2018-08-04 Recipes

I recently asked @pinkprius: If there was a wiki where you could publish recipes, would you do it? @wion at one point mentioned he’d be interested; @tomasino has recipes on his gopher site – someday I think we need alternatives to the ad-ridden recipe sites we find online... But I only have two recipes on my blog, haha. So I wonder: where would I get others from?

Pink Prius created a etherpad for brainstorming. What would the ideal recipe website would look like and what features it would have? If you are interested to use a non-commercial recipe collection feel free to edit and expand.

etherpad

My own thoughts:

easy to contribute means a simple, time tested format: a picture of the result, a list of ingredients, some paragraphs of instructions, possibly more pictures of the preparation
focus on the simple benefits of a printed book and a simple wiki: no automatic scaling for different number of people; no automatic conversion from metric to imperial; think of a target audience of active editors no larger than a dozen people
we can build federation on top of wiki technology
make it easy to edit means plain text or a simple form (”add ingredient”, “add step”)
no ownership of recipes, all can be edited
prevent vandalism using no administrator roles as far as possible
peer review using wiki technology: list of recent changes, page history, reverting to older revisions
editable block lists (admins only)
very long term storage means using plain text
very simple markdown (paragraphs, bullet lists for ingredients, italic and bold emphasis, images)
simple CSS (”brutalist look and feel”), no fancy layout
no mandatory Javascript
proof of concept: can it be read via gopher, can it be used via lynx?
full text search is good enough: ingredients, allergenes, cuisine, and so on are part of the text
tags are part of the text; we need tagging so that we can produce pages with lists of recipes for certain cuisines
assume multilingual entries: have language tags
have pages explaining cooking jargon

And now there’s a prototype...

prototype

Here’s what I would add:

The “new page” wizard (clicking on the “New” link) should offer to upload a main image and up to three related images.
Better “wizards” for the most commong tasks that don’t involve editign a page.
Right now the upload limit is 2M, so perhaps we should allow more but process agressively?
A better search such that you could quickly search for “all desserts in english without eggs”.
Improved CSS. Help definitely needed!
Write more help pages, a style guide, something about the license (I’d prefer CC0, i.e. a dedication to the public domain).

Here’s how I would work on improving the prototype (coming from a software development background):

Create a list of “stories”: use cases for the site describing something we would like to do, like quickly search for “all desserts in english without eggs”
Sort this list of stories so that the stories at the top can be implemented immediately

Stories:

“I want to list all desserts in english without eggs”
“I want to skim all the soups in english with pumpkins in them”
“I want to replace this picture with another picture I have”
“I want to rename this recipe”
“I want to create a variant of this recipe”
“I want to save a link to this recipe on my user page”
“I want a random recipe”
“When I save a recipe, I want the system to tag it for all the allergenes it recognizes” (this requires a special page for known allergenes; it should be user editable, of course)
Tthe list of allergenes must know about synonyms, e.g. egg, eggs, yolk”
“the list must also know about hierarchies, e.g. milk → both dairy and lactose”
“When I look at a list of recipes, I want to see both the title and a very short description”
“I need a PDF of this recipe”
“I want to browse the category tree” e.g. Dessert → Brownies → Fudge Brownies (this simply requires a page for every tag so that we can tag them in turn)

#Cooking

Comments

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@switchingsocial suggested Cookbook (which is part of Wiki Books and it seems to be really close. It’s a wiki. It appears to have no ads. The user interface is crowded, unfortunately. But perhaps it would work? I was looking at Dessert → Brownies → Fudge Brownies. That’s pretty cool.

@switchingsocial

Cookbook

Fudge Brownies

– Alex Schroeder 2018-08-04 22:54 UTC