Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes
cucumbertown.com
cucumbertown.com
I'd like to make a suggestion for a cool feature: being able to clone someone else's recipe and put my own 'twist' on it. Almost like a git fork, if you want to use that analogy. You could also submit pull requests... you get the idea.
Literature cannot be forked the way we think about it in code. My variation of the potpie isn’t simply a fork of the ingredients and editing lines. It’s “likely” a different style altogether and in most cases required the new author to write something ground up. We tried fixing this but the edge cases became too complex to handle.
There's a few recipes I've used for which this is the case. Same for my mum - I've got magazine clipped recipes of hers that say something along the lines of "add cherries at the end, use sultanas instead of currants; I add a dash of brandy" or others that say "you need to cook for about 45 mins, not 30".
I think variations allow for a sort of evolution of a recipe towards your own personal preference.
But of course that doesn't take account of the actual implementation of such a feature being possible to do in a way that works well and fits with the aims of this site.
I'd be interested to know what sort of edge cases make it complex. Surely it's just a pre-filled version of a page, that one edits and optionally has a link saying "based on $recipe". I could see it getting abused for people wanting to link their recipes to popular ones (like youtube response vids that aren't really responses) but beyond that sort of thing it seems pretty basic. Were you trying to digest the multiple variations to offer options within a recipe or something?
We have a wish list in our mind where we can add structured annotations (tips/alt ingredient/photo) to the original literature and have a repository of such stuff residing on top of the original recipe itself.
This way it can become a far more richer data, set in the original context and offer mutual learning to all.
Thoughts?
It does just that :D
Also, if it's something you care about, you mis-spelled 'consistency' in your intro video as 'consistecny' on the 1st step of the recipe.
Golden Rings 5
Calling Birds 4
French Hens 3
Turtle Doves 2
partridge in a pear tree
* '2 oz of butter' becomes 'butter 2 oz of'.
* '2 rashers of bacon' becomes 'rashers of bacon 2'.
it's wrong for some things, with apparently no workaround:
* 'five-spice powder' becomes 'spice powder five-'
* 'three cheese coleslaw' becomes 'cheese coleslaw three'
Apart from the last two - can't you just highlight the numbers without moving them?
Edited to add: looking at the way the recipes are presented on the site - with the quantities in a different column, rather than tagged on the end - makes me think that it would be clearer if it looked that way in the editor too, so you don't think of it as a sentence.
The writer is learning continuously with more people using it, and we correcting the imperfections as we spot them. There is no end to the ways in which people may enter ingredients. Our bet is, once the user get to see how it is presented on the final output, the second time they will start visualising the way it needs to be entered. A bit of mutual learning. Meanwhile, we keep looking for patterns and keep correcting these rough edges.
Also there are tons of use cases that we try to solve here. For instance, people who have recipes stored on their personal Onenote/Evernotes accounts or blogs can simply copy/paste the ingredients and steps to the free form editor.This would not have been possible in a structured form.
http://raymondsfood.cucumbertown.com/ recreated around 100 recipes from his blog over a weekend using the editor! Sure, it could still render buggy, but it is possible to iron out the bugs with more data coming in and patterns detected.
When Cucumbertown[1] launched we had a lot of HNers like Trey who used to keep recipes in a Dropbox folder and share. The first version of the editor was form based (a bit like a survey form) and inhibited copy/paste and free form cursor movements. We hacked around that version for sometime time till we hit the limits. A textfield could only do so much.
So some time back we decided to do a full rewrite, ground up pushing our limits with everything we learned.
This editor tries to be unobtrusive, simple and smart. The engine behind the scenes does a lot of work including parsing, numbering, autocomplete etc. all the way to a beautiful output.
Here’s an example: http://www.cucumbertown.com/onion-puffs-recipe-dish
This is just a start and there’s a lot ahead of us. As always we would love your feedback.
I hope this help HNers like munificient[2] move from textfiles to a better solution.
We have tied together parts of https://github.com/daviferreira/medium-editor, vanilla-js and jquery :)
Say I'm making spaghetti. In the steps I want to just type "boil 1 lb spaghetti in 4 cups water for 4-5 minutes" and have the tool parse the "1 lb spaghetti" out into the ingredient list. As it is, I have to type "spaghetti" twice. I know it may seem lazy, but when you are entering hundreds of these things it gets annoying.
Looks like the parsing code might already be there since you're doing it to the ingredient list. Anyway, looks miles ahead of what I'm using. I've been a Cucumbertown member for a long time but haven't visited much, looks like a lot has improved!
But will definitely give it a shot. We had something like this planned early on, but were too scared to try it out. And yes, we have been improving a lot on the site, please do come frequently:)
However, I can't seem to find a way to display the recipes that I "crave" - seems like this would be a good way to save tasty meals for later cooking.
Can you let the recipe page be only about that dish? The "similar dishes" below it can all be collapsed if needed. Because many will just want to print scroll the actual content and not get lost in other things.
Requests that'd make be use it: * special indian section (or others) * Special indian + vegetarian. add the greed/red dot and you instantly have a large audience. * I guess you could just allow special tags, and that could make above possible. * printable/downloadable book. Not strictly necessary, I could just run phantomjs and print out a list of pages, but if this was pre-done that'd be nice.
It's not in the Dummies book, not on Betty Crockers list, not on Wikipedia, not on a list I found on epinions, ...?
This brings to mind, does the recipe auto-convert to metric (eg from cups or imperial). How does it handle that?
edit: Also, I forgot to mention but it's a bit annoying that there's an upper limit to password length.
Meanwhile here is the link you were looking for http://cucumbertown.com/humans
Hint: http://www.d.umn.edu/~alphanu/cookery/glossary_cooking.html
Wonder if you can build in synonyms without making it cluttered: julienne is for _home_ purposes used as equivalent to allumette, or matchsticks, or long thin strips, or batons. In a professional kitchen I think batons|batonnet are fatter, julienne are skinny and long, allumet|matchsticks are as the name suggests but a usually a little thinner.
Standardising recipe descriptions is probably pretty hard.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/carmelize
Also it's not 'US Americans' but Usanians.
Alternatively all the content is in hrecipe format. It shouldn’t be much work to take a dump.