snacksby blog snacksby blog!

Just in time for L.U.N.C.H.

2007-02-21T08:53:00.000-08:00

A suprising number of you use the pantry! For the uninitiated: basically you list out what you've got on hand and store it on Snacksby and everything is nice and neat and saved and perfect.

But not always as perfect as it could be.

Enter completion badges! Now whenever you are logged in and visit a recipe page, you get a nice little badge, like so

that lets you know how close you are to making the recipe! Sure, it only works all that well if you keep your pantry up to date, but I've only been using it for 20 minutes and I already like how it gives me a quick overview of my options!

Future plans along this route would probably be: automatically showing this when you're browsing recipes a la search-by-ingredient-list and highlighting what you have/don't have on the recipe page (Get out your fancy pants!). It also doesn't work with synonyms or substitutions just yet, but c'mon, cut us a break. We're workaholics enough for you kids already.

So yeah. Hopefully you dig that!

feeds and callouts

2007-02-16T14:19:00.000-08:00

Callouts:

Myself, for elbowing a girl in the face on the metro yesterday morning

Create a recipe on the main recipe page!

Yeah, that probably isn't very important to you. But hey, I like people adding recipes, so it comes first.

Fallouts:
Age-old technologies, like visiting webpages. What do we want? RSS! When do we want it? In the next paragraph!

http://www.snacksby.com/rss/recipe is the location of our very first and most excellent RSS feed for freshly minted recipes. I haven't linked it on the main site yet, (a) because it's after 5 on a friday, and (b) because maybe it might end up being kind of broken and I'll need you to tell me if it is!

If you'd like to do other neat things, you can always kick it like this:
http://www.snacksby.com/rss/recipes/users/marchdoe for a feed of marchdoe's recipes!
http://www.snacksby.com/rss/recipes/ingredients/coconut%20milk for a feed of any recipes involving coconut milk!
http://www.snacksby.com/rss/recipes/tags/vegetarian for a feed of any recipes tagged with vegetarian!

THIS IS MONUMENTAL AND WILL ONLY GET BIGGER, MY FRIENDS. ALSO: BETTER. ALSO: let me know if they break. they update every half-hour, although we all know that's way more frequent than it needs to be.

power to zee people

2007-02-09T13:42:00.000-08:00

You people out there - I've looked in through your narrowed eyes, into your dark souls, I know what you hunger for.

Social networking stuff.

And a journal of a thousand miles starts with a single feature release: shared recipe lists! Now you can see what recipes a person has saved! Not enough privacy, you say? If you'd like to keep all of your lamb curries hidden from your thinking feeling friends, no worries, you can always go into your recipe box and uncheck the share this list box. Easy as imaginary pie!

Go forth! Make swoon-worthy recipe lists! (mine are pretty lame right now.)

buddha's delight

2007-02-07T14:29:00.000-08:00

Rumor has it I'm a vegetarian, and once upon a time I lived with a vegan. Cooking was a character-building experience! Another rumor has it that when I'm scrolling through a list of ten thousand different recipes I don't want to have to read through eighty tags what I can make for who.

And so we fixed that.

Now when you're rolling around Snacksby you'll get a little icon next to the name of anything that's tagged as vegan or vegetarian ! Sure, this relies on you characters out there to accurately add the 'vegetarian' or 'vegan' tag to recipes*, but in the eternal wisdom of not only George Michael but also Limp Bizkit, we've gotta have faith.

FUTURE-LY FORTHCOMING THINGS BEGINNING WITH F: Friendship! Favorites! Flavor!

*do this! please!

bring out your pens

2007-02-05T13:44:00.000-08:00

Courges and courgettes, today I am pleased to announce: SHOPPING LISTS ARE BETTER. Now you can have them subtract out what you've got in your pantry so you don't have to spend forever doing editing work!

Now, we all might know about the normal shopping list, where you click and say "add to shopping list" and stuff like that. What you might not know about is that your recipe box holds special shopping lists just for a set of recipes. How does it work? Let's have a little review!

Add some recipes to your recipe box - Visit a recipe page, like Beef, Orange and Gorgonzola Sandwiches (which is notable for lacking gorgonzola). Click Save to Recipe Box up by the top. Repeat this for a few other recipes you're thinking of making this week!

