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Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites

• danychok 5y ago
  Ben Awad developed a great little app which addresses this problem also. I believe he developed it with his mother - who is a the designer. https://www.mysaffronapp.com/ https://www.mysaffronapp.com/
  • SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
    I've been using that app for a while. It's pretty nice.
• AwkwardPanda 5y ago
  It can get frustrating skimming through text walls just to find the recipe on blogs/sites. Authors do it to get high ranking on Google. You can use OnlyRecipe.app to extract the recipe information. It works on almost all sites/blogs which follow a recipe standard when they post. You can also save it to your phone directly using the app. Scan recipe QR code using your phone camera and voila. Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mysticpeaks.onlyrecipe https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mysticpeak... iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1602130759 https://apps.apple.com/app/id1602130759 Short 50-seconds video on how recipe camera scanner works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziSNwjv9PXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziSNwjv9PXo Currently working on a feature that lets you share recipe "image cards" with your friends.. Something like this https://i.redd.it/kk1goqsswo981.png https://i.redd.it/kk1goqsswo981.png Let me know if you'd use that feature
  • logifail 5y ago
    > Authors do it to get high ranking on Google [..] I believe it's more likely that it's to do with whether you can or can't copyright a listing of ingredients and method. If you add enough of a story, you definitely can.
    • weird-eye-issue 5y ago
      No. As somebody who pays recipe creators and publishes recipes this is just wrong. The recipe is separate from the text that accompanies it
      • logifail 5y ago
        > The recipe is separate from the text that accompanies it Separate in a copyright sense? A web scraping bot won't necessarily make that distinction.
        • weird-eye-issue 5y ago
          Yes in a copyright sense. Recipes are also separate in a technical sense too because for SEO purposes publishers use markup to help crawlers understand recipes.
    • zffr 5y ago
      Could be wrong, but I thought it was so that you spend more time on their website and have a chance to see more ads
  • candiddevmike 5y ago
    The irony of having an ad supported app to scrape recipes from ad supported websites. I'm not sure how I feel about this.
    • spacemadness 5y ago
      Technology companies selling a solution to a problem created by technology companies instead of coming together to fix the original problem. This is the world we live in.
      • massysett 5y ago
        The original problem is that people want to Google for recipes and not pay for them. As a cook there are several solutions to this: 1) pay for a subscription from vendors who are in business to sell recipes, such as Cooks Illustrated 2) get recipes from companies that provide them as a complement because they sell something else, generally food-related products. For instance King Arthur Baking has good recipes, and many are available from food companies such as Tyson, Kraft, and Betty Crocker. Grocers also have many recipes. These sources aren't interested in spamming users with ads because the website is one big ad. 3) Buy cookbooks, they're not expensive. But yeah as long as people want to crank search terms into Google and get "free" stuff, it's going to be ad-infested, and then other ad-seeking folks are going to run their shakedown operations just like the adblock extensions charge money to advertisers to let their ads through.
        • dron57 5y ago
          3) buy cookbooks While cookbooks are great they're not easily searchable. If only I could ingest every recipe from every cookbook I bought into a personal database. Hey that'd be a neat app idea!
          • sinbadpalomar 5y ago
            this is actually already a thing. Damn i forget the app but it exists I did the trial once https://www.eatyourbooks.com/ https://www.eatyourbooks.com/
  • cryptonym 5y ago
    Spending time writing user-hostile recipe for SEO purpose, then someone else building an app trying to undo this and finally the end user spending time installing app, scanning QR code and going back to the original user-hostile website because the app didn't get milk quantity. Now I'm too tired to cook anything.
    • AwkwardPanda 5y ago
      Hey can you share the url.. I will fix small issues like this..
      • cryptonym 5y ago
        It's visible on your video ;-)
    • JeremyNT 5y ago
      All we're missing is crypto/NFTs to create a full circle of tech bullshit.
  • shortformblog 5y ago
    FYI, you are about to get eaten alive by foodies. https://www.eater.com/22307633/why-are-people-mad-at-recipeasly-recipe-blog-criticism https://www.eater.com/22307633/why-are-people-mad-at-recipea...
