I rarely post on HN, but I’m breaking my silence to say that this app is amazing and I can see it changing my life!
Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
271–280 of 360 posts
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
The irony of having an ad supported app to scrape recipes from ad supported websites. I'm not sure how I feel about this.
Technology companies selling a solution to a problem created by technology companies instead of coming together to fix the original problem. This is the world we live in.
The original problem is that people want to Google for recipes and not pay for them.
As a cook there are several solutions to this:
1) pay for a subscription from vendors who are in business to sell recipes, such as Cooks Illustrated
2) get recipes from companies that provide them as a complement because they sell something else, generally food-related products. For instance King Arthur Baking has good recipes, and many are available from food companies such as Tyson, Kraft, and Betty Crocker. Grocers also have many recipes. These sources aren't interested in spamming users with ads because the website is one big ad.
3) Buy cookbooks, they're not expensive.
But yeah as long as people want to crank search terms into Google and get "free" stuff, it's going to be ad-infested, and then other ad-seeking folks are going to run their shakedown operations just like the adblock extensions charge money to advertisers to let their ads through.
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#273The 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.
How is this any different than running an ad blocker or using Reader Mode in Safari, for example?
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#274It 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 tho…
Honestly it’s cute and clever, but not especially useful. I find it doesn’t really add anything and is clever fir it’s own sake.
I know tastes differ, but personally I think it’s terrible.
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#275It 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...
Great thing about those recipes its not only the layout, it has the volumes in grams.
How on Earth would you measure volume in grams?
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
I take it most of these recipes are hosted on low effort spam sites that stole the content in the first place. Are they also entitled to your righteous defense?
That's a very convenient assumption! "People who blog recipes are probably crappy anyway, so I'm morally clean" isn't a successful ethical system.
But I wasn’t sweeping up all recipe blogs, only those that are festooned with obnoxious ads. As to moral cleanliness (wow) it matters what use the recipe will be put to. If I just want to cook something, it’s fair use. If I am setting out to scrape massively and create my own spammy site, that’s not cool obviously. Please consider more angles here.
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#277Earlier 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.
That only covers backlinks and authority, it's just one piece of the puzzle. Ironically, that's called a "black-hat" way of obtaining backlinks and authority. The "white-hat" way is to go to legit websites and purchase links, literally pay them to link your website. This is a great example of what's considered "ethical" in SEO
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#278One trick you can do is just to Print the recipe, and you get all ads removed in a nice clean view. Almost all the recipe sites I use have a Print button somewhere on the page.
You could make an extension that literally calls Print on the page, and turn it into a PDF view from which you can save it. Your recipes could get stored locally or something, so you always have the website URL + clean recipe view stored.
That way you support the site, and you get your recipes without destroying your eyes.
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#279The 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.
They've been mass-spamming this on Reddit using multiple accounts and sockpuppeting to promote it too. They also promoted this in a Show-HN 5 days ago as well and it flopped: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29733982
Re: Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a very convenient assumption! "People who blog recipes are probably crappy anyway, so I'm morally clean" isn't a successful ethical system.
But I wasn’t sweeping up all recipe blogs, only those that are festooned with obnoxious ads. As to moral cleanliness (wow) it matters what use the recipe will be put to. If I just want to cook something, it’s fair use. If I am setting out to scrape massively and create my own spammy site, that’s not cool obviously. Please consider more angles here.
We're considering the angle of an app whose sole purpose is to capture the valuable IP of an author and remove their ability to monetize it.
It's not like they're paying them via some publisher program, just pure scraping and re-organizing.