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Turn recipe websites into plain text
- greenie_beans 6y agoYes!! Thank you
- rawoke083600 6y agoOH AWESOME !
- dlivingston 6y agoThis is great and works, for the supported sites, remarkably well. One major flaw: it seems like the calories and macros aren’t captured. For bodybuilding and powerlifting types, and other athletics, these are the most important part of a meal. What would make this a “killer app”, in my view, is if I could request a recipe in JSON instead of just formatted plain text as you do. Then I could use the recipe (and recipe search) in my own home-brewed meal planning program.
- aspenmayer 6y agoVery nice insight. I might even go a step further and archive the entire page[1]; hard drive space is cheap, and how many recipes is one person going to save, honestly? 1-2 LOCs worth? Then you can just parse the content you want, with the ability to drop down into the original page as you first saw it. As a person with better visual memory for certain kinds of data, having the original page content may have as much meaning as the recipe, for entirely different reasons. Food can be very personal, and recipe books doubly so. A recipe archive can be as personal as we like, or all of that can abstracted away when we don’t need it. [1] https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs
- gindely 6y agoLOC? Line of Code? Surely 1-2 LOCs is significantly less than any recipe.
- icegreentea2 6y agoI'm guess it's "Library of Congress"
- aspenmayer 6y agoYeah, that’s what I meant. I was going for a visual metaphor that might be lost if I just said some number of bytes.
- aspenmayer 6y agoI meant Library of Congress, an anachronistic visual metaphor related to data storage from the 1990s, perhaps earlier? In 2012, 1 LoC was roughly equivalent to ~3 PB (petabytes). I remember first seeing it on Slashdot way back in the day, before they had user moderation or user meta-moderation. https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/04/a-library-of-congress-worth-of-data-its-all-in-how-you-define-it/ https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/04/a-library-of-congres... If you save the source document, the code needed to parse your recipe archive is likely to be pretty short. Then you have a corpus to do A/B testing of your recipe parsing code against. Side note: I feel that moderation and later meta-moderation system on Slashdot was the most transparent, fun, positive moderation system I’ve ever been part of. I wish HN had more than just up and downvotes, for instance. User meta-moderation would help reduce flamewars immensely IMO. https://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml https://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml https://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml https://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml
- langitbiru 6y agoThis is awesome. But perhaps this product is better packaged as a browser extension. So when you browsed a recipe page, the product would turn the page into a plain text recipe.
- chaos_a 6y agoOr an app of sorts. Usually when I look up recipes it's on my phone, these recipe sites are even worse on mobile.
- notatoad 6y agoi use this one, it works quite well https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlcdjbkdaegmljnnncfnhiioiadakae?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...
- wackro 6y agoDefinitely this. ... but then I noticed Firefox reader view does this. Take a look: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/brilliant-banana-loaf https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/brilliant-banana-loaf
- bagacrap 6y agoI'd rather not install an extension (trust) and not all browsers I use (e.g. on mobile) support extensions. You can use a bookmarklet pretty much anywhere though: javascript:location.href='https://plainoldrecipe.com/recipe?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href) https://plainoldrecipe.com/recipe?url='+encodeURIComponent(l...
- SilasHaslam 6y agoThanks for the great idea. The code got broken in the comment, but was easy enough to reconstruct. Another bookmarklet I use is PrintFriendly. It uses some of it's own js, and also works well on recipe sites - giving more options for what to keep/remove.
- bjoli 6y agoNeat! Now make a website that instantly electrocutes or at least painfully shocks people that publish recipes as Instagram stories! The accumulated anger I have after trying to follow those will mean a hefty donation from my side :) As an aside: I live in a jurisdiction where recipes cannot be copyrighted, so I have collected all recipes I remotely liked on a web page with only text. All recipes except some of the very last ones "untested, potentially disgusting" headline are in Swedish though: https://koketteriet.se/skrivet/Recept/recept.html https://koketteriet.se/skrivet/Recept/recept.html
- perk 6y agoWow, your collection of recipes is a goldmine, thanks! Didn't know that recipes couldn't be copyrighted here in Sweden.
