kind of neat relationshippy thing

Sick of making one-ingredient substitutions? You can now relate ingredients to one another! Use the 'add relation' link on the ingredient profile page, and you'll be prompted to assign some ingredient as a kind of another ingredient. Example:

parma ham is a kind of ham, and ham is a kind of pork

So one day soon Snacksby will run through all of these relationships and know that when you say you've got parma ham you've also got pork. Right now, though, all it does is sit around and look pretty.

This is one of those sorts of features that's sure to run into bugs where it's searching the wrong way up the tree, or there's an infinite loop, or something is related to itself or whatever, so just be on the lookout for errors with it and let me know when you see 'em!

Oh and P.S., you don't have to set parma ham as a kind of pork - Snacksby's smart enough to jump through ham and to figure it out. So don't go around assigning something like velveeta extra sharp instant cheddar cheese to cheese!

what? what? what? what's that?

Sorry for the radio silence, this crazy thing called "Real Life" sometimes happens. But now that I'm back, you've got an ignore button! A sort of crappy ignore button, but it's pretty close.

Now when you get search results from the "You have X out of Y ingredients" search, there's a lil' "ignore" button to the right of the result. Click it and that recipe won't show up again when you're doing a search by ingredients! It's probably the only way to keep Rock Candy from showing up so much...

We got reviewed on CenterNetworks, a social networking review site. For everyone who agrees with the "too much of that green link crap!" (or is that just 'everyone'?) i'm working on toning things down. there's a ton of grey linkage out there now, ph34r it!

in case you didn't know, i'm just crushing the site full of features until it gets so unimaginably unbearable that you all leave. then i'm gonna redesign!

Hopefully next up:

1. Links will appear when you put URLs in something like a credit line or a comment.


2. Instead of everything being substitutions, we're going to have parent and child ingredients! Canned diced tomatoes will be a child of canned tomatoes which will be a child of tomatoes (fresh tomatoes will be a child of tomatoes, too!). Lettuce will be iceberg and romaine's parent, and blah blee blah! That'll work out sixty times better than what's going on now, big thanks to Zoe for making me realize how dumb things currently are when I wrote like ten paragraphs having to describe how substitutions work on the site.


3. I'm forgetting things. What am I forgetting? Help me!

shopping lists + recipe box + sorting + other things

Your recipe box is now perfectly incredible. You can now sort it into different lists, and get a shopping list for each one of them! Plan meals for the week, for a dinner party, for whatever - this is one part of Snacksby I'm definitely using. it even uses Hot Tech like drag-and-drop and edit-in-place!

I added a couple other things......... but I can't quite remember what they are. At the very least the site is possibly crash-proof now (hellooo qualifiers).

p.s. we're on flavorpill. hungry hungry hipsters?

ingredient elimination diet thing!

Now when you're searching for recipes by what ingredients you've got you can specify what ingredients you'd like to not include, which is good for people with culinary restrictions (food allergies, etc). You can only use it from that page, though, and only from the top search box.

i hate 1and1 and their horrible customer support.

I woke up to the server being crashed, again, and so now snacksby has been down for 9 hours when all 1and1 needs to do is press the reset button. I've wasted over an hour being on the phone with 1and1's "customer support" twice, both times saying they are sending the issue over to the administrators. It's 9 hours later, guys. Come on. Even if Snacksby is having trouble, it isn't too much to ask someone to walk over and hit reset three times in four days. PS It's a managed server, if you care.

The plan now is to move the SQL database off of the server and over onto one of my dreamhost accounts, and start moving the code somewhere else as well. if keeping the mysql stuff separate doesn't help, then i'll permanently move the code. Here's hopin'!

Snacksby, yahoo'd to the nines?

Just found out Snacksby is featured on today's The 9, a Yahoo newscasty internetty kind of thing ("it’s like Internet Talk Soup!"). We're #6, which means we beat out skateboarding, william shatner and a site that sings the news to you!

update: snacksby was runnin' all nice and fast and all, then suddenly it got brought to its kneeeees.

another update: i hate 1and1, i am totally finding a new place to host snacksby. why can't they just reboot the server? Oh, right, because that would be too easy.

....i broke substitutions while making other things better. they'll be back soon enough! update: back.

recipes and blogs have never been better bedfellows

Like to blog about your recipes? We've got a new tool to help you do just that! The Recipe Droplet lets you store your recipes in Snacksby and then with the press of a couple buttons plug them right onto your blog. You want an example? Take THIS! (I'm too lazy to style it with CSS, just accept it!)

It isn't even 10 a.m. 4 pm and i've made two three one billion improvements!

il primo: User request to make it so you can't add duplicate items to your pantry. Done! Now if two Snacksby can figure out how to combine things, it will. Apologies in advance for combining dashes and tablespoons to make something like 3.00045324 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar.

il secondo: In the holy name of competition, results in the recipe search for when you don't have everything are returned in order of what percentage of the ingredients you have. What competition? Recipematcher, an adsensey site which registered its domain name on june 20th, the very same day snacksby was released! I can barely count the number of people who have brought this site to my attention on two three fingers, it's spreadin' like internet-crazy. I guess I'll have to run off and get on techcrunch now?

Oh p.s. One of those two people actually emailed the recipematcher guy, and he claims he was developing the site beforehand, and the domain name registration is a coincidence. I believe him! You should, too.

il contorno: why am i the only person who realized voting didn't work? it does now!

il dolce: you can now remove things from your shopping cart by clicking the little 'x' next to them. i promise you one day i'm going to make that be a real image!

also: snacksby graduated from 3rd grade and is now much better at understanding measurements for the typey-boxes.

Snacksby API! Google Homepage Module!

Heeyyyyooooo here comes some new Snacksby new stuff ice cream van! First up we've got a REST API, with all kinds of ingredient/recipe/tag search functionality. Develop some stuff for it or let me know what you need and I'll improve it!

What's that? I don't trust you? You're right! I went and made a google homepage module just so the API would be useful! Also let me know if you'd like me to attach anything to that. Coming soon should be a netvibes one, since I think everyone I know actually uses Netvibes and not Google...

Oh and here's a nice clicky-button you can click to add it to your Google homepage:

1and1

Remember this name: 1and1. Why? Because they're the hosting provider that makes Snacksby die all of the time. All of the time. This morning we were out from about 6:30 or so until almost noon. I'm going to release that stuff I was talking about a couple days ago today, even if it isn't completely done - I don't know exactly what I'm doing with them so I'll need some feedback from you cats!

two (2)

There's been a lot of radio silence recently. Why? I've been working hard! Two big things are coming to Snacksby. One of them is a TLA. The other one will live on your Google homepage.

And I'm telling you this because..? Because I'm hyped!