Comment by x86mitch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by x86mitch | Hacker News Reader

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Some Background:

Within the last year, I started down the route of eating out less and being more conscientious of what I was cooking. Google searches are a pretty good resource for finding recipes with one caveat, you can't store the recipes. I would save my favorites to a folder in my browser, but eventually, that folder became 120+ recipes links and ver time consuming to filter through when I wanted to make something.

I built FeastGenius to solve the problem of finding and organizing all those recipes. With the site, you can do the following.

- Add your own recipes.

- "Clip" recipes from anywhere on the web.

- Find a recipe on the site you like? You can save it to your profile so you can easily find it later.

- Organize recipes into collections and share them with anyone.

- Search from 20,000+ recipes.

    - plus filter by calories or macros (if your an iifym nerd like me).

- Find the top trending recipes added to the site.

    - Since I'm on reddit way too much I thought it would be fun to use the same algorithm they do for 
      organizing trending posts.

I would love to hear the feedback from the hackernews community. I'll take the suggestions into consideration as I continue to build.

Some feedback - Clicked on a random soup recipe, it gave a photo, the ingredient list, but for the instructions it wanted me to go to some other site. This is inconvenient and it also carries a real rick of losing the recipe if the external link 404-s (see the LuckyPeach fiasco, for example).

I realize there might be some copyright issues, but for me, as a user, they don't exist when I copy recipes to my own private collection, so I would expect any online version of it to behave the same way. It needs to keep full versions of every recipe and an optional "source" link.

I'm not interested in calorie counting as a central feature, so the way the site functions right now is not dramatically better than just keeping a plain bookmark list.

EDIT - I can formalize my main gripe now.

Above, you describe the site as a way to _organize my recipes_, where in reality it's more of community _index_ of recipe _links_ with some diet-oriented extras. That's the main issue. It doesn't actually do well what you describe at the top, but it does well some other thing that's mentioned at the bottom.

This is a clever website! I like it. One thing that would be nice is letting members directly download some sort of collection / list- preferably with formatting- so that if your site ever goes poof everyone doesn't lose all their data.

That being said, I do like this idea, and will see if I can introduce my mom to the site in a bit.

How do you intend to keep this site alive long-term?

I appreciate the feedback. I'll add it to my list of things to do in the next version of updates. How would you like to get that information, in csv format or something else?

> How do you intend to keep this site alive long-term? Currently, the site is being hosted on Heroku so I can scale it as needed. I'll likely move it to AWS in the nearish future, but for now, Heroku is doing the trick. As far as longevity goes I do daily DB backups so in the case of an issue I can do a restore. If the site picks up in popularity I could also move to doing hourly backups.

Depending on how you're sourcing the recipes, a simple HTML-to-markdown conversion might work.

Here's one that I found but there are quite a few out there:

https://domchristie.github.io/turndown/

A quick look makes it seem like the website is mostly just a stripped down version of Yummly, what sets it apart?

Cool! Will check it out and see if it defeats my own system. Also great you started cooking yourself. It is a great way to relax and be creative. Hard work pays off afterwards:) Ill write down my way of working, hopefully it inspires you.

My current system is: when i have found and tested a good recipe, i copy/paste it into an email and email to myself, with a headline prefixed with “recipe”, for example “recipe: soto ayam”. Copy pasting recipes is important, as websites blog posts disappear quite often.

Email is always with me, gmail has a very good search engine. Content is free form.

Usually i can just copy/paste (missing) ingredients into the google keep list i share, for groceries, with my better half.

Additionally i can share recipes with her by mailing them, although sharing links would be more convenient.

Will try it out later this week when i probably come up with a never before tried recipe.

The website looks great, love the design and categories.

> "Clip" recipes from anywhere on the web.

I always wondered if recipes would be, like most content, copyrighted. Have you looked into this?

Also, did you try using pen and paper? This sounds silly but when I am fasting, I am get cranky. Writing it down helped me stay focused and not give my self yet another excuse to break the fast.

Edit: Formatting.

you are absolutely correct, the instructions for a recipe can be copyrighted. If you use the app you'll notice that when a recipe is clipped, in order to see the instructions you will get directed to the original recipe. I want to do right by creators and make sure they get the full credit deserved. What the app is concerned with is the ingredients(which is not copyrighted). I can use that for calculating the nutritional content.

Is there a library you use for the clipping, or do you have to write a custom piece of code for each site you can clip from?

Thanks for building this. Funny enough I had a very similar idea last night :) Currently just store recipes in my notes app but its less than ideal

Adding recipes into my notebook was the origin of this site. I would write out the ingredients and then look up the nutrition content for each one. So the purpose of feastgenius is to automate that :)

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