Tag Archives: design

Release: 12-2-2010

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!

Almost There

The new theme is almost settled.  I just have to capture the image I actually want for the background (it’ll involve food) and replace the rather bland wooden one with the one I intended from the start.

I’m not sure I’m in love with the new theme, but its a lot better than the usual wordpress ones you can download from wordpress.com.  And at least now I know the code.  So when I want to change it again it is with in my power.  Any comments on the theme?  Feedback is — as always — most welcome.

Building a Custom Theme

Construction of a custom blog theme is in progress at the moment.  Bear with us for a few days until I get it nailed down.  It’ll be a little bit of a mess.

Design Update

Updated the design of Fridge to Food.  Small updates, but I feel they make the site feel lighter, airier and more comfortable.  Also did a bunch of speed optimizations, some bug fixes and some SEO type stuff.  It’s steadily coming together.

In other news finals time are approaching and that should free up a fair amount of my time to work on it.  Should being the operative word there.  Who knows what will actually happen around here.

Many a Thing Added to the List

The update tonight included a lot of new features.

  • User Profile Browsing – You may browse through all user profiles by cookies or date joined.  From the profile you can see the recipes that user has posted.
  • Title Search – Title search has been added.  You may now search the recipes on Fridge to Food by title.
  • Recipe Delete – You may now delete recipes you posted by accident or double posted.
  • Image Delete – You may now delete images you previously posted when you have a better image.
  • Image Recrop – You can now recrop an image from the full image at any time.
  • New Icons and L&F stuff.

Also added were some bug fixes and stuff to make posting a recipe easier.  You are now asked if you really want to leave the posting page when you accidentally hit the back button.  And the validation checking is performed before posting, so you won’t lose the recipe if you’ve forgotten something.  Additionally, the double posting catch was updated somewhat.  It ought to be more effective.  Enjoy!