    • floren 5y ago
      They're full of shit, though. Crack open the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook and find a cookie recipe, then search for the same recipe name online. You're going to find 1000 word essays about Dear Meema's Secret Snickerdoodle recipe... followed by the same damn recipe as the BH&G cookbook.
      • shortformblog 5y ago
        This is an anecdote which clearly does not cover all cases. I think the presumption is that cooking sites are nothing but spam, but the fact that so many high-profile cooks complained about this perviously shows that this is not the case and that their livelihoods would be affected by apps like these.
      • mattschkolnick 5y ago
        [flagged]
        • floren 5y ago
          Matt, this ain't cool. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mattschkolnick https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mattschkolnick https://www.peppertheapp.com/about https://www.peppertheapp.com/about
    • butwhywhyoh 5y ago
      Wrong, "foodies" are about to get eaten alive by people sick of their shit. The only people complaining loudly about that were the people propagating the BS. I certainly don't see any complaints from users mentioned in that article. If your business model relies on people scrolling past a bunch of filler to get to a short list of instructions, be prepared for people to get tired of it and solve the problem.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• bearjaws 5y ago
  I just happened to be looking into a shakshuka recipe and as per usual every website is 90% life story, background, history of the mesopotamia era... This worked perfectly and will make shopping a bit easier. Example below. https://onlyrecipe.app/?url=https://www.loveandlemons.com/shakshuka-recipe/ https://onlyrecipe.app/?url=https://www.loveandlemons.com/sh...
• mhh__ 5y ago
  See also https://based.cooking/ https://based.cooking/
  • megraf 5y ago
    This is my suggestion as well. I've used it for dozens of meals.
  • andai 5y ago
    Discussed previously (446 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26419717 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26419717
• notreallyserio 5y ago
  Feedback: visiting recipe pages, such as the one bearjaws shared, using Safari[0] can result in you being "trapped" -- the back button doesn't have the desired effect. It looks like onlyrecipe may be doing something to the web history. 0: Safari on iOS 15.2, iPhone 8.
  • AwkwardPanda 5y ago
    Hey, that's surprisingly very annoying. Thanks a lot for that feedback. I'll fix it ASAP. In addition, I would encourage you to try the iOS app. Way better experience. Because this is a app-first service. Web was built later.
• asow92 5y ago
  reminds me of https://www.paprikaapp.com/ https://www.paprikaapp.com/
  • asow92 5y ago
    Their web import feature, while not always perfect, does a good job of stripping these things out. And this service has synching between native apps on various platforms.
  • haswell 5y ago
    As a regular user of Paprika, I have to mention that it's a fantastic app, and any recipe I intend to make more than once gets imported.
  • parkersweb 5y ago
    Yeah - there’s some really lovely touches to Paprika - like: - easily scale the recipe to make different quantities - convert units used to one you’re more familiar with. - wherever the recipe says ‘do x for 10 minutes’ you can tap on the time and it’ll allow you to set a timer for that one piece.
  • ziggus 5y ago
    Agreed. Probably the best recipe app around, just for the built-in browser that lets you grab any recipe from a site. I think I've run into one instance of a site that it couldn't scrape, out of hundreds.
  • actualwill 5y ago
    Every time I see a recipe app, I wonder if it will stack up to Paprika. It never does. It parses every recipe website and the sync works perfectly.
• mirthturtle 5y ago
  Someone tried this a while back and it didn't go so well: https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2021/03/02/recipeasly-food-bloggers-controversy/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2021/03/02/recipeasly-fo...
  • gamerDude 5y ago
    Maybe keep ads so that the bloggers can keep their current revenue stream. As someone who loves this idea, all I care about is easy access to the recipe. Its ok with me to have not too intrusive ads.
    • gamerDude 5y ago
      Or just move the recipe to the top and keep all the other content/ads below.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • metabagel 5y ago
    This is an app, though, not a website. If I understand correctly, it’s just parsing the page for you. Edit: Oh, there is also a website.
  • toyg 5y ago
    The site is back up, although it now seems to contain exclusively "free" recipes (i.e. coming from CC sites and old books). IMHO there are ways to make recipe-scraping resistant to copyright claims. 1. hide all scraping actions behind a login page; that makes content private, hence uninfringing. 2. every time a user "publishes" or shares content, present only an extract of the recipe, like the ingredients and first few steps; expanding the extract sends you to the original site (ideally to the specific anchor of the procedure).
