x86mitch

thats funny, ya I renamed it from recipepoodle.

At its core that mostly what it is. The project forced me to get out of my comfort zone as a programmer. I picked up 2 new language/frameoworks (rails and angular), had to learn about building infrastructure on top of aws, deep dived into elasticsearch and then pollish everything enough to get it to a "showoff-able"(word?) state.

Hey cryptica. The intention of this post was not to "raise money from investors" (the service is free and I have no plans to monetize it so it would be a terrible investment). The intention was to show off something I've been working on in my free time. The project did indeed start because I had issues filtering through all the saved recipes in my browser's bookmarks.

Thank you for pointing this out. I was not even aware of rich snippets. I'll update the site to use this formatting as soon as I can.

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.

TIL. It's funny because one of my motivations for building this site was to have a project that allowed me to work with ElasticSearch.

I've never used CopyMeThat but I just looked through it quickly. It looks like a good app for solving a similar problem that feastgenius is solving. I think the difference with what I built is that it also calculates the nutrition content per serving. This was important for me personally because I use the app to search for recipes in certain macros ranges. For example, Finding chicken recipes in a macro range of (carbs:30-50, protein:20-40, fat:10-20). The search for feastgenius was built on top of elasticseach and in the near future I'll be building out more features based around really robust searching. I'll also be focusing time on building features for discovering new recipes. I hope that answers the question :)

Zestful looks awesome! I'll take the chance to look into it more over the next few days. But looks like something that I would benefit from using :)

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 :)

For this project, I used Spoonaculars API for clipping recipes. I would be very interested in creating my own, similar to what you did. That would give me more control over the process. Did you come across any open source repos when you worked on your crawler?

> Is there a reason you don't include the instructions of the recipe on your website?

Yes, when users clip recipes from another source I want to make sure that users need to navigate back to the original page to see the instructions. This is to ensure the original author gets credit for it. If a user adds a recipe themselves to the site then it will show the instructions. Here is an example of a recipe with instructions for demo purposes, https://www.feastgenius.com/recipes/everything-nice-jerk-chi....

I have not used paprika myself so unfortunately I cannot comment. But if there are any features that you would like me to focus on for the next updates of feastgenius let me know and I will work them in.

Would love to see it. Please reach out to me if you do open source it.

This sounds like something I would use if it were public. It would be awesome If I could swap recipes from the plan. For example, if I didn't feel like having stir fry I could swap it out for a meal with similar points.

Awesome! If you want to chat feel free to reach out to me. There are some really good api's out there to help speed up the process.

Thank you! I think theres a lot of improvement that can be done in the space. Reach out to me if you want any advice on helpful api's I came across when building feastgenius. I'll be more than happy to chat :)

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.

Thanks for the kind words. This indeed was a hack project that I would work on in front of the TV when I had time after work. It feels good to have it in a somewhat "showoff-able" state. I think what made me stick to this project as opposed to the number of other ones I've given up on is that this was something I was using throughout the entire development. So I've been building something that I want to use. To your comment on the animation delay, I agree with you. I'll remove it in the next few days in favor of a better way to display the information.

️exactly. I don't have a lot of talent when it comes to front end design. Having Material kit as a starting point was a huge help for me.

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.

If anyone else out there is like me then they probably constantly have projects that they start and never finish. I have always loved programming and have always had side projects that I've built in my free time, but would never finish them. Typically it was always the same story, get started, run into a problem, can't find the solution, stop working on the project. Rinse repeat for the next one.

This time around I made a challenge for myself that the next project I take on I would put my full ability into building it out, even if it took forever to get to certain the solutions. The project I built was called recipepoodle (http://www.recipepoodle.com/about). I spend a lot of time cooking and I wanted to build something that would allow myself, friends, family... whoever, to be able to post and share their recipes.

I think one of the reasons I stuck with this project was because even before I started hosting it online I was using it almost daily from my localhost. I want to give a shoutout to two resources I ended up using pretty heavily for learning rails. Going through these tutorials I was able to build social features like sharing, user profiles, following users, saving recipes you like... etc.

gorails.com [awesome bite-sized videos on a huge spectrum of ruby topics] thinkster.io [great for learning to build real-world applications]

The application is utilizing ruby 5 for a backend API and for the frontend I opted to use Angular. I added a better breakdown for tech stack below.

Backend recipepoodle was built with rails 5 and using Postgres for persistent storage. I use Heroku for server deployment, currently on the hobby plan (approx $5 month). The app is also using elasticsearch for search and recipe recommendations. I chose to go with AWS to host my ES cluster purely based on financials (free for the first year). The final piece I am using is an API for getting the nutrition breakdown of each recipe. So when a user creates a recipe I send the ingredients to spoonacular.com/food-api in JSON format and it returns me the macronutrient breakdown.

Frontend I am far less of a frontend developer so I ended up relying heavily on tutorials and stack overflow. I used Angular 2 for my frontend framework (from what I hear of react I wish I had used that). I'm hosting the site using AWS S3 with Cloudfront sitting in front of it for caching.

There is still a lot of work to do and it's buggy as heck but its really the first time a project as left my localhost to be hosted online. If anyone has any questions I would be more than happy to answer them :)