEO garbage into dev/null.
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#227The fact that this app is stealing content (that mostly makes money by ads) and monetizing it with ads is horrible. Right up the entitlement-alley of HN.
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#228For me, the context and reasoning behind why the recipe does what it does is much more important than the recipe itself; that makes such apps counterproductive.
I can imagine that "just the recipe" is useful for very novice cooks, but most of the time it's much better to learn the patterns and techniques than to follow the precise recipe. You'll be much more prepared that way when things don't go to plan, or when you're missing a few ingredients.
And this may be unpopular here, but I often enjoy the "life story" too: for me, many of the joys of cooking are in the connections made to other people. And if the recipe writer wants to build a connection with the cook because they poured so much effort into the recipe, I'm open to that -- and whatever it may bring to the actual cooking.
(Maybe I should make a "just the code" browser extension for Github that deletes README files ;) )
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bloggers who are putting care into their work typically write more for the people who follow them than for the randos who drop in from a Google search. What do people who subscribe to foodie Patreons care about? The people who have a list of bookmarked recipe blogs? What about people coming from Instagram posts who are drawn in by a beautiful photo, what are they hoping to see? Why are we establishing a framing that…
I don't think we are establishing a framing where the randos (folks like me) are of prime importance - merely establishing a framework where they exist. The WaPo piece speaks against recipe aggregators who simply strip the recipe down to ingredients and algorithm. i.e. I am fairly comfortable with recipe websites writing long-winded stories for their audience while alternative apps strip those down to ingredients and…
I agree with this. These app don't take anything from the experience of people who want to read these asinine stories -- it just helps the folks that are there for the ingredients.
If this gets shut down I would love if a general, open-source solution could be developed to spread the capability. A generic Python recipe parser that anyone could hook up to a front-end. If the apps proliferate at a high enough rate they can't all be shut down.
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#230It 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...
Still a lot of text to get up and go, even if the context can be helpful. Personally I am a fan of the Food Network recipes online, especially Alton Brown’s. Straight to the point with no fluff, and maybe a Good Eats segment if you’re lucky.
There's a Recipe Card button in the top right; doesn't get more compact than that. Though I think I'd struggle cooking an unfamiliar recipe using only the card, like you said, the context is helpful (and so are some photos, I might add).