    • kixiQu 5y ago
      > private, hence uninfringing let me know how this goes for private torrent tracker sites
• switzer 5y ago
  Since OnlyRecipe.app is already parsing the recipe site, it would be a great feature to allow conversion to weights from volume (e.g. show 120g of flour vs. 1c of flour). Also, allow someone to double (or 1.5x...) the recipe as well, and have all measures double in the recipe!
  • AwkwardPanda 5y ago
    Thanks for the feedback. I'll see if that conversion can be done in a generic way.
    • geocar 5y ago
      I was taught to bake (and write recipes) using a mixture of units; to prefer metric measurements when precision is required, but to prefer "American" units when it isn't, almost to highlight the absence of precision, and to clue the reader that they may have to adjust for humidity or the amount of gluten generated (or whatever). I know this stuff is obvious to an experienced cook, but I can also imagine seeing 14,2g of anything causing some unnecessary distress when trying to work with an unfamiliar recipe. Maybe something like "1c of flour (approx. 120g)" is a good way to be safe? If you're looking for an engine for actually doing the conversions, there's GNU units[1] and Frink[2] which both contain databases of these conversions you may be able to mine. [1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/units/ https://www.gnu.org/software/units/ [2]: https://frinklang.org/ https://frinklang.org/
      • Symbiote 5y ago
        I have friends who sometimes help me cook a dinner for more friends. I've seen some of them try to measure out 22.5mL¹ of olive oil for frying because I pressed a button on the site to 1.5× the recipe... Recipe websites don't include that first 10 pages of a "beginner" recipe book, which usually describes how to measure ingredients and the various cooking techniques used. ¹ 1.5 metric tablespoons, 1.5 × 15mL.
    • hellweaver666 5y ago
      As a metric user, imperial format recipes are the bane of my existence. I swear to god some Americans don't realise the rest of the world uses a whole other system.
• 2bitencryption 5y ago
  What is the reason that every single recipe site, without fail, follows this same horrible pattern? I.e. the twenty paragraph "When I was a child growing up in Atlanta..." followed by a crappy in-house video player followed by, finally, the actual recipe? My assumption is SEO? For some reason, Google must really like having tons of text on your page, and dislikes simple "here's the recipe"? etc? Second question - anyone who has searched for recipes also knows that Google will parse out any star rating from the recipe page and show it alongside the results. Which is obviously meaningless because comparing 4.5 stars from grandmas-cooking.net to 4.5 stars from foodnetwork.com is apples-to-oranges. So what's to stop me from simply faking my own star system, then presenting it on my website so that google picks it up in its results? And what triggers Google to look for a star rating? Could I update my tech blog to have a star rating and Google will show it? Or is it limited to keywords like "recipe"?
  • jordansmith 5y ago
    They goal of a recipe website is to get ad revenue. Top tier ad networks won’t accept your site if it’s just straight up recipes so you need to have the padding to get approved. And it increases the amount of ads you can squeeze onto the page for higher RPMs
  • Rygian 5y ago
    The copyright around the recipe itself is a challenging issue [1], so a simple way of guaranteeing that the site is not scrapped and published elsewhere verbatim is to include also non-recipe material that falls more clearly under copyright law. [1] https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-protection-recipes/ https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-protection-recipes/
    • littlecranky67 5y ago
      Not sure about the US or the EU in general, but in Germany at least databases - even if they solely consist of trivial, non-copyrightable data - are still copyrighted. This law was put into place after a company in Germany just hired people to type of physical copies of Phonebooks and the yellowpages, and sold a "phonebook" on CD. A name+phonenumber pair isn't copyrightable, but the collection as a whole is (at least now).
• adwww 5y ago
  Anyone know why this life story rubbish seems particularly acute on recipe websites? I get the authors are doing it to boost Google rankings. But why do I only see it on cooking blogs, and not on blogs about cycling, DIY, programming, urbanism, whatever else I'm searching.... Not many tech blogs start with a 4 page life history before showing me the code snippet I'm looking for.
