Show HN: Cinc – GitHub for recipes

https://www.cinc.kitchen

by keithasaurus • 9 years ago

363 152 9 years ago

If anyone wants to know the stack it's Django/Postgres on the backend, and an Elm SPA frontend. All data goes through an undocumented REST API.

brntn• 9 years ago

Nice work!

Are you using mptt or treebeard under the hood to manage the forking?

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

Nope. It's a pretty simple relation to express without external libraries, so I figured I'd keep the granular control and just do foreign keys. Easier to refactor schema or migrate data that way.

dpapathanasiou• 9 years ago

Nice project!

If you need more data, check out this:

https://github.com/dpapathanasiou/recipebook

I've also enabled it to talk to this via TOTP, if you ever decide to switch to/want to enable mongo as your recipe doc store:

https://github.com/dpapathanasiou/ARMS

Good luck with it, and keep us posted!

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

Thanks, but we have our own importer. BTW, I'd suggest writing a metadata fallback in your library. You'd be surprised how many sites will work just on parsing json linked data or schema.org's Recipe format.

Good luck!

NickBusey• 9 years ago

This looks promising and fairly well done, but it's lacking a few critical features IMO. The first obvious one is a way to Diff a recipe and it's Forks (unless I missed that).

The harder and maybe more important one, is an issue that GitHub itself still hasn't figured out how to solve either. There should be a process for a fork of a recipe being able to explain why it is better than the original, and have the fork be able to be voted on so that the 'best' fork as voted by the most users becomes the canonical 'Chicken Noodle Soup' recipe, or at least display the forks on main recipe ranked by popularity.

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

Yeah, it's on the list of things to do. Once there are enough recipes/users it will also be useful to see the history/ancestry of recipe. There are already a few that are forks of forks. All the recipe data is immutable and versioned, so that will happen at some point.

jitl• 9 years ago

A++ would love to see the diff feature :)

ghayes• 9 years ago

My first thought was to remove "Vegan Butter" from the chicken recipe (or move it into a "Dietary Substitutions"), but then I realized my forked recipe would probably just be lost in the void. Maybe the goal of forks should be more akin to pull requests?

colordrops• 9 years ago

Seems that "Dietary Substitutions" could be a first-class data type. It would be a named multi-map of one item to another one. So you could create you own "Dietary Substitution Map" named "Nut allergies" or "Halal" or "Vegan", with butter -> canola oil, milk -> soy milk, milk -> almond milk, etc.

Then you could pick the particular substitution map that you care about and avoid forking recipes unnecessarily and have most recipes support most diet types if the proper map exists.

tedmiston3• 9 years ago

There should be a process for a fork of a recipe being able to explain why it is better than the original, and have the fork be able to be voted on

That'd be a nice edition to GitHub's forks page. Over there star count might be the best proxy.

melicerte2• 9 years ago

I though the README.md and project stars was there for that precise reason. Am I wrong ?

JoshTriplett• 9 years ago

There should be a process for a fork of a recipe being able to explain why it is better than the original, and have the fork be able to be voted on so that the 'best' fork as voted by the most users becomes the canonical 'Chicken Noodle Soup' recipe, or at least display the forks on main recipe ranked by popularity.

A combination of popularity and the ability to choose to merge changes back into the original seems sufficient.

roryisok3• 9 years ago

"forks" is so fitting here

gyrocode• 9 years ago

Interesting idea... Phrase "fork a recipe" just got a new meaning.

mch823• 9 years ago

Might be worth user testing some different ways of saying "fork" in case the people who cook aren't the same as people who code.

One to try might be "Remix" and "Remixes"?

pbhjpbhj2• 9 years ago

"Adapt", "modify", "tweak", "personalise", ...?

Is forking really good for recipes, do you want to automate inclusion of upstream changes, surely not?

joombaga• 9 years ago

How are you doing volume to weight conversions? Do you have a big table of weights-by-volume for different ingredients?

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

Yeah, densities and fuzzy matching. It'll get more intelligent eventually, but does a pretty good job on common ingredients at the moment.

mcjiggerlog• 9 years ago

It'd be good if you could customise what kinds of foods should be displayed in what measurements.

E.g. I'm seeing 1 cup of steamed rice - being British I have no idea what that means. I turn metric on and it tells me 237 milliliters of rice, whereas I would be expecting grams. I'm pretty sure measuring solids by volume is a US-only thing.