- bjoli 6y agoIt is due to a very old ruling saying that just listing ingredients and steps is not enough to reach a "threshold of originality" (verkshöjd).
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoMaybe that’s why modern recipes on the web at 90,000 word behemoth life stories with one step of the recipe every 70 screens of indirection.
- bjoli 6y agoWe can still just copy the how and what, and not the accompanying epic novel :) I think I managed to give credit where it is due (in the intro, at least), but about 60% of the recipes are things we veganised ourselves from whatever old family recipes we have.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoPlug a friends books here, all vegan from Byron Bay in New South Whales: http://organicpassioncatering.com/ http://organicpassioncatering.com/ Anyway, I find, as I rapidly approach the big four-oh, I don’t need recipes much anyways, so I have a sleeve-book with some recipes, some pages are just dish names, and others are flavours or ingredients that go together.
- Polylactic_acid 6y agoRecipe websites are the worst of web design. To make things even worse they are mostly used on mobile where bloat/advertisements/janky loading is even more of a pain.
- somehnguy 6y agoNot to mention the 1200 word partial life story preceding every recipe. I could not care less what pivotal moment in your childhood led you to like chocolate cake. I just want to make one.
- batiudrami 6y agogotta try and hide from the Google robot that you're just a content farm monetising other people's copyrighted content somehow. you'll note the recipes are always "adapted from" somewhere else with a minor change.
- ggop 6y agoHighly recommend BBC Good Food. Just the recipes without the fluff. They also have ratings but no review, which is great.
- HenryBemis 6y agoDouble edge knife here, but reviews can be very helpful, when the audience is positive they can provide good alternatives/substitutes, ideas to increase/reduce this or that ingredient to achieve a different flavour, etc.
- silveroriole 6y agoHuh? Good Food does have reviews/comments at the bottom of the page.
- soco 6y agoThis. Now imagine having a tool/extension/app to filter out this...
- 6y ago
- cburger 6y agoThis is awesome. Thanks !
- Lerain 6y agoThis is pretty cool! Are you open to PRs for foreign language recipe sites (German in my case)?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kaonwarb 6y agoThank you for this. For an app the does something similar (not free): https://www.paprikaapp.com/ https://www.paprikaapp.com/
- diroussel 6y agoI've been using Paprika app for years, and I would reccomend it. As well as importing from websites, you can enter you own recipes. And my wife and I can sync between our phones and laptops so we can follow and edit the same recipes. Very handy.
- blcarson 6y agoThe title on the homepage is spelled wrong but otherwise nice work! :)
- HenryBemis 6y ago"Plan" instead of "Plain". No spellchecker will pick this up :) Many will see, few will notice, and typoglycemia will do the rest :)
- cstuder 6y agoA german synonym for typoglycemia is "Buchstabensalat" - letter salad. So maybe it's a very subtle joke. Otherwise there's a PR open: https://github.com/poundifdef/plainoldrecipe/pull/1 https://github.com/poundifdef/plainoldrecipe/pull/1
- vestrigi 6y agoI was already excited when Apple showcased an Extension for the new Safari in their keynote that did something similar. I wonder if any of these websites will find a way to prevent these recipe scrapers from working so that people read the damn ads in their blog texts. Instapaper‘s article extraction gets rejected from time to time and Safari‘s reader mode too, but it’s mostly on major news sites.
- jspash 6y agoNow if you can add a feature to convert Cups -> Grams correctly then you've got my money!
- CGamesPlay 6y agoWhy is cups->mL not sufficient? Cups->grams just seems more prone to errors in general.