  • BoorishBears 5y ago
    think of how niche Rust is compared to Apple Pie
    • jenscow 5y ago
      Personally, I long for the Rust which I used to smell coming from my grandma's kitchen when we used to visit on Sundays. Unfortunately, she's no longer with us. However, her Rust continues to be a part of our lives. The Rust you buy from shops today just isn't the same.
• laurentlbm 5y ago
  Thank you, I hate blog-post-type recipes! Do you plan on adding a dark mode?
  • AwkwardPanda 5y ago
    Yes. That's in the roadmap. It'll be out soon on both android and iOS. Then on web.
• mrsuprawsm 5y ago
  There's this Chrome add-on which also filters out the junk from recipes: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlcdjbkdaegmljnnncfnhiioiadakae?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc... It was featured in the MacOS Big Sur keynote being used with Safari but sadly hasn't made it to the App Store yet.
• shaneprrlt 5y ago
  Is this a real service, or just a portfolio project for your resume?
  • AwkwardPanda 5y ago
    For now it's just a project. I learned Flutter and wanted to build something with it. If enough people like it, I will make this a full-fledged service. And focus on adding features like dark mode, server-sync, sign-in, account management, export/import of recipes, sharing screenshots of recipes like this one directly with your friends https://i.redd.it/kk1goqsswo981.png https://i.redd.it/kk1goqsswo981.png
    • ROARosen 5y ago
      Really nice! I wonder how you get the parsed recipe to load so fast, much faster than say outline.com (though they prob have some more server-side stuff going on)
• kerneloftruth 5y ago
  Sincere best wishes and good luck with this -- thank you! Then, please do the same for code sample sites. :)
  • AwkwardPanda 5y ago
    Thank you.
• domoritz 5y ago
  Could someone make a uBlock Origin filter list that removes the stuff before the recipe? I'd subscribe to that.
• JonathanBuchh 5y ago
  It would be amazing if there was something that would convert recipes to the format used on Cooking For Engineers. It’s so intuitive and easy to read. I never want to look at steps to make a recipe again. Scroll to the bottom to see what I’m talking about: http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/108/Banana-Nut-Bread http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/108/Banana-Nut-Bre...
  • hahajk 5y ago
    That’s pretty cool recipe formatting, but man that site has the least appetizing food photography I’ve seen in a long time.
    • umvi 5y ago
      It's for engineers. Function > Form
  • yummypaint 5y ago
    This is a great way to represent recipes! It looks like it would also allow more info to be fit on a notecard compared to just text
  • dicroce 5y ago
    Damn, that is awesome. We need an AI to convert text instructions into this format.
    • dfithian 5y ago
      I created this app to scrape a website's HTML for recipe and ingredients and create a grocery list. It works for recipes in many formats. https://mo-nomz.herokuapp.com https://mo-nomz.herokuapp.com
  • duckmysick 5y ago
    Modernist Cuisine has recipes with a similar format. They also have an ingredient list with baker's percentage using the largest ingredient by weight as the baseline. Example (second image) https://modernistcuisine.com/recipes/pressure-cooked-vegetable-risotto/ https://modernistcuisine.com/recipes/pressure-cooked-vegetab...
• sct202 5y ago
  For people who don't want to install an app, most recipe websites have a "Jump/Skip to Recipe" link at the top under the header and sometimes it's mixed up in between the fb/twitter share buttons. You still get hit with modals and videos but at least it's less.
• nucleogenesis 5y ago
  Some blogs do the extra stuff right. Sally’s Baking Addiction’s preceding blog is often invaluable with tips about timing, temperatures, possible places things can go wrong, etc. It has the floating “skip to recipe” button which is handy when you come back to a familiar recipe for some details. The clutter isn’t the problem as much as the content quality is most often for me.
• patrickserrano 5y ago
  Mela on iOS[0] is a very similar app with some great polish. One nice thing with Mela at least, is if you use the built-in browser it can get around some paywalls like NYT Cooking. It also integrates with the Reminders app for grocery shopping lists. [0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mela-recipe-manager/id1548466041 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mela-recipe-manager/id15484660...