AAAton2• 9 years ago

neat idea!

A weird piece of feedback: Something about the UI gives me a substantial feeling of loneliness.

zdrummond3• 9 years ago

Odd, but I felt the same... it looks nice, its clean, and easy to read... but I didn't get the same excitement to cook as I do with say Serious Eats (example: http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2017/05/new-orleans-style...)

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

This cracks me up. At the same time, it sounds like it's something that should be taken seriously. Thanks for the feedback.

dhruvkar• 9 years ago

I can see that.

But I prefer the pinboard-esque design to a flashier one.

It's utilitarian and snappy - just the way my grandma made 'em.

jasonjayr• 9 years ago

I don't think it's loneliness -- I think it's a stark contrast to most of the other major recipe collection sites out there that are visually cluttered.

I think that's a refreshing change for this type of site; You may want to consider a means of allowing users to curate and discuss recipes on sub-domains, some kind of API or some other means of splitting it up? A kind of crisp, clean social platform for food prep ....

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

Yeah, there's a whole concept of how it may work for collaboration that has yet to be implemented. Thanks for the feedback.

AAAton2• 9 years ago

I don't seek more flashiness or colors. I actually appreciate the simplicity.

Thoughts on what the feeling could be rooted in:

I Think it would help with more than 3 recipes on the front page. That gives a feeling of emptiness that can be confused with loneliness.

I also think there could be a better choice of image cropping. One that does the trick of making them all one size, but that also lets me see the food and thus inspires me.

0xCMP• 9 years ago

Agreed. It looks very good, but there needs to be some play with how items flow on the page and a little more contrast.

Some of the white areas can be filled in with some nice text on how to use the product or ideas of what to do next?

This is mainly on the home/list pages. The page for the recipes looks pretty balanced

styfle• 9 years ago

That's a good way to describe it. Something about it feels empty.

I think the most obvious is the tiny sliver of a picture on each card. It feels like I'm looking though a key hole.

Besides that, the website is great!

zdrummond3• 9 years ago

Nice!

It is clear you put a lot of care into this, and I am sure there is a bucket full of features you want to get to, but I have a big request.

What I really want is one step beyond a place to store recipes. I want a meal planning site! I want to create a pool of recipes that we like, and plug in how often this week we will eat at home. Then outcomes a grocery list and a plan for each day. Maybe it even sees what we have liked, and suggested new recipes to add to the pool.

I am this close to pulling the trigger on PlateJoy, but my biggest hurdle is I can't add recipes I _know_ we like to their list of experimental (to us) meals.

Really, I don't mind/enjoy cooking, but never seem to carve the time out to plan an entire family of four's meals a week in advance.

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

already in the works :)

zdrummond3• 9 years ago

Great! Do you plan on open-sourcing? Anyway for me to help, even if it's feedback?

rojobuffalo2• 9 years ago

Hey I'm also working on this (separate from OP). In the meantime you might check out https://www.eatthismuch.com/.

drakonka• 9 years ago

This looks like exactly the kind of thing I've been searching for; thank you for the recommendation.

papa_bear• 9 years ago

Thanks for the mention - I started ETM with a similar goal in mind. We have a "personalize this recipe" function that's functionally similar to forking, but we never expanded on it much. We're planning to improve the social and browsing features eventually, but have some other priorities to get to first.

Also, cinc looks really nice - awesome work OP

egeozcan2• 9 years ago

I've given ETM a go for a year (I was a paid member) but the ingredients were very hard to find in Germany so I gave up in the end.

chowes• 9 years ago

Maybe an ingredients.json instead of a package.json, sub versions with quantities, and then this becomes a constraint solver!

anoek• 9 years ago

Check out https://www.copymethat.com/ - has a great recipe import system, meal planning system complete with a shopping list generator, great view of the recipe while you're making it, it's been awesome for us.

k__• 9 years ago

Seeing metric units written out feels kinda odd.

Otherwise very nice idea :)

dgfgfdagasdfgfa• 9 years ago

Looks good!

The mix of Sans-Serif and Serif is a little weird.

whatnotests• 9 years ago

AMAZING idea.

Please allow me to G+ connect or facebook connect, b/c I don't want to have yet another password to remember, and I'd like to (maybe?) share some activity on Cinc with my FB peeps.

