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!