- barbegal 6y agoBecause most Europeans use weighing scales rather than volumetric measurements. When I'm baking I put the bowl on the scales and pour in the ingredients. When recipes say 1tbsp or 2tsp it gets me annoyed because if they had converted to grams I could just pour those ingredients straight in too but instead I need to get out my volumetric measures (or in most cases just guess and hope it doesn't matter too much)
- DavidVoid 6y agoHuh, here in Sweden we use volumetric measurement for most things (milk, flour, sugar, etc.), usually in milli- centi- or deciliter. The exception is usually butter, which is measured in grams (and conveniently indicated on the packaging).
- gindely 6y agoWell, the conveniently indicated grams on the packet are not units of weight - they're units of volume. So you've got two kinds of units of volume in your recipes: milli/centi/decilitres, and grams of butter. But it's fairer than the grams of flour I've been ranting about elsewhere here because at least the manufacturer can have some responsibility for fine tuning it to their product!
- qtk8 6y agoDo you have any source for your claim that "grams of butter", "grams of flour" and "grams of sugar" do not all refer to the SI unit "gram"? I live in Europe and have always weighed exactly 100g on the scale, whether I was asked for 100 grams of butter, sugar or flour.
- butler14 6y agoAs this only works on certain websites, that implies you're not pulling from something consistent e.g. structured data, which the vast majority of popular / visible websites should use e.g. https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/#url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.everydayhealthyrecipes.com%2Fauthentic-polish-bigos-stew-recipe%2F https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/#... out of interest, did you try using structured data to scale the tool?
- C1sc0cat 6y agoYes I would have thought that handling json mark-up would be the first thing that would be implemented. Having said that a lot of users of recipe mark-up have problems implementing it properly.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoTried it with two websites, and neither was supported. Is this aiming to be a domain-specific equivalent of Outline.com and reader-mode?
- wimagguc 6y agoI wonder if this could work as a DuckDuckGo clip? You search for a recipe, and see the result right there on top, without all the fluff.
- memset 6y agoHi! I built this! (Surprised to see it on the front page as I didn’t get much traction when i first submitted it :) Anyway, all of you have a lot of neat suggestions! Please do take a look at the “contributing” section of the repo and let me know if you’d like to pitch in!
- chillee 6y agoHackernews is quite random - stuff that gets no upvotes will sometimes get hundreds of upvotes the next time it's posted. That's why they explicitly allow some amount of reposting.
- danielbarla 6y agoFrom what I've observed on other sites (mostly StackOverflow and Reddit) I think there are a few major components to this, namely: timing of post, luck / randomness regarding early upvotes, and other posts during that day. The last one is a bit like when a film releases on the same weekend as some blockbuster, it is more likely to go under the radar. The middle condition is mostly luck, unless someone is prepared to manipulate the early upvotes somehow. But the first one is quite easy to time correctly - US-heavy sites tend to have a few time slots where a disproportionately large number of people check it. My guess would be morning, lunch and afternoon slots, and especially slots where different time zones overlap. E.g. an afternoon slot for Europe which overlaps with the Eastern seaboard doing a morning check of HN might work quite well, etc. This can help a fresh post break through the decaying, but highly upvoted older posts that are keeping it from more visibility.
- julianlam 6y agoA couple years back, there was a hackernews post that analyzed hundreds of HN submissions and determined which times were best to post. Some days I wish I had bookmarked that link
- tleb_ 6y agoThis [0]? Or the linked article in it? [0]: https://chanind.github.io/2019/05/07/best-time-to-submit-to-hacker-news.html https://chanind.github.io/2019/05/07/best-time-to-submit-to-...
- reactchain 6y agoI want a tool like this for any website, that intelligently extracts just the useful part as plain text. Reader view and so forth just don't work that well. Are there any tools around like this?
- tgb 6y agoI've always wondered why recipes have the ingredient list and quantity separate from the instructions. I often have to scroll up and down (even on a mostly-decent recipe site like all recipes.com) first to see what gets added next and then to see how much of it to add. Why not tell me it's one teaspoon of salt in the same place as you tell me to add the salt? Only advantage to separating them is to make the shopping list, but no reason one can't duplicate the quantities.