Visit your recipe box - It's right over here. When you put your mouse over the area by a recipe, you'll notice two things. First, the text next to it turns yellow and highlighted. Click it and then you can add a note to the recipe - I have 'make this vegetarian!!!' by those beef sandwiches. Next, if you go outside of that a little your mouse turns into a four-pointed arrow. Click the mouse and hold it down, and drag the recipe down under 'new list.' Voila! You're starting a new list! After you've dragged your recipes where you want them, click the 'new list' title and rename the area.

Get the shopping list! - Under each list there is a button that says "Get a shopping list for...". CLICK IT! You'll see a list of all of the ingredients in the recipe. Snacksby tried hard to add them up correctly, but sometimes it's a little off (like if we don't know how many cups of watermelon is a pound).

Get the BETTER shopping list - Have you filled out your pantry yet? It's an easy way to let the site know what you've got on hand so that you don't always have to type it in! Once you've done that, you can click "remove items in your pantry from this list" and Snacksby will draw a line through all of the ingredients you've already got, and if you have 4 carrots in your pantry and you need 6, it will update the list to say you only need 2! INCREDIBLE!!!

Whew! And, of course, if you don't want to go through all of those steps you can always just hit "Add to shopping list" up at the top of any recipe page and it will add the recipe to your main shopping list. But now, basically, you can pick the recipes you'd like to make for a week, and easily go to the grocery store and buy exactly what you need, easily!

So that's the story about what's new. And how did this happen? Because people filled out the survey! If you've got any ideas, just bounce on over there and let us know, and we'll stick them in the on-the-way list!

(Oh, and if you don't like the fact that the ingredients that got removed are just crossed out instead of totally deleted, complain a tiny bit and I'll add in a button to take them off of thet list for you.)

We got mentioned on Lifehacker today by a kind kind user, in response to a story about a service called The Six O'Clock Scramble, where you pay $60/year or so to get shipped a set of menus for the week as well as a shopping list. Sounds keen to me! But can you pick the recipes? Can you plan for vegetarians? Does it know what you've already got lying around? Not so much! I know a lot of you would like to use Snacksby in this way, and that's why I used today to fix up shopping lists. If you have any other ideas that would help us help you, let us know!

(PS: Snacksby's free!)

Communication is the foundation to any good relationship.

2007-02-01T09:45:00.000-08:00

You might not believe it, but Snacksby doesn't sit around so we can climb to the top of a mountain and make exclamations about how wonderful it is. Snacksby sits around so you can sit around at the computer and use it to create culinary masterpieces and/or rock candy. But why do you use it, and how do you want to use it?

I'm not exactly sure!

That's where this survey comes in. We're collecting a bit of information from you cats and kittens so that we can figure out what to do next! There's about 60 trillion options open to us, we just need to know which ones actual Snacksby users want - so fill it out!!!!

UPDATES: Beyond the survey, I've made a couple changes to the adding-a-recipe thing, so now it has less steps than the Empire State Building. I've also fixed a couple bugs, but I'm sure there's more out there, so let me know when you come across them!

COMING SOON: Would you like to be able to look at the recipes you've put in your recipe box and see how close to making all of them you are? I sure would! (...and I mean how many of the ingredients you have. We are not installing cameras in your house to track your progress. Yet.)

OH: if you'd like to drop us an email, snacksby@revolutionhealth.com is our address!

LAST NIGHT: I made a couple Snacksby recipes. Cold Peanut Noodles is probably one of my favorites, for being incrrrredibly easy and for the noodles being the only cooking-ish part of it. I was searching for something to use peanut butter, sesame oil and noodles, but forgot to put water in. That totally needs to be something you 'have' automatically. Maybe salt, too!

I also made about 10 cups of miso soup, but added silken tofu and wakame (seaweed!) and chinese black mushrooms. I made the dashi last night, too, which was a miserable experience since I followed some site's directions to soak the kombu (also: konbu. Another seaweed!) in cold water, then bring it to a simmer. Do you know how long it takes to boil cold water?! Forever! This is why I don't make italian food.

I need to start taking pictures.

stop! snacksbytime.

2007-01-26T11:47:00.000-08:00

Okay, now for a real post, with much less rah rah gobbleygook. There's actual snacksby news!

First off, maybe you didn't notice, but it doesn't quite look the same. That's a pretty boring topic to me (except for the "3 or 4" kind of deals on the recipe search results page, i think that's super keen), but let me know what you think!

Secondly, i'm going to start talking in the third plural singular ALL OF THE TIME. It's what happens when you get bought, I think.

Thirdly:

Actual improvements! Searching is now killer compared to what it used to be. When you search for a recipe from the boring [not "what's in your pantry?"] searchbox it searches through: ingredients! the user that made it! the description! the name! other things! Whereas before it just checked the title or something else completely useless. SO: you can now find recipes about ninety times more effectively.

