Where Things Stand

February 3, 2011 – 11:57 am

The past few weeks haven’t seen a lot of visible action on Fridge to Food.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  I have been working on Fridge to Food’s little sister — Farm to Fridge — and at the same time working to give Fridge to Food a facelift.  I’ve gotten a number of comments from people that the current design is not intuitive.  I’ve also gotten comments to the effect that the dark color scheme is oppressive or depressing.  So I’m working to remedy both of those issues.

The problem is, I’m not a designer.  I’m a developer through and through.  I can make things work and I’m very good at it.  But making things look good?  So. Very.  Not my area of expertise.  The design you see before you today was the result of a long and slow iterative process.  During which I would make a design and say “How’s this?”  And people would respond “Meh…”  Then I’d do it again and say “How about this?” And they would respond “A little better.”  So on and so forth until I landed here.  Clearly, that process is continuing.

In the course of it, I think I wandered away from my original intention for the site.  Originally, I’d wanted something very clean.  With out a lot of extra flash and shine.  I’d wanted the focus on the recipes and the images.  I was trying to build a TasteSpotting++.  So, with this new recent redesign I’ve tried to move back to that idea.  The problem is, I still have all these extra features that I want to use.  That whole “++” part.  And I don’t know where to put them with out ruining the clean and not flashy asthetic of the site.  But also make them intuitive and easy to use.

I might be in over my head with this one.  Luckily, I’ve got the help of a couple of awesome people.  Hopefully, with their feedback, I can find my way to the surface.

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Update 1-7-2011

January 7, 2011 – 11:29 am

Happy New Year!  Welcome to 2011.  And the first update of the new year.  The holidays were as the holidays always are.  Crazy.  Full of family and friends.  Finding the time to work in all the visits and catchups was difficult, and for large segments of the holidays I pretty much gave up on it.  But now the holidays have come to an end.  The local university is starting classes again and all my various visiting friends have returned to their respective graduate programs. And I’m resuming my residency on the couch of a local cafe and getting back into the rhythm.

The big thing in this update was a change to the search.  Suggested by the users of /r/cooking, the new search allows you to search by title, ingredients and tags all at once.  Or any combination thereof.  It’s still not perfect, and a lot of searches are going to turn up no results until we can get more recipes into the database.  I’ll be doing some work along those lines shortly.

A few smaller changes and bug fixes were included as well, but none really merit mentioning.

Until next time, happy eats!

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Update: 12-16-2010

December 16, 2010 – 4:02 pm

Today’s update included the ability to edit or delete comments and a variety of improvements to the recipe import.  The  update also contained lots of other little bug fixes, improvements and design changes.  Such as the replacement of the Digg share button with a Reddit share button and the addition of a reddit share button to each recipe.

The reddit community has been extremely helpful in providing me excellent feedback as I worked to develop the site.  Many of the recent design changes that have been implemented have been at the behest of reddit users and I’m extremely thankful to them for the feedback.  Especially the communities of the food, cooking, recipes, tonightsdinner and food2 subreddits.

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Update: 12-8-2010

December 8, 2010 – 7:23 pm

This update brings a major new feature that’s been in the works for a while.  You can now import previously typed recipes and have it populate the fields of the new recipe form for you.  You’ll still need to do some editing before you complete the submit, it’s very imperfect.  It is pretty good at figuring out which parts of the ingredient are amount, but its very bad at spotting preparations (right now).  So you’ll need to copy and paste those over into the correct field.  However, this should make adding recipes significantly easier. I’ll be continuing to update and improve it and hopefully, someday, it won’t even require editing.

In addition, this update brings some design improvements — you’ll notice that the various menu bars look a little different and a lot more uniform.  As well as a number of bug fixes.

Happy Eats!

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Release: 12-2-2010

December 2, 2010 – 1:52 pm

Holy cow, is it the last month of 2010?  Really?  Really? How on Earth did that happen?

Well, in any case, this is the first update of what should be a very productive last month of 2010.  Most of these changes were made before I made my transpacific trip home, they just required some polishing and finishing in order to be released.  And now, released they have been.  Included in this release are:

  • Several new Ribbons
  • Fixes to the various bugs in Title Search
  • A new, less obnoxious welcome box that you can make go away.
  • Several design improvements.
  • A change to the way reputation is awarded.
    • Upvotes on images will now give 5 reputation and down votes will take 5 reputation.
    • For recipes it remains the same.
    • All previously earned reputation has been recalculated for the new numbers.
  • Updated about page
  • Added a display of a user’s uploaded images to their profile page

The biggest change is obviously, the change in the way reputation is given.  My reasoning here is two fold.  First, I wanted to give more of a reward for people who upload photos.  Photos are extremely important to Fridge to Food, with out them it doesn’t look so hot.  They are also extremely important to people who are deciding whether to cook a recipe. We decide what to eat by sight and smell.  Can’t do smell over the internet, but can do sight.

There’s already an incentive to post photos to your own recipes.  They make it more likely that people will try the recipe, and then vote it up.  And therefor more likely that you’ll gain reputation from it.  However, aside from the ribbons, there isn’t currently much incentive to post photos to other people’s recipes.  Now there is, you have a real chance to gain reputation from it, if you do.

The other piece of the reasoning is that, if you can cook a recipe and plate it well enough to make it look good in a photo that garners lots of upvotes, then you can probably cook that recipe well enough to make it taste pretty good too.  For those cooks who can cook from a recipe, but not really cook original creations it might become misleading if they gain a high reputation from photographs.  However, someone who is about to try a new recipe can always examine the poster’s profile to determine where the reputation comes from.  If it becomes a real problem, I may revisit the issue (one solution might be to split the reputations).  But for now, I’m going to wager it won’t become too much of a problem.

That’s all for now, more updates will be on the way as I get settled in here in Bloomington.

As always, Happy Eats!

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