251–260 of 296 posts
Is there a way to choose non-USA type of meals? I mean, in South America, Spain and other parts of the world breakfast means coffee and cereal, or toast with jam, cookies, fruits or croissants. And it's a light meal. Lunch is a strong one course meal, "tea" is a meal (usually with no tea involved), and dinner is the usual.
Could use a bit more separation of ingredients, cream and sour cream should not share the same selection. Creams would great in many sauces and have a completely different effect than sour creams. Fish selections might want to expand the number of white fishes listed. Interestingly enough some recipes given have vegetables not listed as selectable, cucumbers and water melon are two I noticed; they were in same recipe…
Does this hold true if your registered? It becomes quite useless if one segment of the site overrides another.
1) A calendar, so you could plan out meals for more than one day 2) A way to enter your own meals, so that the generated meals could be planned around the ones you entered (ie. if I had X for breakfast and lunch, what should I make for dinner?)
So I started developing something remarkably similar about 4 years ago (in Django, too!). Wrote up a business plan with monetization, p&l, etc. I brought the plan and prototype to a few seed folks for early funding before I admittedly lost interest and moved onto something else. The hardest technical challenge I had was, knowing there would need to be a ton of recipes in the system to make it truly effective, I had t…
You're totally right about the pains with ingredients normalization - I've spent at least two months making scripts to scrape recipes, and it will only match the ingredients accurately about 80% of the time, leaving a lot of work in hand curating everything it scrapes. I ended up trying to promote users to enter recipes by offering a month free every time they entered 5 good recipes. I built up a decent recipe databa…
I saw it on HN a couple weeks ago and it's basically one big project to scrape and index food blog recipes. It doesn't include preparation instructions but it uses schema.org's recipe format, which includes ingredients and other useful things: http://schema.org/Recipe
Oh wow. Simply wow. I've wanted this without knowing I've wanted it. This probably sounds sad but the effort and potential anxiety required in trying to pick the right foods and what I might want to eat often means I just get lazy and eat out instead. A case where having an astounding number of options often leaves one wanting to pick none of the above. This is a great idea. Edit: Mobile website please!
I'm the same way with the food picking anxiety, except I'm also really stingy at the same time so I'll often be too lazy to eat anything at all. That was the main inspiration for starting on a diet generator - to make it easier for me to gain weight. Definitely going to work on a mobile version of the site soon!
By the sounds of it you have plenty of traffic as is, but I'd think /r/loseit and likely several other subreddits would be all over this. (I see you've been mentioned in 2 comments on /r/loseit)
This is pretty marvelous. I have always wanted to create something like this, but the details have always seemed daunting to me. I couldn't think of a way of merging recipes I liked with nutritional facts and then assembling building blocks for meal plans automatically without a ton of manual labor in data entry. Are these recipes crowdsourced? Have you just been taking copious nutritional notes for a while? If you f…
You're right that there's a lot of work before having even something basically functional - the first version of the site only had about 50 foods to pick from that I entered by hand, all very basic (e.g. ground beef, avocado), and it would throw them at you in a random combination. Then I found the USDA food database, but their formatting is a mess and I spent a couple weeks cleaning it up by hand. The recipes are al…
The idea didn't really seem that exciting to me, but the execution of this is very impressive indeed. I'm going to be using this to demonstrate what I mean by an effective user interface. The abstraction of complexity until the very moment its needed is masterful here. Its simple right up until you need it to be complicated. Hat is off.
Hah, thanks! I'm flattered. You're right that the idea isn't for everyone - it takes a special level of laziness to want to be told what to make for every meal.
I will give you all of my money if you include support for dietary restrictions. I have food allergies and can't consume milk.
You can uncheck milk from the Meal options menu - just click the "Meal options" button on the right side, and a bit down the page there's a big checklist of foods you can filter out of the meal plans.