- DennisP 6y agoAnd if it's on a computer instead of on paper, there's no reason you can't tag the ingredients inline, and automatically generate your shopping list from the tags.
- doersino 6y agoSame. As a result, I've been using this LaTeX package for my personal recipe collection (see example on page 5): http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/ctan/macros/latex/contrib/cuisine/cuisine.pdf http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/ctan/macros/latex/contrib/cuisine/cui... [PDF] (I'm in the process of abandoning LaTeX in favor of a custom Markdown → Pandoc → HTML flow with basically the same layout, though.)
- Bo0kerDeWitt 6y agoI save my recipes in plain old text files. For a long time now I've been meaning to write them up in LaTeX and print them on A6 cards with a nice font. Then construct a nice wooden box to put them in.
- mhb 6y agoThat sounds nice. Do you have a good way of organizing it?
- jevogel 6y agoWe have our recipes in a Trello board for meal planning, grocery list making, etc. I wrote a Python script to extract the data and print out an oft-used subset of them in a nice readable format. I use a Jinja2 template to format the pages with HTML and CSS, then convert them to one PDF document for printing. I use an 8.5x11 page with metadata on one side (name, description, time to make, tags, dates made, etc.) and the recipe on the other. On the recipe side I have ingredients at the top of the page in two columns, and then the directions at the bottom in two columns. We put this page in a plastic sleeve and into a 3-ring binder. When we want to make the recipe, we take it out and tape it to the cupboard with masking tape. That way anyone in the kitchen can easily see it and prep their part.
- xwdv 6y agoRecipes are so common on the web that we need a <recipe> html tag along with <rs> and <ri> for steps and ingredients.
- 2038AD 6y agothere is actually a standard using attributes :) https://schema.org/Recipe https://schema.org/Recipe
- furstenheim 6y agoVery interesting. I'm starting now a project to organise my recipes. With https://github.com/domchristie/turndown https://github.com/domchristie/turndown it transforms the html from clipboard into markdown, they result is really good and it's generic to all recipes. Of course you don't have structure of the recipe and it does not simply work with a url.
- SamuelAdams 6y agoNeat idea! The fiance and I have taken to simply printing recipes on paper. It has the benefit of eliminating a lot of the cruft that the website has - condensing the printed material to just ingredients and instructions. And makes it really easy to reference a week or two later if we want to remake it - just pull it out of the binder.
- mhb 6y agoI've tried that. After the recipe binder got to be a couple of inches thick, it would take more discipline than I have to keep it organized in some kind of effective way. Plus I don't know what way that would be. So I pretty much end up either looking at the laptop while cooking or printing out a new copy each time.
- btbuildem 6y agoVery cool! Does a good job on select websites. Next stop: the holy grail of recipe website cleanup, removing the mindless drivel about the author's.. whatever / whoever, their inane anectodes, and generally any trace of their annoying personalities (here's an offending example: https://www.ibreatheimhungry.com/easy-roasted-pork-shoulder-3/ https://www.ibreatheimhungry.com/easy-roasted-pork-shoulder-...)