Just a thought.

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

At some point ... :)

LostCharacter• 9 years ago

Nice site! I look forward to using it in the future. One thing - when using lastpass to generate a password, it fails to fill the first password and only fills the "repeat" portion. Likewise, it fails to fill the username field for login.

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

Yeah, I have this problem with Mac's keychain on Safari as well. I haven't had the time to fix yet, but it's helpful to hear the same from someone else. Thanks.

zitterbewegung• 9 years ago

I'm working on a project and having a API for recipes would be great. I see there is a mention on your ToS but I don't see where you could access it?

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

It's undocumented, but feel free to check out the calls in your browser's debugger. There's no guarantee of API stability or token permanence at this point. So integrations are not advised yet.

julee04• 9 years ago

this is a crazy fast site! can you share what you are using to host and serve it?

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

AWS/nginx on a fairly minimal instance. speed probably comes from:

- it's an SPA, so it's mostly just doing API calls.

- the database is designed to be fast at a few orders of magnitude of size beyond its current state

- everything is gzipped

sandinmyjoints• 9 years ago

And no ads, unlike pretty much every other free site with recipes!

52-6F-622• 9 years ago

This is a great idea!

My one criticism right off the bat is the name -- the pronunciation isn't immediately obvious. ("Sink?", "Kink?", "Kins?", "Since?")

Then again, I don't know if that's just me...

tedmiston3• 9 years ago

I read it as "sink" like the ci in circle.

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

It's meant to be a pun for "kitchen sink," and also to work with the notion of "sync"-ing. It's pronounced like "sink." Cinc is the number 5 in Catalan and refers to the amount of senses we use when cooking.

52-6F-622• 9 years ago

I retract my criticism then! Also, it seems I should have read the About page. Might I suggest adding it to the top navigation? I think some further explanation/self promotion (especially as you've written it) is warranted.

edit: Also should have known. "Cinq" is five in French as well.

damerms• 9 years ago

It's like http://www.forkingrecipes.com/landing

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

Cool. Hadn't seen this before. Is it your site?

overcast4• 9 years ago

Looks like a more complex version of what I had created with imadefood over a year ago. Similar features, with the branching, etc. I've been working on an iteration into a slightly different direction. As it didn't pick up any steam. Good luck :)

As others have stated below, forkthecookbook, forkingrecipes, and also recipelabs. All do basically the same thing. I just don't think there is enough market for it. Certainly was a fun little project though!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10853665

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

Looks like a 502 error on the site. Is it still up? I'd be interested to see your approach if possible.

overcast4• 9 years ago

Took it down to concentrate on other work, though I'd be open to discussion. hello@imadefood.com

amadeusw2• 9 years ago

Looks great! I'm inclined to host my recipes there.

But before I do that, what is the future for this site?

* Do you monetize by getting a cut from the shopping cart? * Will I be able to easily download my data in the future, like I do with git repositories?

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

I built it primarily for myself. It's able to run on cheap hardware and is very lightweight, so I plan to keep it up indefinitely at minimal cost. I haven't begun looking into funding/monetization, but that may happen soon. All data is already available via the API, so at some point, there will be a "Download my data" feature.

amadeusw2• 9 years ago

Awesome, I'm in.

DerfNet• 9 years ago

this is a great idea. How many times have you looked at reviews on recipes.com or whatever and the first 10 include a half dozen substitutions, basically making a different end product entirely? each of those reviews could instead be a fork. awesome!

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

That's the idea. Still needs some work :)

Jaepa3• 9 years ago

The idea for this has been around for a for a while. http://forkthecookbook.com/ goes back to 2012.

And its an interesting idea. Recipes can't be copyrighted and and recipes are generally derivative. The data is generally well structured, and fairly standardized (ingredients, equipment, instructions, photo, with optional fields for prep & cook time, servings, notes, difficulty, etc). But there are two primary issues:

1. Recipes don't really have a single inheritance. For example, I cook a lot & really enjoying cooking, but when I'm trying to make something new, I won't follow a recipe. I will read a bunch recipes, and try to understand the underlying ideas & steal the ones I think are interesting, then implement my own. So say I look up Tufo Matar find 3 recipes the make my own, if I want to contribute which recipe do I fork?

