Stack Overflow for Food. My new site for food questions. | Hacker News Reader

Stack Overflow for Food. My new site for food questions.

answers.qwertykitchen.com

12 pointsvoidfiles34 comments

I echo all points so far. Nice idea.

Your name doesn't speak to your audience. What % of foodies know what 'querty' means? My guess: very few (in contrast, stackoverflow is a great name, because it is a phrase that has significant meaning to the target audience). If you're targeting gourmet chefs, something like burntgarlic.com would be analogous to stackoverflow.com, etc.

Thats actually a really great point. I guess we thought people would know what qwerty meant. A hybring of food, and computers. Something we will really think about.

Perhaps you should focus your target on simply foodies, rather than foodies + computer geeks. Simplifying will pay off when making decisions in the future. Rather than thinking "what would a food-lover/computer geek want?", you should be asking "what would a food-lover want?"

I'm guessing the food-lover audience is broader and probably more appealing. burntgarlic would be a cool domain name. As a computer geek, some of the food questions I've always had rarely relates to anything computer related. Here's a few:

how to remove skin from tomatoes, peppers, etc? some chefs use open flame, others use submersion in boiling water.

when should one use a mortar over a coffee grinder for creating custom mixed spices?

Yogurt is added into Naan bread for body, why does this work and what other non-dairy alternatives can we use for similar effect?

In what cases would rice wine work better than grape wine (for saute dishes).

Hey thanks for the feedback. I took your idea of burnt garlic, if you don't mind. Burnt Garlic was taken, so I registered http://brntgarlic.com instead. A bit 2.0ish but I like it.

It is a good idea, but there are issues with the execution. I'll outline them below.

The most critical problem is that your site has serious SEO issues. Stack Overflow was built with the goal of having crawlable questions and answers. That's how you build traffic and usage. Your questions are loaded with some AJAX, which means that the search engine will never see them. Even worse, your content will look stale to Google and be indexed very infrequently.

My suggestion: Even if you create a sitemap.xml file (which is one solution), your files will be indexed slowly. You will need to mess with the crawl frequency manually with Google Webmaster Tools. This is less than ideal. The ideal solution is to actually create a crawlable site. You should invest some time and money into learning about SEO and perhaps hiring someone to audit your site.

Next, a little harsh criticism: If you are targeting foodies, you should design your site as such. It's not a very attractive site, let alone designed correctly.

When you say designed correctly, what does that mean? As for SEO not all parts are loaded over ajax, we have a plan for SEO we are just trying to get the user experience down first before we start optimizing for SEO.

I don't mean the design of the code, although that's a little bit of a mess as well. I mean - Your site and Stack Overflow share some functionality, but they do not serve the same purpose. You've basically taken the Stack Overflow design and layout and copied it. Your design cannot work unless it comes from a single purpose and central idea. This applies for everything, not just your design. Features and functionality, as well as design, cannot work unless they follow from your that single basic idea.

I think I have a single idea. It may not look like that I concede, but I do have an idea. Stack Overflow has a great idea, but they don't apply it to food. I am at the most basic level trying to create a stack overflow for food. Obviously the food audience and the geeks might be different, so in the long run the site needs to be different, but in the begging I am really just trying to copy.

"Your questions are loaded with some AJAX, which means that the search engine will never see them" I'm looking at the site with noscript on, and everything seems to be fine. Did he change things since you posted, or am I misunderstanding the issue.

Its built to degrade gracefully. So if you view the site without javascript it should still work. So yes google should be able to pick up all the content. Ajax was hopefully a better user experience.

I don't know if its just me but I think the color scheme and design is very ugly. If its a website about food, you should use some nice and warm colors and design elements which makes me hungry!

What are design elements that make you hunger?

A little bit of googling turned up this:

http://www.logoblog.org/wordpress/hungry-restaurant-logos-th...

There's also an article a while back which talked about how the Aqua theme in Mac OSX was designed so that it will "make your mouth water" to look at it.

A noble attempt, but it is extremely sparse. Hire a designer to get in there and give you a high quality design, make sure he leaves areas for you to run ads as you'll need to so that you can run that sort of site.

What kinds of things can a graphic designer, I assume you meant graphic, give me that I couldn't do for my self?

If you're graphically inclined then go ahead and take care of it yourself, but based on the sparse layout and simplistic design I thought you would need one.

Even StackOverflow and the others are nicer to look at, but remember you're appealing to food geeks and so they are more visually inclined. Part of cooking well is the presentation.

+1 for presentation. If I go to a restaurant and order a dish that looks like crap, it generally tastes like crap too.

Quite simply: an attractive design.

I created an account, and received the password via an email which came, I presume, from your personal email account. No name, just the address, voidfiles@...

Even if you use your address, I think it would look better if you made it come from, e.g.:

  QwertyKitchen.com <voidfiles@...>

Point taken, I fixed that.

as a foodie and a programmer my only suggestion is: we like pictures of food. if you can incorporate that cleanly in your site (fetch pics related to the question, display as nice thumbnails) then your site will look much more inviting.

I don't think your target audiences would understand (or need to) What RPX is.

I think it would be more obvious if you just show the AOL/Google/Yahoo login interface on that right column.

I agree, its in the works, I just added the rpx thing today wanted to see how it worked.

Favicon is the default drupal one and the "About us" is a 404. whoops

Fixed, I had a lot more basic problems then I thought posting this up to HN has been really helpfull in less then an hour.

Did you use an open source software to build your site? Or it is 100% your code?

I just saw it is built in Drupal...did you use a special module?

Yes I used a bunch I will make a list.

Thank you.

So besides the built in ones here is a basic list of the modules I used. I had use some of the in non-intuitive ways, and others I had to really change the way they looked.

CCK Flag Pathologic Automatic Nodetitles Global Redirect MimeDetect Node Comment Path redirect Pathauto Quick Tabs RPX Token Panels Rules User Karma Wysiwyg Views Voting API Vote Up/Down

I converted the 960.gs fluid css framework to a Drupal theme which I then contributed back to Drupal, http://drupal.org/project/ninesixtyfluid , I have modified the Drupal stuff here and there, but other then that its all Drupal and Drupal modules. If you wanted I can provide you with the list of modules I used to create this site.

Uh, horrible glaring typo? What's an anwser?

I fixed the spelling mistake. You really didn't know what I meant even if it was misspelled?

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