pantry stuff

now you don't have to put in an amount when you're setting up your pantry - if you keep it at zero, snacksby'll just assume you've got enough for whatever!

??

What's that I hear? You'd like synonyms to be taken into account whenever you do a search by ingredients?

Consider it done.

Fact: When doing substitution searches it doesn't care how much you have of anything in the substitution.

I spent a ton of time early this morning rewriting how the database search code works, so hopefully we'll be able to improve a lot of things about searches soon.

updates updates

now that we're no longer the most popular site on the internet, i was able to stick in a couple hot new features this weekend.

1. to taste: don't restrict yourself to that horrible realm of quantifiable measurements any longer! 'to taste' as a measurement allows you to let the cook figure out her own damn self what to do. in terms of searching, it's a "you've gotta HAVE the ingredient but a little bit more than an infinitely small amount" kind of thing, just above it being optional.


2. synonyms: Yeah!!! Rutabegas? Turnips? Cilantro? Coriander? Worry no longer! From the ingredient profile page you can now view and edit the different names an ingredient goes by. Pretty soon when you search for an ingredient, it'll search for its synonyms as well, so you won't go through the arduous process of adding things "self-rising flour" and "self-raising flour" so you'll get recipes from both sides of the atlantic.

Plans for this week include getting multiple methods of sorting on every search page and RSS feeds. AND especially being able to edit your recipes after you add them. Searching and specifying tags might make an appearance if i can figure it out - this will help the whole "tell me what i can make that is dinner and raw" deal!

thanks to everyone who is adding ingredients and recipes - i've been astounded by the quality i've been seeing! we've got things from ramen spaghetti to million-ingredient stroganoff, and each addition makes the site work that much better. And, for a shameless plea that goes unsaid in all of these posts - be sure to let everyone know about Snacksby, it only works when people visit and help out!

choices choices!

NEW FEATURE: OPTIONAL INGREDIENTS!

I was killing myself over how to do this, figured it would be a huge horrible battle to implement, so I did what any self-respecting thinker would do: took a shower.

And it worked! So now you get to say ingredients are optional, so when people search it isn't necessarily a total bummer for them if you included some crazy esoteric optional ingredient.

and replies to things from the last thread:

why ingredients can't be editable by anyone?

right now ingredients can't be edited by aaaanyone. i'm working on it, though, that's probably the one of the top 3 complaints. i don't have the "technical skillz" to make it wiki-style, but having the person who made it be able to edit it seems all right. maybe a "editable by the creator" and an "editable by anyone else"? we'll see we'll see!

Can we have an optional box and an approximately box when adding ingredients to recipes?

consider half of your wish GRANTED! Approximately makes it tough, since the reason the measurements are there are so that we can do the "do you have enough?" thing... Maybe approximately could work as "you need to have at least 85% of the amount", but I'm not totally sure. What do you guys think? Important? Would this be an okay solution?

What about adding the concept of yield?

Yield exists, I promise! Servings does, at least. I just forgot to make it display on the page for when you view a recipe, I'll fix that a bit later today

TDL

things to do:

• make ingredients/recipes editable by the people who made them


• make adding info to ingredients/recipes work better


• allow recipe importing from various formats


• make substitutions work better


• fix up the tour


• confirmation if you're adding a blank ingredient


• ...get ready for work right now

also: what do you guys think about pantry? i've heard word it isn't something people who speak english who aren't americans know. feedback?

links links everywhere

1and1 went down, and while i was on the phone with tech support........................... it turns out snacksby got linked on the front page of del.icio.us and lifehacker. not too shabby, 'eh?

the main complaint seems to be about how there aren't enough recipes around. it's true! i sat on snacksby for weeks planning on sticking a ton of recipes in it to get it kick-started, but you know what? i'm just as lazy as you are! you aren't adding recipes, and i barely am, either. "once the crowds fill it up with their wisdom, this'll come in quite handy" is the quote of the day.

feature additioooon

put up a new feature this morning before i went to work: you can now search for ingredients! on the left hand side of spots like the ingredient main page you'll have an ingredient sleuth box, and if you're looking for all of the ingredients with cheese in their name or something, just type type it in and away you go!

the only issue being that it searches both names and description, and i've no clue how to weight them. something that has the body text "this is totally different from cheese" is going to roll up just as high as "ricotta cheese" as its name. i suppose we'll all just have to buckle down and live with it, at least for the time being.

next up:

• searching tags (taking a page from feature requests on mefi)


• RSS feeds (cue terms like stickiness)


• del.icio.us button? (did you know people save recipes to del.icio.us?!) (also: it seems a little self-important to add the button, but let's just bury our modest heads in the sand and do it)

my main man murphy

As soon as I put Snacksby on mefi projects I found out the "I have one teaspoon of salt and ten onions" kind of search was totally broken, and trying to fix it did nothing but spew forth rails errors. buuuut now it's fixed. buuuut man, that was a stressful start.

update: and then fastcgi stopped working, sort of like my heart.

Snacksby.

Okay, so snacksby.

For several hundred years I've struggled with the problem "I've got such and such and such and such in my fridge, what can I make with it?", and hopefully I've now fixed that problem for myself. And maybe for you, too? At the very least I've helped clutter the internet up a bit more.

This blog is here because It's The Cool Thing To Do If Your Site Has Rounded Corners, and maybe it will Facilitate User-Developer Conversation and Create Ideas and all of that positive-flow-of-ch'i kind of stuff. Also, Snacksby is broke like whoa all over the place and you needta let me know where, because god knows after so long of working on it I pretty much hate its (kludgy) guts, and am loathe to find myself QAing it.

Anyway, on that positive note, let me know what you think about Snacksby and what it needs blah blah and we'll see what's what.