wall street journal

Snacksby got an ever-so-brief mention in the Wall Street Journal today, if you'd like to check it out try page D6. If you'd like to check it out without buying a copy you're in big trouble, because apparently reviews of recipe sites are such a big deal they have to be kept in the subscriber-only section of the web site.

Vital Statistics:
Mentions of Allrecipes: II
Mentions of Recipezaar: III
Mentions of Snacksby: IV
First site mentioned: Snacksby
Last site mentioned: Snacksby

Woohoo!

matching matching

I thought it would be neat to see what ingredients match up with other ingredients, sort of a "if i have flour and butter what is my best next purchase?", but since some ingredients are just so damn common they gets in the way constantly. Anyway, I'll grow some neat features out of it in the future, I'm sure, but for now: The Ingredient Clique Search.

trackbacks, again

I've re-implemented trackback on Snacksby and added a page on the tour about snacksby and blogging, although trackback is the only related thing... If you're wondering what this trackback thing is all about, check out this post, which I made before 1and1 lost all of my data and i had to redo my work.

question: what would you like to see added to Snacksby?

update: i've added the ability to see recipes you've saved in your recipe box when you're using snacksby on your cell phone.

update: i like this page about brownies!

????????

happy update!: I got back from out of town, took a look, and realized the server had reset some settings beyond the ones I had been fixing up before. snacksby is back! i just need to re-implement trackbacks, now.

it looks like Snacksby's filesystem somehow got reverted to what it was either a few hours ago or last night, and it's freaking out as a result. i am pretty angry at 1and1, my hosting company. i'm on hold with their tech support right now, but god knows none of this is going to get worked out. the only thing we've lost is trackbacks, i think, i saved a copy of everything locally before i left for work this morning. when snacksby comes back is anyone's guess. stay tuned!

update: i suppose their server crashed, but it is incredibly stupid that their last backup was on the 16th. i backed up stuff this morning, though, so i'm moving that on in. i hate 1and1. all we're losing is trackbacks, though, and they were pretty (very?) easy to implement, only took me a couple hours, so those'll be back in a flash.

trackback!

Today I added trackback to recipes on Snacksby, so if you end up making a blog post about something you ate or whatever, just add the url (or the trackback url, down under the comments) into your blog post (however that magic happens) and a link back to you should show up on the recipe page under 'comments!' Glorious, 'eh? Now you can keep track of who is making what, and how good something reaaaally is.

SPEED FREAKZZZZ OF RECIPELAND BEAR WITNESS

Doesn't typing ingredients in that hellish grey box get to you after a while? Well bear hell no longer! From the new recipe page you can hop on over to the quick ingredient inserting page and type your ingredients in just like:

4 bananas
1/2 cup milk
2 tablespoons olive oil

right now it doesn't quite get abbreviations, though, so T vs. t and tbl and all are out for the moment. Stick around on the front of your seats, though, because that should be coming up soon!

when you add a recipe to your shopping list, and you already have the ingredient in your shopping list, and the measurements are the same, then instead of making a new item in your pantry it gets combined! soooon it will combine measurements that are somehow connected.

update: it does that combining-related-things now. hopefully that'll work with the pantry in a bit.

snacksby is actually pretty sweet!

When you work with something a lot, you start to despise it. Or at least get tired of it. I haven't worked on Snacksby much that week, but today I decided to use it to make my shopping list for the week. It went like this:

1) find a recipe i liked
2) add to recipe box
3) add to shopping list

despite the fact that the shopping list is crap because it duplicates things, this is an AMAZING system! i don't have to write anything down! i can just print it out or use my cell phone (m.snacksby.com, kids!) and i love it! granted, i'm sure i can do this at other sites, but come oooon cut me some slack this is so much fun!

i'll work on making the shopping list not duplicate itself and making it order itself right.

fones fones fones

All right! Point your cell's browser to m.snacksby.com and VOILA! Log in and you can access your shopping list and pantry from your cell phone (no recipes yet). Try it out, let me know how it works. I spent all day struggling with making m.snacksby.com map correctly, so gooood luck.

