Ask HN: Check out my side project | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Check out my side project

mealfire.com

13 pointspkulak23 comments

You really need a real home page. Having a guest account they can play with is awesome ... but it's not a good way to start it off.

When I come to the site for the first time, the first thing I see is an unexplained empty calendar. That's very confusing. You need a "this is what mealfire is and why it's cool" page.

UX is nice. I really like the way you do bulk-adding of ingredients and directions.

Nice idea. I can definitely see using it once I'm responsible for my meals.

Bottom-line, everything is good but the very-first impression, which is what's most important.

Yeah, it's always been my intention to have a real home page, but I've never been able to figure out what it would be. I've got an about page with a bunch of text, but who wants a wall of text or a sales pitch when they hit a site? It may be a good idea to put a brief description of the site in the guest bar at the top.

>but who wants a wall of text or a sales pitch when they hit a site?

It may be a fine line, but I've noticed myself hitting a lot of new sites thinking "why don't they just tell me what it is/does and show me some screen shots before I have to sign up?"

I think it's a big deal. I almost always pass without it.

The best approach may be to cookie return visitors and then redirect them to the example, with a way for them to get back to the original LP if possible (landing page).

I whipped up a home page and deployed. The more I thought about it the better the idea sounded.

It's already a big improvement and I realize you just threw this up, so that's especially impressive. I'd suggest making the list of major features more "scan-able", perhaps by listing the features in bullet points, or just creating a tour. Also, I'm a tad confused on this point, but if it costs $5 to register (for the non HN crowd anyway), I haven't seen mention of that anywhere on the site...that's probably something people should find out before clicking "register".

I've been working on this for a couple months in my spare time, and I think it's turned out pretty well. It's a meal planning site. It's really simple, but it really helps when you want to eat at home more instead of going out. Check it out and let me know what you think. If you want to register, use this link (to avoid the 5 bucks):

http://mealfire.com?promo=hackernews

There's still a million things I want to add/improve, but it's at a point now where it's been working great for me and my wife (especially since we just had our first kid), so hopefully it can be helpful to some other people too.

I signed up using the link you provided, but it won't let me use the service, it keeps redirecting me to amazon.

I liked your service. It reminds me of Joe's Goals in a certain way, which is one of my favorite web apps.

Crap! I'm sorry, this is the register link:

http://mealfire.com/register?promo=hackernews

(I wish I could edit that comment)

That still redirected me to Amazon Payments and asked for 5 bucks...

ditto

That's really weird, because I can see that it's working for other people. And it works for me. I think I'll just end up turning off the payments until I can get it worked out.

Awesome! I always get excited when I see other food related apps on hn.

A bug: All of the blue buttons in the content area(ie Create Shopping List) do not work for me because the ul with id header links is covering them.

I signed up and then wanted to get the bookmarklet, and I had to log out to find it. When I did find it I ended up bookmarking the page with the bookmarklet on it rather than the actual bookmark.

I run a recipe search engine(recipepuppy.com), so we do a lot of the same things. If you need any tips streamlining the parsing of recipe sites or anything else let me know. kris@recipepuppy.com

First of all, this seems like a great app; it has a very nice usability in its current form. That said, it seems like there are just a few ideas that could really improve the app:

1. A real homepage. For example, notice how the homepage on www.freshbooks.com shows a decently sized screen shot, followed by a list of the major features, and an invitation to either take a tour or jump right in to "try FreshBooks for free"

2. A tour, FAQ, contextual help, or some method of introducing users to features they may not have noticed otherwise. For an example of where this would be useful: I added a recipe right away and was impressed with the interface, but only after I added all the ingredients did I discover that I could, in fact, group elements together (under "more options").

3. Insert the "add ingredients" and "add directions" buttons directly into their respective boxes.

4. Make the list of ingredients drag-and-drop? I can't say for sure whether this would be useful or just get in the way, but it seems like a good idea to me.

This is a really good idea, and a nice implementation. Like jackowayed said, a better presentation would help with first impressions. Some kind of recipe sharing would be cool, too.

I think it's a bad idea to punish people who register by locking them out unless they pay $5. At least warn them of what's going to happen...

I liked the idea so I thought I would register right away. Now I'm prevented from trying it out. Why would I shell out $5 now?

This link should get you in for free, though people have been having trouble. I haven't really figured out why yet.

http://mealfire.com/register?promo=hackernews

I went ahead and set up your account and added a warning if I'm going to charge. You're right, it's a bit of an ambush!

I've been working on something almost exactly like this in my spare time. That's an odd feeling.

"Great minds think alike". Do you feel better?

One thing that I noticed:

- Maybe move the "add X" to inside the box, on the bottom right corner.

I really liked the "create shopping list" feature. The way you do the items aggregation is very useful.

What do you mean by "add X"?

"Add ingredients" and "Edit directions". I thought both were "Add...", that's why I used "x".

Allow users to purchase recipes from the site for a small fee (99 cents?).

Allow other users to sell recipes on the site.

Take a cut between the two.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com