• mstudio 5y ago
  Nicely done! I just ran into this "clutter" issue last week while trying to read a recipe that kept auto-scrolling due to a pop-up ad intermittently changing height at the top of the page. Some quick feedback: it worked perfectly for a recipe at "simplyrecipes.com" but was unable to find a recipe on the Food Network, specifically: https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/creme-brulee-recipe-1916827 https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/creme-brulee... Keep up the good work!
  • AwkwardPanda 5y ago
    Thanks for the feedback.. Yes i am continuously "fixing" some sites that have very specific issues. Should be fixed in a few days.
• mfashby 5y ago
  similar discussion recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29161585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29161585 similar open-source program plainoldrecipe https://plainoldrecipe.com/ https://plainoldrecipe.com/
  • Gualdrapo 5y ago
    https://plainoldrecipe.com/recipe https://plainoldrecipe.com/recipe returns a HTTP 400 error, https://plainoldrecipe.com/ https://plainoldrecipe.com/ does not.
    • mfashby 5y ago
      Ah thanks, fixed
• markstos 5y ago
  Better: Use AnyList. It has a feature to import recipes. The result is that not only get to view a clean copy of a recipe, but a clean copy is stored in AnyList for easy reference later.
  • njovin 5y ago
    I'll second this recommendation. I started using Anylist last year and it's incredible. My weekly grocery flow goes like this now: - Skim a few recipe sites for anything new I want to try - 1-click import them to Anylist (using the browser extension) - Add recipes to the weekly meal plan in Anylist - Click "Add all ingredients" for each recipe, which automatically puts all ingredients for the recipe into my shopping list. One of my favorite things is that it automatically categorizes the list items by store section, making the shopping much easier. It doesn't work with every recipe site, though (traeger.com for example), but it works with most. There are two features I wish it had that would make it nearly perfect: 1. Ability to create my own categorization rules. For example, "whole peeled tomatoes with their juices" gets categorized as beverage, and I can manually recategorize that specific item, but it would be nice to create a rule for wholepeeledtomato* that puts it in the "Canned Goods" category 2. The ability to exclude ingredients from being added to the list. I always have salt, pepper, and olive oil on hand, but I end up having to manually cross a dozen of those off my shopping list when I add ingredients for the week when nearly every recipe inevitably includes them.
• thrower123 5y ago
  Most recipe sites are less terrible if you click the "Print Recipe" button, for example: https://goodcheapeats.com/simple-rice-pilaf/ https://goodcheapeats.com/simple-rice-pilaf/ versus: https://goodcheapeats.com/wprm_print/27621 https://goodcheapeats.com/wprm_print/27621
• gedw99 5y ago
  aa
• gedw99 5y ago
  nice !!
• joshstrange 5y ago
  If you are looking for a way to tame your recipes look into Paprika [0]. It can import/scrape recipes from any site and lets you organize them and save them for later. You can use it to build a shopping list, meal plan, track what you have on hand, and more. I always make a point to mention it on posts related to recipes since it's the best app I've found for recipes and worth every penny (no subscriptions, 1-time purchase). You can also export your recipes and share them with other people (last I checked the export file was essentially a zip with JSON inside and the pictures). [0] https://www.paprikaapp.com/ https://www.paprikaapp.com/
• yepthatsreality 5y ago
  Pro tip: if a recipe has a “Print” link on the recipe page, clicking it will most likely give you a “Reader mode” version of that page with the clutter removed.
• johnwatson11218 5y ago
  I have wanted to build something like this for consuming news sites, especially when my ad blocker has to be disabled. But thinking more long term ... what about a ML project that can look at many recipes and do a kind of PCA, figure out the essence of a pound cake for example and use actual data to show the main variations as clusters in a high dimensional state space. Or even try to reduce Thai or Mexican cooking to certain prototypical dishes and have versions at different skill levels for the aspiring home chef.
• Jonovono 5y ago
  Awesome, i'm going to add this to my PWA browser: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/wapps-private-minimal-browser/id1597325145 https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/wapps-private-minimal-browser/...
