Show HN: Fork recipes on the "Github for food" | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Fork recipes on the "Github for food"

cucumbertown.com

28 pointsCherian23 comments

For the hacker in us, we’ve built a short-hand notation for writing recipes

I always wanted this as a cook & hacker. Not spend too much time writing a recipe from scratch. More importantly DRY.

For those of you that are confused as I was, they are referring to the site as the "Github for food", and are not managing their content using Github as I wrongly inferred from the title.

EDIT: title was changed to make this clear.

Sorry, if it’s confusing. What we meant is Cucumbertown allows recipes to be forked and changed upon.

No problem, I was just making sure people didn't misinterpret the title as I did. I think your new title is quite a bit more clear.

Great site & concept though. I'll be sure to bookmark it and look around later. I'm curious to see how you applied the forking (I like the pun) concept on recepes for people that aren't familiar with software version control systems.

You don’t see it since the post recipe is for the users under login.

But here’s a peep. http://d.pr/i/DB3L

When you try to write a recipe, we figure out if the recipe exists and suggests a “Write a variation”.

The variation is essentially a fork http://d.pr/i/fG09 that allows you to delete ingredients, change prep methods etc.

You can manually "fork" a recipe too.

I don't normally use recipe sites because they are so obnoxious. My team and I tried Cucumbertown based on the GitHub comparison and it was worked well. Check out the Chicken and Mushroom gratin we made here: http://www.cucumbertown.com/recipes/55365/chicken-mushroom-g...

Definitely make the Write a Variation more prominent. Also, on the main page you don't even mention that as a feature. To me, there's lots of recipe sites, and having the variation aspect is your differentiator, so shout it out! I'd encourage you to just rip off the Github fork ribbon, because after all, it is proven to work.

I assume you are working on design? Design will be really important. Having fun factor in the design combined with the social aspect of forking recipes could really do well, but you gots some work to do!

It’s a UX battle that we’r trying to conquer. We are just getting started!.

It also appears that this site supports the hRecipe Microformat:

http://microformats.org/wiki/hrecipe

That's pretty slick.

I had this exact same idea years ago. I think I had a better name too. What's the expression on HN? Was it, "Ideas don't matter, execution does"? :-)

Well done! (Only immediate thought is that you should make the "Write a Variation" more prominent the way Forking is more prominent on GitHub.)

Execution truly does.

The name bit is a bit surprising to me. As an Indian the name struck with everyone. But when I came over to the US, the feedback for the name from the average user was – I’d say not so great.

First reaction I got from someone was "is that link SFW?"

Talk about cultures.

We are a team of 4 people in 3 continents, none of whom have seen each other http://www.cucumbertown.com/humans and all through our dev process this never struck us. Guess we are the angels on earth.

There is a story behind the name Cucumbertown. http://www.cucumbertown.com/faq/#whatupwithname

I realized the name issue during my first dialogue at Sand Hill. The conversations went pretty well until there was a pause towards the end. A partner chalked in words together and politely asked me if I was open to changing the name. That’s when it struck. But then we have a reason for it…

He was half joking. I think.

I think the name is really cute, actually. Doesn't sound like a startup at all. Maybe sounds a little childish but I think you can own that.

Are you guys affiliated with yummly because your site looks so close to yummly's first iteration? http://www.crunchbase.com/assets/images/original/0008/4777/8...

It looks interesting and I found a couple promising recipes but why not let us create accounts so we can actually try it out? You'll get more specific feedback.

Sorry about that. We just launched and is testing waters.

The site is in beta state and we approve people along the way.

I’ve approved on HN folks in queue now. I didn’t see Tucker there.

Hop in…

I'm quite impressed with what these guys have accomplished since only starting this company a few months ago. Looking forward to what's coming next!

Dear community,

We just launched http://tcrn.ch/REN2RU our public beta.

Leads to a 404 page at the moment. Please don't post links on HN unless they're ready.

Sorry, HN traffic crashed us. Back up now.

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