SMS is next. Do any of you use SMS services where you've had to log in? How do I make sure you're you, and not some unscrupulous snooping scoundrel who wants to get to Food Lion and snag all of the beef jerky before you get there? Do I just get an SMS from somewhere, then reply to the number it came from? Do I even get an SMS number or do send the initial SMS to an email address? I sure don't know anything about this, and I'm too hungry to do any research right now.

also: something is making pantry items multiply like rabbits. i think, anyway, it could have been me testing 'add to pantry' or something. lemme know if you notice this!

thisss weekend

this weekend was spent trying to find dwarf fruit trees, and not so much on snacksby. my balcony has 0 dwarf fruit trees on it, and snacksby is only improved a tiny tiny bit. improvements include: ingredients now stay in order (!!!) when you input a recipe, and that viewing-what-you-can-make-from-the-pantry bug katrina found is fixed as well.

quiz time: would any of you use snacksby to keep track of your shopping list if you could view it on your cell phone? do you ever use your cell's web browser? would it be better as SMS? would you ever want to see recipes on your phone? if so, would you only want to see the ones in your recipe box or would you, god forbid, want to actually search for them? help me help yooooou!

unprintables

I'm going to tell you the truth - it's exciting to see Snacksby in the newspaper! It looks like it's mainly just that lifehacker blurb (is lifehacker SYNDICATED?), but here's the newspapers I've heard Snacksby got mentioned in:

July 3rd - Kansas City Star, South Bend Tribune (Indiana)
July 4th - South Florida Sun Sentinel
July 5th - The Macon Telegraph (Georgia)

Are there more I'm missing? Let me know! As thanks for making Snacksby so popular, tonight you'll get an 'add this recipe to my shopping list' button.

UPDATE: You've now got a slightly undernourished "add this recipe to my shopping list" button.

new features!

it appeared a while ago, but now you've got the ability to find recipes you don't have 100% of the ingredients for. it comes up with a "you have x out of y total ingredients for:" above the recipe name. that's now the kind of search the "tell us what's in your pantry:" box uses. it's a little ugly right now, but prettiness comes after functionality!

we're also got shopping lists together, which are pretty nice. there are 'add to shopping list' buttons on all of the ingredient pages, and it's easy to move items from your list to your pantry. (very) soon you should be able to add whole recipes to your shopping list.

what else?

apparently that lifehacker story has been picked up by a bunch of newspapers. what gives?! I'm not complaining, but are we now in the land of newspaperally syndicated blogs? If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, i suppose. if you see snacksby in the paper and would be nice enough to send me a clipping, drop me an email at jonathan.soma@gmail.com.

adzzz

I put up adsense, but I'll probably hate myself enough in the morning to take it down.

note note note

after this weekend is over i'm probably going to be focusing on optimizing caching and database queries, and you certainly won't get any new fun out of that, so let me know what features you'd like aaaasap!

Responses!

Today I've done a lot of work, and thus have broken Snacksby a metric ton. When you go to check your pantry, you might have like 450 ingredients in it, and that may or may not be my fault! I think most of my work today was with substitutions and your pantry, but I think I'll be able to cover it by responding to comments people left on the last post. Here goes:

also, (for example) if I say I have "flour" in my pantry, recipes which ask for "all purpose flour" don't come up - would be nice to have 'flour' to stand for all kinds of flour.

This is how substitutions are supposed to work, and now finally do! You add "all-purpose flour" as a substitution for flour, and then whenever you do a search it should act like you've got APF if you say you have "flour" and you have substitutions turned on. Today I set up the pantry so it automatically includes degree 1 and 2 substitutions (covered poorly here), so you should be okay in the future. Watch out for degree 1 vs. degree 2 substitutions, I'll probably have to kick it 4th-grade style with a Venn diagram for that.

If I were telling someone what I had in my pantry, for instance, I wouldn't normally list seasoning. It's just something I always have, since any given recipe won't use that much, but I couldn't get a recipe to come up until I added 'black pepper' to my list.

Some people have suggested ignoring seasonings completely, but there's two problems with that. #1, I actually don't have a way to do that. Snacksby doesn't know the difference between ground pepper and chicken breasts. #2, sometimes people want to find recipes that don't have the spices in them. I know everyone probably has sugar, but maybe a diabetic or somethin' wants something that doesn't - I'd rather err on the side of making people include everything they've got. I'm trying to maintain a little list on the pantry maintenance page that talks about what you should make sure to include, although I'm sure there's a better way to do that.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to put up the ability to search even if you're missing some ingredients. I figured out how to code it this morning, just haven't implemented it yet. The only gripe I've got with it is that you're probably looking for something with 5 ingredients where you only have 4, but it will definitely show you something that has 2 ingredients and you're missing 50% of them. That will get fixed eventually, I guess.

sometimes i'm adding something and wonder what else other people have used and what are common tags so that people can find what they need!

this is a great idea! i guess it can look at the ingredients and figure this out. look for this feature in the future, it seems a little complicated for it to happen soon.

I guess that's about it. Oh, bigtime change - you can now edit recipes that you added! Soon you'll be able to edit substitutions, too. Just give me a little bit longer on that one. Another change was that searching from the "tell us what you've got" box now uses substitutions (degree 2) automatically, so people don't get so angry about now nothing works. maybe I should make searching from that box include water and stuff? you really only use that box if you're in a hurry, if you reaaally didn't want water you could always use the search page. who knows, i'm done for the day.