• infini8 5y ago
  Love the standardised layout. Another step towards simplified digital consumption this year. Reminds of Tandoor: https://github.com/TandoorRecipes/recipes https://github.com/TandoorRecipes/recipes
• mvexel 5y ago
  As some other commenters have said -- often, the "print" function will give you a more concise / readable version. I keep a recipe folder with PDFs "printed" from recipe web sites. It would be nice if this app would support printing. It does a great job reducing this recipe page to its essentials: https://onlyrecipe.app/?url=https://cookieandkate.com/best-vegetable-lasagna-recipe/ https://onlyrecipe.app/?url=https://cookieandkate.com/best-v... but when I try to print, the preview shows a blank page (Safari on Mac).
  • brewtide 5y ago
    I believe this is by design. If you subscribe to their "premium" model, it lets you print as usual. Honestly, not a terrible way to make money, while offering a free service.
• AwkwardPanda 5y ago
  Oh shoot. I did not expect this huge a response. Any more load and my backend server is going to collapse.
• js2 5y ago
  The comments on recipe sites are often useful. Things like: pre-heat your mason jars before pouring in the caramelized sugar or they'll crack. You can find clarifications, or things people have substituted, or just how a recipe has failed for some folks. There's a handful of recipe sites I tend to stick to. Smitten Kitchen, All Recipes, Serious Eats, NYT Cooking. I also have a few favorite cooking books: On Food and Cooking, Joy of Cooking, The Art of Simple Food. Then I have some speciality cooking books for desserts, ice creams, and soups. My wife transcribes recipes we really like to 4" x 6" index cards. The recipe box is up to probably about 200-300 recipes we've collected over our 25 years together. FWIW, on current iPadOS, Only Recipe isn't showing up in the Share menu for me.
  • hnrodey 5y ago
    Aggregating to handwritten version is very nice. A recipe box is a terrific artifact to hand down through generations. Congrats.
    • vestrigi 5y ago
      Nice if you get the recipes right on the first time but tedious if you like to update recipes and add comments. At least for handwriting perfectionists.
      • groby_b 5y ago
        A handwritten recipe without annotations and butter stains is simply a recipe you don't like very much ;) Which, to me, means digital is a bad format - because I'm not going to annotate in my text editor while juggling three burners and the cake in the oven.
        • vestrigi 5y ago
          Yes, after all the recipe should be a tool and not a piece of art that's never going to benefit anyone because it shall not be stained. I probably wouldn't bother with updating small changes in my text editor afterwards either!
• post_break 5y ago
  How about only the stories from recipes, no recipe. Would be an ironic coffee table book.
• y04nn 5y ago
  It is interesting that there is not yet a Wikipedia of recipes. It would be the perfect use case for a wiki. People would love to share their recipes variations and improve/fix existing one. There would be a standard layout, introduction paragraph would explain the history of a recipe and link to other similar recipes. That would be interesting to read. And there would be an endless number of recipes. For-profit sites are full of ads and SEO optimized to improve user retention/engagement, which make them annoying to use. A wiki could be print friendly and distraction-free, which would be perfect for a recipe.
  • layer8 5y ago
    The edit wars would be horrible. Everyone has their own recipe for any given food item, plus endless variations.
    • kuschku 5y ago
      Make it a namespaced wiki. Every user can only create and edit recipes in their own namespace, or the namespace of groups they’re a member of (like GitHub treats repos for example). Then you could, as user, follow users you like. Each recipe would be in structured format, but could also have rich text introductions / explanations, if users wish to add such information. You could even let users add custom styling to their own namespaces/subwikis, as tumblr, myspace, wordpress, youtube and reddit used to do / still do (with a way to turn this off as user, if you just want the plain content)
      • diogenesjunior 5y ago
        then it comes down to just building your own reddit style site centered around food recipes
      • nybble41 5y ago
        > (like GitHub treats repos for example) This is the way. Publicly read-only repos with easy access to forking and pull requests are far superior to wiki pages with no access controls. Compared to current GitHub you would mainly need to add support for structured data, ratings, and indexing.
• short12 5y ago
  Recipe websites are a prime example of everything that is wrong with the web today. The bulk collection websites are primarily crap but for the same reasons as the personal branded websites. A shit ton of junk around a sometimes worthwhile background story or such and then the recipe all with shit tons of junk interrupting and destroying any sense of continuity. Fuck their stupid ads
  • hericium 5y ago
    Web written for Googlebot, not humans.