- tlofreso 6y agoNice work! I built something very similar: https://recipemincer.com https://recipemincer.com It seems you're using the same Python scraper I am: https://github.com/hhursev/recipe-scrapers https://github.com/hhursev/recipe-scrapers
- patrickbolle 6y agoThis is fantastic! I'd love it if I could pair this with an RSS aggregator to get new, plain-text recipes in my RSS feed every day/week, etc. Right now I get an RSS feed of my favourite recipe sites but have to get through so much junk to see the actual recipe. I recently went down the rabbit hole of recipe websites while I built a little side project Shopify app for creating recipes on ecommerce stores[1]. Having a plaintext version has been on my backlog to-do list forever, but it seems the vast majority of store owners aren't keen on it. It's been a massive learning experience for me; and I never realized how... bad the recipe website experience was for so many people. Question: how do you think we, as in us as the people building the current web, can improve the standard recipe display on the web? Obviously removing the 1300 word novel before recipes is a big plus, but what else do you think would improve your day-to-day recipe browsing? [1] https://recipekit.app/ https://recipekit.app/
- bagacrap 6y agothe obvious answer is to remove the insane number of enormous ads you have to scroll past or click through on your way past that novella
- patrickbolle 6y agoThat's valid. I guess I haven't seen ads in a long time thanks to ublock, but makes sense for the general reader for sure.
- Jolter 6y agoGot a certificate security error from Firefox, so didn't visit.
- ErikAugust 6y agoTrim is a general purpose remover of cruft, but seems to work on recipe sites: https://beta.trimread.com/articles/23286 https://beta.trimread.com/articles/23286
- dmje 6y agoThis is ace! I do often wonder if many recipe sites ever really think about the user experience. It's almost always going to be on mobile and there's either got to be a simplicity to the presentation (which is what this does brilliantly) OR a really simple way to flick between ingredients and method. The one that stands out for me is Jamie Oliver (example: https://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/vegetables-recipes/veggie-chilli/ https://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/vegetables-recipes/veggi...) - on mobile there's this super simple tab that flips you between ingredients / method. It's simple, but exactly what you want, especially when you're covered in flour / oil / etc... :-)
- benawad 6y agoIt looks like you're using the recipe-scrapers library to scrape recipes which only supports a set number of websites. If you want to expand that, I recommend parsing JSON+LD and Microformats. Given your parsers folder [2], it looks like you've tried it, but only for specific websites. I would make that generic and check whether the metadata is available on any website. I wrote a blog post on this if you're interested [3]. source: I've built a very similar tool for my cooking app: https://www.mysaffronapp.com/ https://www.mysaffronapp.com/ [1] https://github.com/hhursev/recipe-scrapers https://github.com/hhursev/recipe-scrapers [2] https://github.com/poundifdef/plainoldrecipe/blob/master/parsers/bowlofdelicious.py https://github.com/poundifdef/plainoldrecipe/blob/master/par... [3] https://www.benawad.com/scraping-recipe-websites/ https://www.benawad.com/scraping-recipe-websites/
- xtracto 6y agoHowdy crap... I just created an account on your website and added one random recipe (cashew nut yoghurt) that did not work on the original post site, and it worked like a charm! You've got a new paying customer :) I'd been looking for something like your app for a long time. Ough, your PayPal flow is not working :( fix that and you'll have a paying customer haha
- benawad 6y agoOops, what part of the flow isn't working?
- adrianmonk 6y agoMy quick and dirty trick for finding the actual recipe in a long blog post: Ctrl+F "print". Probably 90+% of websites use some tool to format the actual recipe, so the actual recipe pretty consistently includes a link for printing it. Search for the word "print", and it takes you to the part of the page that has the recipe. (You don't actually have to click the link. It's just a landmark for navigation within the page.)
- bennettfeely 6y agoRelated: I just launched a website with a collection of easily copy-and-paste-able lists in plain text. https://copypastelist.com/ https://copypastelist.com/
- bovermyer 6y agoRecently I started putting my recipes on my personal website in a minimalist way. No stories, no ads, no images.
- richardgill88 6y agoThis is really cool, I've been building a site to help build templated recipes with markdown and javascript and I'll definitely be using this when I transcribe recipes! https://programmablerecipes.com https://programmablerecipes.com
- mobasirhassan 6y agoI am eagerly awaiting for something like that can happen in coming days. There are lots of things like photos, video, ingredients, nutritional value, serving tips, recipe notes and ofcourse structure data in my https://hassanchef.com https://hassanchef.com