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The idea for this has been around for a for a while. http://forkthecookbook.com/ http://forkthecookbook.com/ goes back to 2012. And its an interesting idea. Re
by Jaepa 9y ago
The idea for this has been around for a for a while. http://forkthecookbook.com/ http://forkthecookbook.com/ goes back to 2012.
And its an interesting idea. Recipes can't be copyrighted and and recipes are generally derivative. The data is generally well structured, and fairly standardized (ingredients, equipment, instructions, photo, with optional fields for prep & cook time, servings, notes, difficulty, etc). But there are two primary issues:
1. Recipes don't really have a single inheritance. For example, I cook a lot & really enjoying cooking, but when I'm trying to make something new, I won't follow a recipe. I will read a bunch recipes, and try to understand the underlying ideas & steal the ones I think are interesting, then implement my own. So say I look up Tufo Matar find 3 recipes the make my own, if I want to contribute which recipe do I fork?
2. This may have been dealt with by the use of stars. when I was using forkthecookbook, there was no way of "bookmarking" recipes and the so users forked them, which lead to the results having huge number of identical forks. That being said it seems like the star system may resolve that. But currently it looks as though unmodified copies of the recipes still appear in the Forks list, which makes it harder to find benifical changes. Also it would be nice to have a history section with a message summarizing what changed.
All that said this does look nice.
Additionally, a nice feature to have would be to "import" a recipe, though since phrasing of a recipe is protected this gets a little bit legally complicated.
- keithasaurus 9y agoThanks for the great feedback. Yeah, the version history, etc will have a UI at some point. You're also right that needs to be some sort of indication for the diff between forks. We'll get there. People haven't been going crazy with forks yet (turns out if you post to hacker news, that changes :), so that will be worked on. There is an importer already! It's not perfect, but it works with most recipe sites. Thanks for pointing out forkthecookbook.com. I hadn't seen that, and it's definitely relevant.
- Jaepa 9y agoOh cool I missed that. It looks like a fun project. I will definitely join and try to contribute some. Is there a better means of reporting bugs than the the contact us email form?
- chewxy 9y agohello, FtC author here... it's mainly a zombie project now (you know, dead, but still has active users)
- keithasaurus 9y agoi like some of the ui ideas on your site. nice work.
- fanpuns 9y agoI tried this FtC before this one and really liked the idea. Did you ever do any write ups about making this project or the launch?
- Jaepa 9y agoHey chewxy. I think I talked to you about FtC for a while when it came out(irc maybe?). Good to see you again.
- ehotinger 9y agoYeah, it's interesting how many people have had the same idea at some point or another. I was fiddling around with Rails and AWS for a bit around 4 years ago and used the same idea for a tiny project. It's a bit like deja vu. https://github.com/ehotinger/OldCode/tree/master/VariantChef https://github.com/ehotinger/OldCode/tree/master/VariantChef
- overcast 9y agoA lot of us have tried this idea, me included two years ago. It seems like a logical idea, but there really isn't enough people looking for it.