2. This may have been dealt with by the use of stars. when I was using forkthecookbook, there was no way of "bookmarking" recipes and the so users forked them, which lead to the results having huge number of identical forks. That being said it seems like the star system may resolve that. But currently it looks as though unmodified copies of the recipes still appear in the Forks list, which makes it harder to find benifical changes. Also it would be nice to have a history section with a message summarizing what changed.

All that said this does look nice.

Additionally, a nice feature to have would be to "import" a recipe, though since phrasing of a recipe is protected this gets a little bit legally complicated.

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

Thanks for the great feedback.

Yeah, the version history, etc will have a UI at some point. You're also right that needs to be some sort of indication for the diff between forks. We'll get there. People haven't been going crazy with forks yet (turns out if you post to hacker news, that changes :), so that will be worked on.

There is an importer already! It's not perfect, but it works with most recipe sites.

Thanks for pointing out forkthecookbook.com. I hadn't seen that, and it's definitely relevant.

Jaepa3• 9 years ago

Oh cool I missed that. It looks like a fun project. I will definitely join and try to contribute some. Is there a better means of reporting bugs than the the contact us email form?

chewxy• 9 years ago

hello, FtC author here... it's mainly a zombie project now (you know, dead, but still has active users)

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

i like some of the ui ideas on your site. nice work.

fanpuns2• 9 years ago

I tried this FtC before this one and really liked the idea. Did you ever do any write ups about making this project or the launch?

Jaepa3• 9 years ago

Hey chewxy. I think I talked to you about FtC for a while when it came out(irc maybe?). Good to see you again.

ehotinger• 9 years ago

Yeah, it's interesting how many people have had the same idea at some point or another. I was fiddling around with Rails and AWS for a bit around 4 years ago and used the same idea for a tiny project. It's a bit like deja vu. https://github.com/ehotinger/OldCode/tree/master/VariantChef

overcast4• 9 years ago

A lot of us have tried this idea, me included two years ago. It seems like a logical idea, but there really isn't enough people looking for it.

bruce_one• 9 years ago

I'm a huge fan of the fact this does weight conversions (cooking by weight is now my favourite, and I've been looking for a site that is just weights, so this looks like a win to me :-) ).

One note I'd make, though, is that US, UK and Australian cups are all different sizes. (and possibly others?)

And from the one recipe I saw it looks like you're using UK cups? But, possibly not as well... Either way, it might be worth calling that out, or allowing for cup-type specification similar to how you do for weights?

Somewhat related, some sites call out egg weights too, and that might be something to try and do here too? (Because, if nothing else, egg weights are often written on the carton which acts as a guide; even if people don't actually weigh them.)

Another thought, again... Some kind of showcasing? A la Github's explore, or even "awesome" pages? I might be off, but to me discovery is really important for recipes and I love browsing "cookies" or "desserts in a hurry" or similar; and pages akin to that with community curation could be nice?

Hmm, another random idea... Some kind of more granular forking to facilitate things like "do you have a stand mixer?" and that kind of distinction? (Coupled with "equipment switches" maybe?) In the past I've done recipes that required something I didn't have, and I've had to tweak fairly aggressively to make it work, but when/if it did work, maybe adding that feedback into the recipe would be valuable? e.g. user ticks "don't have a dehydrator", and recipe tweaks to "use your oven and set it low", etc.

Anyway... It looks awesome! Keep doing what you're doing, and I'll use it :-) Just some random thoughts that came to mind :-)

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

Thanks! All useful thoughts.

askvictor• 9 years ago

Somewhat related, some sites call out egg weights too, and that might be something to try and do here too?

Some technical recipe books I've used just specify the weight of total egg. Not that useful for a home cook though.

For that matter, I'm curious what egg size descriptions is like in other countries; in Australian shops they're like condom sizes - I haven't seen 'small' or 'medium' eggs for over a decade.

BBlarat• 9 years ago

Well it depends on what you're cooking, if you make an omelette it's not a big deal if you have too much egg, but if you make say a chocolate fondant than the size of the egg is very important to get the correct texture.

roryisok3• 9 years ago

We have small / medium / large here in Ireland. I'd bet they're the same size as your xl / xxl / magnum eggs though

egeozcan2• 9 years ago

In Germany, they are "S", "M", "L", "XL"; although I've seen "S" only once, ever.

anotherevan2• 9 years ago

Love that you can convert the measurements to preferred units (such as metric).