• notyourwork 5y ago
  The use case sounds great but why does everything need an app anymore? Everything doesn't need an app, thats why we have the web. /end rant.
• wombat-man 5y ago
  I've given up and just try to find good cook books. I can't deal with internet recipes anymore. cool idea though!
• tonymet 5y ago
  are you planning to index the recipes ? there are a couple other recipe transform apps out there but it’s the indexing that will distinguish you .
• shortformblog 5y ago
  This is theft that gets around a copyright loophole. Don’t steal recipes.
  • pjerem 5y ago
    It's complicated. Where is the limit ? For me it's just a web browser optimized for recipe websites. It's basic scrapping. Google does it, why can't I do it ? Are "reader mode" browser extensions theft ? Are ad blockers theft ? Is using Lynx as a web browser theft ? If your business depends on your content never being scraped, you are screwed.
    • nybble41 5y ago
      It's not that complicated. Copyright was simply never intended to apply to recipes. The fact that there is nothing copyrightable about a mere list of ingredients and basic preparation instructions without any creative elements is not in any sense a "loophole".
      • pjerem 5y ago
        Also that.
        • theartfuldodger 5y ago
          It's obvious to everyone that content producers who write, format, publish and promote recipes usually have a revenue goal. Any tactic that defeats that is theft, whether you want to point to fineprint somewhere or not. You know that someone made something and you have decided not to give back. Ad free recipe sites are already handled, you pay a subscription fee instead. That being said, the final format of an onlyrecipes scrape is very attractive! It would make for a nice intentional feature of recipe website, so the producers can still get their impression revenue and the readers can enjoy such a pleasing format
          • nybble41 5y ago
• darkstar999 5y ago
  Copy Me That does this and more, if anyone is interested in comparing. It doesn't have a polished UI but it's very useful for me. https://www.copymethat.com/ https://www.copymethat.com/
  • kwerk 5y ago
    My wife and I are heavy users of CMT. Especially the ability to add recipes to a specific day and create a unified shopping list sorted by type (produce, spices, etc). I do wish there was a more modern multi-platform alternative. CPM recently stopped updating their iOS app so we can’t use with recent iOS.
• leifg 5y ago
  I use a similar recipe manager on my phone (paprika 3 but also playing around with Mela). They come with an integrated browser to download the recipes. Not only do they did rid of the novel about the ingredients and their origins, they also get around most paywalls. The thing that would make me instantly switch to any other manager is an app that would parse recipes from the various YouTube and TikTok videos. If you follow the right accounts these videos are a gold mine.
• 3guk 5y ago
  It's such a shame that something like this has to exist and that the creators have to resort to a fairly fixed playbook of SEO techniques (like whole life story, recipe development etc etc). From my personal experience running a small tech tips site - it seems that I constantly end up further down the rankings cause I refuse to stuff each page with information that is not relevant.
• vigneshv_psg 5y ago
  Slightly off topic, but a hack that i have found to read recipe websites on my phone is to use the "Print Recipe" link that most websites provide. It gets rid of most of the annoying ads, autoplaying videos and unzoomable text (or text tapping on which takes you to some random link because the page resized and you accidentally tapped on an ad). The "Print Recipe" page usually contains just the recipe in a format which is easy to read without any clutter.
• fancy_pantser 5y ago
  In the same vein, I made the Recipe Filter extension for browsers: Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlcdjbkdaegmljnnncfnhiioiadakae https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc... FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recipe-filter/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recipe-filter... Source code (there's Safari in there if you don't mind building it yourself): https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter I was spurred into action by a comment here on HN back in 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15755378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15755378 It got demoed to the world during WWDC 2020, which was really neat: https://youtu.be/Kwh2y6VkzoA https://youtu.be/Kwh2y6VkzoA
  • adammenges 5y ago
    Is it not on the safari 'store' because of the $99 a year?