Entering recipes! It's now something like 4 steps. Should it all be on one page? Should it be less steps? Do you like it? Lemme know!

Ingredient input box! It's a crazy crazy thing that you'll see on the new recipe page as well as the pantry editing page, and probably other places. I won't explain it because I'd like to know whether you guys* like it or not. It's supposed to make entering your ingredients less painful and more all-in-one-screen. Opinions?

Related snacksonomies! I had to learn mathematics for that one, friends. Set theory and MORE! It's a little bit buggy but hey, I have a liberal arts degree.

Tagged substitutions! That's kinda fine, I guess, right?

Anyway, there's probably some broken stuff on the site, try to toss me an email at snacksby@revolutionhealth.com if you run across any. I'd appreciate it! I'd also appreciate any thoughts on the new site, or suggestions as what you'd like out of it now. I wouldn't have asked a question in just about every paragraph of this entry if i didn't care about what you thought!

* that's gender-neutral 'guys,' ladies!

WHAT HAPPENED?!?!?

2007-01-26T11:33:00.000-08:00

Snacksby minded its manners and studied hard in school, and as a result: SNACKSBY GOT BOUGHT. By Revolution Health Group, specifically. If you thought Snacksby was good before, get out your fancy napkin holders because this is going to be great! Revolution Health launched a pretty neat health site which will "empower you and your family with world-class products and services to better manage your health and wellness needs." But don't worry, we didn't get gobbled up by the corporate machine, Snacksby will still be as charming as ever - and since it won't just be a hobby anymore, it should end up being about sixty times more useful!

Thanks a million for helping this happen!

1:1

2006-09-10T08:21:00.000-07:00

Success!: Now when you're inputting a recipe you can do an amazon-supported search to find the cookbook it's from, so it'll pop up with a nice little image when you view the recipe. Aaaaand if someone buys it then I get a kickback! Give me a bit and you'll also be able to browse recipes by cookbook sources.

Failure!: You know how I asked about NYC? Well, there's a lil' thing called freshdirect that does grocery delivery. I hacked up a nice little script to allow you to add items to your freshdirect cart from your shopping list on Snacksby, but it turns out even their website doesn't allow session hijacking, which was how you were going to take over Snacksby's freshdirect shopping cart. That's fine enough, I suppose, so people don't steal your credit card info or something, but it sure did make all of my work for nothing - maybe if you plead real nice they'll let sessions get stolen for not-logged-in users? Anyway, that's what I've been working on recently, sucks it didn't work out.

I guess I'll try to hook into Amazon's services or something... Anyone use any other online grocery services?

vulgar bulghur and other tales

2006-09-06T05:01:00.001-07:00

This weekend I was in chicago, my new favorite city on earth since I don't care about foie gras (I do care about pierogies, just in case you were wondering. asparagus/feta/red pepper vareniki? yeah!). I was in a spelling bee in a bar and fell out in the first round on the word bulgur, which i spelled bulghur, because that's how it's spelled on the damn bag of bulgur wheat i've got sitting on my counter.

But while I was gone? Oh right, Snacksby died. Apologies about that. In an amazing and unpredictable fit of competence, however, 1and1 seems to have restarted the server for me without me waiting on hold for a million years or even calling them at all. It's incredible! I've turned off a couple things in the meantime and miiight not really turn them back on for the moment 'cause I've got bigger fish to fry. They just a couple measurementy things, you'll probably survive.

Not like anyone really reads this, but: Do any of you live in New York City? I need to know, sort of, for secret things.

vulgar bulghur and other tales

2006-09-06T05:01:00.000-07:00

kind of neat relationshippy thing

2006-08-27T19:51:00.000-07:00

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?

2006-08-26T20:34:00.000-07:00

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:

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

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.

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

shopping lists + recipe box + sorting + other things

2006-08-22T05:42:00.000-07:00

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!

2006-08-21T04:46:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-08-18T11:56:00.000-07:00

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?

2006-08-15T07:17:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-08-14T05:14:00.000-07:00

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

recipes and blogs have never been better bedfellows

2006-08-13T08:24:00.000-07:00

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!)

2006-08-12T07:05:00.000-07:00

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!

2006-08-08T11:58:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-08T08:49:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-08-02T21:12:00.000-07:00

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!

wall street journal

2006-07-27T04:00:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-26T17:48:00.000-07:00

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.