posted
Okay, not really your taste buds. I mean, kinda sorta your taste buds. Mostly your eyes, fingers for typing and a little bit of your time.
I mentioned previously that I've spent the last two months channeling every little bit of free time I could muster into a recipe search and sharing site called Fridge to Food. I opened it up to a closed beta two weeks ago and have been slowly inviting in friends and family in small groups. As of this weekend I finally finished the primary tool: the recipe search. You can now search for recipes using the ingredients they contain. And it's a search very similar to a google search - just enter the names of the ingredients you have in the search bar and you'll get a list of recipes using them in return. With the search finished and working. I am ready to open it up to a wider group of people for testing and thus I am inviting all of you to try it.
What does trying it involve? Not much really. It involves giving me the email address you would like to use for your account so I can enter it into the system, either by post in this thread, email to beta@fridgetofood.com or private messaging me. After that, you can simply use the site as you please. If you like sharing recipes and receiving feedback on them then you can do that. If you just want to find some new recipes to try you can search for recipes.
Keep in mind, its still in a very early stage.
It's only been online two weeks and under development two and a half months. And then only in my spare time. I'm trying to get user feedback as early as is possible so that that feedback can help drive the development of the site. I have many, many features in mind for it. But since I only have so much time to work on it right now (still have the day job - for now) those features are going in in small batches every weekend.
So if you like food (that should be pretty much everyone), give it a try!
Ps. this is the same post/invitation I made over at Sake. The invitation is extended to the full Hatrack extended community Posts: 3295 | Registered: Jun 2004
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posted
So, having had a chance to examine the site, what do you guys think?
Do you have any critiques of the style and design? How about the interface?
I, personally, like the minimalist design. But I've been told by a few people that it's too minimalist to the point of looking amateur. They say it needs something to look more professional.
Also the current todo list looks something like this (in no particular order):
-allow users to edit their recipes
-keep track of creation dates for recipes, comments and users
-allow users to order recipes when browsing and searching by: 1. date added 2. number of votes and for search results 3. relevance to search
-add images for users, recipes and recipe instructions 1. possibly add galleries and allow any user to add an image to any recipe or instruction. Then allow users to vote on the image they like best for that particular instruction or recipe. Votes up give the poster cookies (less than gained from votes up on recipes), votes down lose a very few cookies. Highest voted image is the one displayed on the recipe page. If there's a tie a random is selected for the recipe page.
-ability to search recipes by title in addition to ingredients
-notify users when someone comments or votes on their recipes
-add rss parser to parse recipes out of blogger's rss feeds (if they give us the feed)
-add suggestions for tags same as ingredients are suggested
-add advanced search, allowing the user to search only with in certain tags
Anything that's missing from this list that you think should be on it? Anything on this list that you think should be a priority?
Edited to add that as more features go in, I'll start restricting the features by cookies (the number next to your username). The more cookies you have the more features you can access. Every one who starts in the closed beta gets 50 cookies to start. When your recipe is voted up, you get 10 cookies. When it is voted down, you lose 5. Normal users will start with 1 cookie.
At 1 cookie users will be able to search for recipes and add recipes. Things that will be cookie limited will be retagging, commenting, posting images to other's recipes, voting. I'm trying to come up with other features to limit in this way and just how I want to do it. So far I'm thinking about something like this:
10 cookies - vote 20 cookies - comment 100 cookies - post image 200 cookies - retag
Posts: 3295 | Registered: Jun 2004
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