Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

http://www.cucumbertown.com/writer/#

by Cherian • 12 years ago

48 48 12 years ago

Cherian11• 12 years ago

We built this with a lot of feedback and help from the HN community.

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.

[1] http://cucumbertown.com/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8358827

swookiee• 12 years ago

Impressive editor. What js framework(s) / js libraries did you use to build it?

sondr32• 12 years ago

Seconded for knowing a little more about the tech behind this.

digitalpbk• 12 years ago

Dev here...

We have tied together parts of https://github.com/daviferreira/medium-editor, vanilla-js and jquery :)

Fastidious• 12 years ago

It would be nice if I could see the recipes without the need to sign on.

Cherian11• 12 years ago

The homepage is the only one with a signup page. Everything else is accessible directly.

e.g. http://raymondsfood.cucumbertown.com/

kolev2• 12 years ago

How do you get a subdomain like that?

Haddit• 12 years ago

Liked the Ingredient suggestion thing in the editor, And also ingredients on the side bar makes it easy while cooking ! Good job

anilgulecha• 12 years ago

Pretty! Well done.

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.

Cherian11• 12 years ago

Actually we had the print version, which was more readable, and attention focused. That didn’t make it in the current iteration. Point noted.

nobodysfool2• 12 years ago

No autocomplete for julienne, sautee, carmelize. It seems like this was written without any input from a trained chef.

Hint: http://www.d.umn.edu/~alphanu/cookery/glossary_cooking.html

Cherian11• 12 years ago

Sorry about this. The system learns. i.e. new keywords get added regularly via new recipes. I’ll add this to the repository.

pbhjpbhj4• 12 years ago

"carmelize"? I've heard US Americans saying it but I just thought it was poor diction for "caramelize" [bleurgh, of course caramelise is the correct spelling ;0) ]. Did you typo it or is this becoming an accepted spelling?

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.

nobodysfool2• 12 years ago

It is becoming an accepted spelling.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/carmelize

Also it's not 'US Americans' but Usanians.

infruset• 12 years ago

Hey! This is really nice. Maybe I missed it but there doesn't seem to be a way to have the ingredients be proportional to the number of people you want to prepare it for. Of course, some things are not linear, and there should be a way to specify it (like the $ in Excel or Calc).

Cherian11• 12 years ago

We want to build this as a platform exposing the data where you can write an app on top of this and do this calculations. Think FB apps on FB.

Human_USB• 12 years ago

How does one export data from this? JSON / Markdown?

Cherian11• 12 years ago

We don’t have an explicit button but if you need the data we can export it for you.

Alternatively all the content is in hrecipe format. It shouldn’t be much work to take a dump.

simi_• 12 years ago

I was _very_ skeptical starting watching the video, but you guys totally won me over by the end. I'm recommending the site to my wife now, who's an avid amateur cook.

sugarpirate• 12 years ago

Hey, this looks really good!

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.

Cherian11• 12 years ago

We had a feature – “create a variation”. Unfortunately the feature did not work well in the real world and we had to pull the plug.

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.

pbhjpbhj4• 12 years ago

My variation of the potpie isn’t simply a fork of the ingredients and editing lines. //

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?

chewxy• 12 years ago

You might want to check out Fork the Cookbook: http://forkthecookbook.com

It does just that :D

stinky613• 12 years ago

Please, please allow passwords longer than 10 characters

aqeel2• 12 years ago

Done!

cos2pi• 12 years ago

This is really cool. I've already shown your site to my mom, who loves it.

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.

Cherian11• 12 years ago

A long requested feature – I hope we get time to build a mini bookmarking feature.

mattbreeden• 12 years ago

Really nice looking editor. I don't cook, but if I was going to use this I would want an option to turn off automatic parsing of the ingredient list (did not check to see if you had that).

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.

bazzargh3• 12 years ago

Seconded. The parser is very odd; it turns 'a nice cream' into 'nice cream' but 'an ice cream' is left alone. Moving the sentence structure around doesn't scan right, eg

  Golden Rings 5
  Calling Birds 4
  French Hens 3
  Turtle Doves 2
  partridge in a pear tree

it's inconsistent, you have to retype things after correction to get something grammatical:

* '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.

anandgrafiti5• 12 years ago

Sorry about that, We took a calculated call with the editor. For the consumer, a structured tabular view of ingredients make sense but for the author, the structured way of entering it in tables becomes a chore. This is the main problem with creating good recipes. So we try to hit a sweet spot, and bring up a bit of that desired structure the way we parse the ingredients.

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.

sondr32• 12 years ago

This is incredibly neat, I love it. I haven't used it extensively, but would there be any way to easily export things so you can import it to say AnyList for shopping? I normally would just use Paprika for this, however the recipes here looks gorgeous.

edit: Also, I forgot to mention but it's a bit annoying that there's an upper limit to password length.

aqeel2• 12 years ago

You can use longer passwords now!

pbhjpbhj4• 12 years ago

Aside: from the vid, what are "2ons" of onion? I've searched and can't find it on Wikipedia. Google's doing it's thing of not letting me limit SERPs to those with the terms I want (yes even when they're in ""). I found a couple of recipes that mention "X ons" of ingredient but ... is it USA ounces to distinguish from "oz" as imperial ounces?

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?

Cherian11• 12 years ago

Not sure of this. Can you point me to one?

bazzargh3• 12 years ago

In the vid they say '2 nos', not 'ons' for onions and also '4 nos' for lasagna sheets. I'm guessing whoever typed that thought units were required and typed a variant of 'nºs' to mean 'numbers'. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numero_sign

pbhjpbhj4• 12 years ago

Lol, yes, now you mention it ... oops.

jv22222• 12 years ago

This site is a masterclass in how to build a niche online community. Nice work.

prawn• 12 years ago

Very nice. I clicked to try entering a recipe, went straight to a page and quite liked the experience from there. I would rather "1 teaspoon" stayed on the left of "newt eyes" than the right, but I like that they are styled differently.

seektemp001• 12 years ago

Cannot click the footer links, it keep pulling more data and pushing it down. Was trying to get to about, faq etc.

anandgrafiti5• 12 years ago

A long pending complaint. Been keeping it to the backburner for a while. SOrry about that. The auto loading stops after a while and becomes user triggered.

Meanwhile here is the link you were looking for http://cucumbertown.com/humans

cooperadymas• 12 years ago

I have been typing up all of my recipes off of my sticky notes. (Using a WordPress plugin called RecipePress.) My biggest annoyance that I thought your editor might fix is repeating myself.

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!

anandgrafiti5• 12 years ago

Ha! You have just suggested a terrific feature. I have no idea how we could implement something like that even with the parsing logic. I mean, we see way too many writing patterns on a restricted ingredient entry area itself. So imagining the multitude of edge cases makes my head spin:)

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:)

Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes

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