I second Bruce's comment about cup sizes being regional. So are teaspoons and tablespoons for that matter. The wikipedia pages do reasonable coverage on this.

So good to clearly indicate which region's measurements are being used.

Always been a frustration of mine when reading recipes as having to figure out what country the recipe is published in to figure out what the measurements actually are. (Unless they are in metric, which is unambiguous.)

rojobuffalo2• 9 years ago

I was under the impression that the Imperial (UK) measures were mostly no longer used. Is that wrong?

neoteo• 9 years ago

In fact a country selector would allow not just measures to be adapted but also the ingredients (eg. in some countries dry-yeast is a lot harder to find than the regular kind). Cuts of meat are different too and you often have to resort to Wikipedia's language options to see what a tenderloin cut (say) is in your own language. Finally you could have alternatives with which you could swap out any missing ingredients.

rcpt• 9 years ago

"guthub"

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

lol

aracarie• 9 years ago

Open Sauce

kbanman• 9 years ago

Very well done!

I had started on a similar idea a while back, but never got around to it. Even have a cute domain for it (pifork.com) in case you're interested :)

yellowapple2• 9 years ago

So I'm trying to submit my cheesy toast recipe as a test. Unfortunately, I can't:

- "1 slice" (of bread) is not a valid quantity

- "to taste" (of black pepper) is not a valid quantity

Oh well. I guess I won't be using this then, at least not yet.

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

those can be handled:

1 | slice bread

(blank) | black pepper, to taste

Some aspects of the UI/UX still need work.

Thanks for the feedback.

yellowapple2• 9 years ago

I tried both of those; still complained about an invalid quantity.

justboxing• 9 years ago

This looks great! Congrats on shipping!!

I like that you have a scaling feature. => https://www.cinc.kitchen/info/features

I know this may be too much to ask, but if you are taking requests, some basic nutritional info (ex: Protein content, avg. calories) might make it even more awesome for those of us tracking daily calories, protein (for atheletes etc). I understand things like sodium, fat might vary depending on how much salt or oil the person cooking the recipe uses, so maybe this might not be feasible to implement...

mch823• 9 years ago

Good idea... Formatted to look like a standard nutrition label would be a nice touch

markdown• 9 years ago

Viewing source made me sad. One would think that recipes of all things would survive the appification of the web.

thearn4• 9 years ago

An analog to Travis CI for this would be interesting and delicious.

An analog to Docker images would be something like Blue Apron or Hellofresh I guess.

noway421• 9 years ago

An analog to Travis CI for this would be interesting and delicious.

Surprised it is not a startup yet..

tylerdurrett• 9 years ago

Next step: npm cook spaghetti-and-meatballs

In all seriousness though, definitely looking forward to a public API. Great work!

joshumax• 9 years ago

I started a teensy bit of work on something sorta like this a while ago: https://github.com/joshumax/git-cooking

Glad to see somebody actually brought a similar idea to fruition :)

boromi• 9 years ago

Does this not support issues and comments? If not those would be welcome additions.

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

There are comments (if enabled by the author). Not sure if issues will make sense? Would you be writing recipes collaboratively?

Toast_2• 9 years ago

Looks good. I think you should also consider adding the "keto" diet on there as well. Maybe meals < 10 net grams of carbs?

pyedpiper• 9 years ago

yes, then it will be easier to avoid diets that assume our digestive system hasn't had any evolutionary pressure since the neanderthals...

Toast_2• 9 years ago

I'm confused, do you actually think the ketogenic diet is based on a neanderthal diet?

qrv3w• 9 years ago

This is cool!

A couple weeks ago I was looking for a way to find similar recipes (forked recipes, in a way) and I ended up making my homebaked solution. [1]

[1] https://timetomakefood.com/find

m3kw9• 9 years ago

I was sold on Forking, I'm sure no pun intended

jerrysievert• 9 years ago

might I ask that recipes be presented in h-recipe format? (http://microformats.org/wiki/h-recipe) it's simple to do, and works really well.

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

What's the case for h-recipe over schema.org's recipe format?

taherchhabra• 9 years ago

Is there a way to compare how it actually tastes? , These days I am baking cakes by watching recipes on youtube, the texture always comes correct and I use exact weights as described but the taste is somewhat lacking. It would be good if we can give reference to a local cakeshop for its similarity to the recipie

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

Do you mean can you do that in comments? Or are you asking if we can automate a sense of taste? The latter would be extremely difficult. Not sure I understand :)

x0• 9 years ago

Is there a way to do pull requests? I'd like to go through and convert a few people's °F to °C.

