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Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

cucumbertown.com

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Re: Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

#21

Post by swookiee »

Cherian wrote: post #2

We built this with a lot of feedback and help from the HN community. When Cucumbertown[1] launched we had a lot of HNers like Trey who used to keep recipes in a Dropbox folder and share. The first version of the editor was form based (a bit like a survey form) and inhibited copy/paste and free form cursor movements. We hacked around that version for sometime time till we hit the limits. A textfield could only do so m…

Impressive editor. What js framework(s) / js libraries did you use to build it?

Re: Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

#23

Post by mattbreeden »

Really nice looking editor. I don't cook, but if I was going to use this I would want an option to turn off automatic parsing of the ingredient list (did not check to see if you had that).

Also, if it's something you care about, you mis-spelled 'consistency' in your intro video as 'consistecny' on the 1st step of the recipe.

Re: Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

#24

Post by Cherian »

cos2pi wrote: post #22

This is really cool. I've already shown your site to my mom, who loves it. However, I can't seem to find a way to display the recipes that I "crave" - seems like this would be a good way to save tasty meals for later cooking.

A long requested feature – I hope we get time to build a mini bookmarking feature.

Re: Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

#25

Post by kolev »

Cherian wrote: post #4
Fastidious wrote: post #3

It would be nice if I could see the recipes without the need to sign on.

The homepage is the only one with a signup page. Everything else is accessible directly. e.g. http://raymondsfood.cucumbertown.com/

How do you get a subdomain like that?

Re: Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

#26

Post by Cherian »

kolev wrote: post #25
Cherian wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The homepage is the only one with a signup page. Everything else is accessible directly. e.g. http://raymondsfood.cucumbertown.com/

How do you get a subdomain like that?

When you cross a threshold of recipes, we assign the domain. Else the whole page looks very empty.

Re: Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

#27

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Cherian wrote: post #14
sugarpirate wrote: post #13

Hey, this looks really good! I'd like to make a suggestion for a cool feature: being able to clone someone else's recipe and put my own 'twist' on it. Almost like a git fork, if you want to use that analogy. You could also submit pull requests... you get the idea.

We had a feature – “create a variation”. Unfortunately the feature did not work well in the real world and we had to pull the plug. Literature cannot be forked the way we think about it in code. My variation of the potpie isn’t simply a fork of the ingredients and editing lines. It’s “likely” a different style altogether and in most cases required the new author to write something ground up. We tried fixing this but…

>My variation of the potpie isn’t simply a fork of the ingredients and editing lines. //

There's a few recipes I've used for which this is the case. Same for my mum - I've got magazine clipped recipes of hers that say something along the lines of "add cherries at the end, use sultanas instead of currants; I add a dash of brandy" or others that say "you need to cook for about 45 mins, not 30".

I think variations allow for a sort of evolution of a recipe towards your own personal preference.

But of course that doesn't take account of the actual implementation of such a feature being possible to do in a way that works well and fits with the aims of this site.

I'd be interested to know what sort of edge cases make it complex. Surely it's just a pre-filled version of a page, that one edits and optionally has a link saying "based on $recipe". I could see it getting abused for people wanting to link their recipes to popular ones (like youtube response vids that aren't really responses) but beyond that sort of thing it seems pretty basic. Were you trying to digest the multiple variations to offer options within a recipe or something?

Re: Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

#28

Post by sondr3 »

This is incredibly neat, I love it. I haven't used it extensively, but would there be any way to easily export things so you can import it to say AnyList for shopping? I normally would just use Paprika for this, however the recipes here looks gorgeous.

edit: Also, I forgot to mention but it's a bit annoying that there's an upper limit to password length.

Re: Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

#29

Post by sondr3 »

Cherian wrote: post #2

We built this with a lot of feedback and help from the HN community. When Cucumbertown[1] launched we had a lot of HNers like Trey who used to keep recipes in a Dropbox folder and share. The first version of the editor was form based (a bit like a survey form) and inhibited copy/paste and free form cursor movements. We hacked around that version for sometime time till we hit the limits. A textfield could only do so m…

Seconded for knowing a little more about the tech behind this.

Re: Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

#30

Post by bazzargh »

mattbreeden wrote: post #23

Really nice looking editor. I don't cook, but if I was going to use this I would want an option to turn off automatic parsing of the ingredient list (did not check to see if you had that). Also, if it's something you care about, you mis-spelled 'consistency' in your intro video as 'consistecny' on the 1st step of the recipe.

Seconded. The parser is very odd; it turns 'a nice cream' into 'nice cream' but 'an ice cream' is left alone. Moving the sentence structure around doesn't scan right, eg

  Golden Rings 5
  Calling Birds 4
  French Hens 3
  Turtle Doves 2
  partridge in a pear tree
it's inconsistent, you have to retype things after correction to get something grammatical:

* '2 oz of butter' becomes 'butter 2 oz of'.

* '2 rashers of bacon' becomes 'rashers of bacon 2'.

it's wrong for some things, with apparently no workaround:

* 'five-spice powder' becomes 'spice powder five-'

* 'three cheese coleslaw' becomes 'cheese coleslaw three'

Apart from the last two - can't you just highlight the numbers without moving them?

Edited to add: looking at the way the recipes are presented on the site - with the quantities in a different column, rather than tagged on the end - makes me think that it would be clearer if it looked that way in the editor too, so you don't think of it as a sentence.

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