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.

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!

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.

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!

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!

The Pan Baked out of Bird Stuffing

The Mashed Potatoes

The Mushrooms and Onions

The Green Beans

The Turkey

The Carcass

Happy belated Thanksgiving everyone!

Hope the meal is satisfying in more ways than can be described. Pictures of my own thanksgiving will be following.

Happy eats!

Well, it’s free to you.  But it isn’t free to the restaurant.  In fact, it’s very expensive for the restaurant — to the point of being harmful.

Most restaurants run very thin profit margins.  The average marginal profit for a full service restaurant in the United States is about 5%.  That means that if you go to a restaurant and have a $50 meal, the restaurant makes $2.50.

Open Table charges restaurants for its service.  That’s why it can offer it to us — the consumers — free of charge.  There are startup fees for software installation.  There is a monthly subscription fee.  And finally there is a charge of $1 per diner who books through opentable.com or the mobile app and $0.25 per diner who books through the restaurant’s own website.  A recent study of the Open Table fee structure discovered that when you take into account the start up costs, the monthly subscription fee and the average number of tables Open Table actually fills for restaurants, the actual average cost per diner is more like $2.60.

That means that if you book through Open Table and eat a $50 meal, the restaurant doesn’t make any money from you.  Zero.  All of the profits go straight to Open Table.  If you eat a substantially cheaper meal, it’s possible the restaurant could actually lose money from your visit.

So why on Earth do restaurants agree to this?  Why do so many use Open Table?  Well, because of us.  Their customers who use Open Table.  Because we don’t want to make that phone call. We pressure them.  So much so, that some of the restaurants that don’t use it feel the need to explain themselves.

They’re afraid that if they don’t use Open Table, they’ll lose our business.  Even though they don’t gain anything from our business when we book with Open Table.  They hope and pray that next time we come, we won’t book using Open Table and they’ll actually be able to make some money.  But more often than not we don’t.  We book on Open Table, every time.

So what can you do?  You can help out the restaurants who’s food you love by making a reservation the old fashioned way — calling!  And you can spread the word to your friends who use Open Table — when you book with Open Table the restaurant loses.

This batch covered adding recipes, voting on recipes and having your recipes voted on.  I have a bunch more in mind, but I need help naming them.  The photography ones especially, I’m having trouble with.  I’m the first to admit I know little to nothing about photography.  The ones I have in mind play out like this.

First there are the ribbons for adding photographs:

• white: added photographs to 25 recipes not posted by you
• red: added photographs to 100 recipes not posted by you
• blue: added photographs to 400 recipes not posted by you

Then there are the ones for having your photographs voted on:

• white: photograph with 10 upvotes
• red: photograph with 25 upvotes
• blue: photograph with 100 upvotes

I am at a complete loss for names of these ribbons.  Anyone have any ideas?  Also, any one have ideas for ribbons that they might like to see on Fridge to Food?