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

No, but you can fork it for yourself if you want. I think most people that are writing fahrenheit want fahrenheit. However, at some point there will likely be a conversion ability for that.

F_r_k• 9 years ago

It's a shame that units are not understood by the system. Once imputed they should be stored as K or °C and then displayed as the user wants

acalderaro• 9 years ago

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but should the "What's the name mean" in the about section be "What does the name mean?" or "Whats the name mean?"

The first is "proper" the second is colloquial. At least that's what I thought.

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

It's not proper grammar :) Proper grammar would be "What does the name mean?"

It's written this way simply because it's a question I've heard a lot, and when people say it, they usually combine "what" and "does" and say "What's the name mean?"

jszymborski• 9 years ago

The 's contraction can mean 'is', 'does' or 'has'.

In this case "What's the name mean" expands to "What does the name mean".

"Whats the name mean" is grammatically incorrect. :)

jstoja• 9 years ago

I really like it. I often look for a receipe with many likes online and have to read dozens of comments to adjust it...

For example the receipe of some cake where nearly all commenters advise to put 1/4 of the sugar advised. If you don't read the comment, chances are that even with a recipe approved by many people it tastes like shit.

I really hope this will grow and success!

mch823• 9 years ago

Maybe a button to order the ingredients from Amazon or similar?

Edit: And maybe a shopping basket in case someone wants to order ingredients from a few recipes.

Edit (again): And don't forget about letting people order the equipment too.

linopolus• 9 years ago

Another site totally unusable without JS enabled, where it could be just used to add dynamics to otherwise nicely generated HTML..

omnimus• 9 years ago

Is it open-source project? Are you looking for contributions? I am passionate cook - designer - frontenddev. I struggle with recipe sites and where to save mines. If this was somehow libre and had future i might want to contribute.

enobrev• 9 years ago

I've been wanting to try this for a while. This looks great! Nice to see some excellent suggestions in this thread as well, that I definitely never thought of. I hope this is successful, as I'm a huge fan of the idea.

livas• 9 years ago

this is a pretty cool thing. just maybe they can change that design. Anyway, i like that.

TekMol• 9 years ago

Interesting project, well executed!

Are you storing the recipes in Git repos or in the Postgres DB?

If in Postgres, what is the format? Do you put each receipe in a single JSON field? If not, what does the data structure look like?

INTPenis• 9 years ago

But it's not really like github for recipes until you solve the url interface.

I should be able to go to a user and their recipes with the same ease as on github. Having unique IDs for recipes exposed in the URL isn't really necessary.

midgetjones• 9 years ago

I think this is a brilliant idea, but I wonder if the terminology should be changed? I think the concept of saving a copy of a recipe, then editing it would come much more naturally to the 99% of people who have never heard of github.

fanpuns2• 9 years ago

Nice project, I like the format of entering new recipes. I think you will get good uptake even from users who don't know what GH is :)

Is this project open source or does it plan to be at some point? I've looked at some of the other projects out there that are similar, but many seem to die based on the founder running out of steam or getting busy with other stuff. I would really be interested in contributing to this or a a similar project if anyone has a suggestion for one that is open.

joepour• 9 years ago

This is really cool, congratulations on shipping!

Have you thought about simplifying the UI by changing "Forks" to something like "Twists" or Takes (as in 'my twist on' or 'my take on').

We all understand what I fork is but the average user will likely get confused, and not just because a fork is a kitchen utensil!

roryisok3• 9 years ago

I love this, signed up straight away. I've also recently discovered cookingforengineers.com and I love their card recipe system. it would be so cool if you could add something similar - I hate the traditional model of recipes, I always have to read and re-read them several times.

I'm not sure how you would go about adding this though, its quite different from the structure you have already

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

Yeah, I've seen what they do. I like it in some ways. But with user-submitted input, their recipe card system at some point will be insanely wide/large/unwieldy.

bruth• 9 years ago

Wow! My friend and I had this idea years ago.. possibly pre-GitHub. I am glad someone finally made it! Well done. My particular interest was seeing how a recipe deviates from the original.. a recipe graph of sorts. That would a fun way to visually explore and find related recipes that are similar in ingredients.

overcast4• 9 years ago

It's been done to death already. No one really seems to want this, even though it's awesome branching recipes.

amelius• 9 years ago

Chicken Alfredo Pasta with Sweet Potato Noodles (480 Calories per Serving)

You probably mean 480 kilo calories.

zimpenfish• 9 years ago

It's been commonly accepted that "calories" without qualification means "kilocalories" in prose / speech for many years.

ClashTheBunny• 9 years ago

Calories with a capital C are kilocalories.

jordanwallwork• 9 years ago

I went for a pretty ambitious test recipe (Heston Blumenthal's Egg in Verjus, Verjus in Egg), unfortunately I'm not able to save it - it's complaining that one of my ingredients is an invalid weight - 3.3 grams Gellan F. If I remove it then it complains about the ingredient before it, so I'm wondering if there's an ingredient limit? It's at about the 40th listed ingredient. It took me ages to input everything so I do hope I'm able to save it!

The recipe entry experience was great though, some small details that I think would improve things even further:

- Esc should clear the 'text entry' modal, I kept clicking this by accident when wanting to add a new section heading and it was a nuisance having to click the 'close' link

- '+ Ingredient section' should replace last ingredient row if blank

- Would be nice to have section headings (similar to 'ingredient sections' for recipe methods) to break up recipes with multiple discrete sections - Hard to find errors in long recipe. Could be more prominant, or add a 'jump to next error' button?

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

Thanks for the detailed issue. Sorry for the trouble! Could you send me the recipe link? I'm unsure know why you'd be hitting the issues you mentioned.

I'll try to respond to the issues you raised one-at-a-time:

1. 3.3 grams should be valid. Unsure why that would be a problem unless some weird unicode stuff???

2. There's no ingredient limit.

3. Esc clearing: I agree :) Clicking on the black transparency layer should also clear it. I just need to build it in. Maybe tomorrow :)

4. Plus -- you're right. Hadn't thought of that

5. Headings: I've left that for users to choose to do on their own. Hard to get too strict about that stuff. (Same reason steps aren't numbered.) I'd suggest doing all caps and a line break at each section.

6. Errors: I agree. There are a number of things ahead of that on the list of priorities, but it's a good idea.

Thanks for the descriptive feedback! Heston Blumenthal's recipes are always welcome on the site! Let me know if you run into any other trouble.

macygray• 9 years ago

I have a feature request: add diffs and ability to show who have starred and who have forked your recipe

trwhite• 9 years ago

Nice idea. You should get Schema Json (http://schema.org/) on this so the recipes can be crawled properly.

xyclos2• 9 years ago

Should have the fork icon be an actual fork rather than the github icon.

xyclos2• 9 years ago

I didn't expect this to get so many points. I'll add a bit more substance:

The ability to base your own work off of others' is one of the most important features of github. It is probably also a feature that probably wouldn't necessarily be understood by somebody not in technology or not familiar with how git works.

If this was my product, I would have named it it "Fork". Putting that feature front and center and making it really obvious that it is the stand out feature of the app, IMO, would help people to get right away why what you've built is so awesome. Even if they don't know what the heck github is.

azeirah• 9 years ago

Please pay someone to add a few thousand recipes, and please keep working on this for a few years. This can be huge.

melicerte2• 9 years ago

Nice idea. Just that code is a universal language, english is not. Is there any way to handle multiple languages for a same recipe outside of forking? forking is one way to adresse this issue but there would not be any other value to the fork than translating a recipe.

Just asking

rkuykendall-com• 9 years ago

Love it!

Would be most useful to me with calorie support. I see some users are hacking it by adding it to the title or in the notes. That should be a strong hint.

williamle8300• 9 years ago

Are sign-ups disabled? Not getting my confirmation email

keithasaurus32• 9 years ago

No! We've just had so many that our email server has been backed up! It should come soon. Apologies for the delay!

yousifa• 9 years ago

Would like to pm you. Can you please put your contact info in your profile or email me (in my profile)

kwhitefoot• 9 years ago

Minus marks for blank window if JS is disabled.

jdjdjdhjehd• 9 years ago

Why does your terms of service mention a web development agency?

Show HN: Cinc – GitHub for recipes

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