    • daveidol 5y ago
      Not the OP, but I maintain an extension for using keyboard and mouse on Xbox xCloud. I'd love to support Safari, and like OP I have it technically working as well, but as the extension is free and open source it's hard to justify the $99 price tag just to share it with the world. https://github.com/idolize/xcloud-keyboard-mouse/issues/13 https://github.com/idolize/xcloud-keyboard-mouse/issues/13
  • julianlam 5y ago
    Thanks for creating this! I use this plugin all the time. I often don't remember it's running, but then I invariably land on a recipe site, and then the Recipe Filter modal pops up, and instantly brings a smile to my face.
  • strig 5y ago
    Yo thanks for making that extension! I've actually recommended it to a bunch of friends and family
  • john-tells-all 5y ago
• arthurgibson 5y ago
  I've been using this web app built by typesense as a demo, the non-clutter is ideal: https://recipe-search.typesense.org/ https://recipe-search.typesense.org/ prev: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25365397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25365397
• mongol 5y ago
  My problem with recipes are - how do I know they are good? What is the quality control? Perhaps someone just grabbed a computer and wrote a bunch of steps down.
  • adammenges 5y ago
    I guess that's what ratings are for. Who knows if it'll taste good to your taste buds, but if many others like it that could be a good indication.
  • pfranz 5y ago
    Honestly, I tend to rely on the "brand" of where I'm getting the recipe. Ratings are only useful if you trust the site to have good ratings (either an active audience with similar taste or editors filtering and publishing with similar taste). I haven't seen it much, but I also worry about food safety for random recipes.
  • schnevets 5y ago
    In my experience, ratings are an inaccurate measurement. If you want to learn how to cook Pad Thai, are your going to trust the 5-star recipe with 30 responses, or the 3.9-star recipe with 3,100 responses?? An active comment section tends to be a step above reviews, because at least you can see if other people find the recipe too spicy, or boring, or an exciting base for other ingredients. And no, 2 comments that say "I loved this recipe!" and "Thanks!" isn't sufficient. This is usually how you can tell a recipe on an aggregate of authors like FoodNetwork, AllRecipes, or NYTimes is legit. In my opinion, one step above an active comments section is following individual recipe writers that you jive with. An individual writer will usually have a measurement of success that you can agree with (health-conscious, budget-friendly, unique flavors, wide appeal), so you can understand their motivation better. Also, they have some credibility on the line. When you find writers that you agree with, you may even find their "filler" text to have some substance (another reason a "poseur" would feel obliged to include vapid copy before their recipe).
• adammenges 5y ago
  I'm curious how you wrote the logic for recipe detection? I've know some others who've tried to solve this and like many pattern recognition tasks it turns out to be harder than you'd think, but not impossible of course. Just curious how you did it.
  • AwkwardPanda 5y ago
    So schema.org has a standard json schema for recipes. Crawlers use this information to parse and figure out what kind of content lives on the page. Since google encourages this and ranks pages with schema higher, all recipe blogs and sites add this schema to their html. This is structured data. I just parse this json. Not all recipes follow this though. So you may occasionally see error messages for old sites that have not implemented schema.org structure.
• adammenges 5y ago
  Feature request: Add in the iOS app safari extension thing so you when you browse to `www.allrecipes.com` or similar it opens in your app.
• otrahuevada 5y ago
  According to https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protected-by-copyright/ https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protecte...: Recipes can be protected under copyright law if they are accompanied by “substantial literary expression.” This expression can be an explanation or detailed directions, which is likely why food and recipe bloggers often share stories and personal anecdotes alongside a recipe’s ingredients. So besides SEO, there's this thing where the recipe itself is basically defenseless against someone stealing it and calling it theirs but the sum of the fluff around it plus the recipe on the other hand can be copyrighted and enjoys all the protections afforded to these kinds of things. So, if say, Jamie Oliver likes your recipe and puts it in a book passing it as his, you can now legally tell him to stop doing that because of said fluff.
  • alisonkisk 5y ago
  • hackcasual 5y ago
    I don't think that's the case. He'd only get in trouble if he reproduced the "substantial literary expression." The actual list of ingredients and step-by-step procedure aren't copyrightable.
  • morsch 5y ago
    However (from your source), Even if the description of the recipe is sufficiently creative and copyrightable, the copyright will not cover the recipe’s ingredient list, the underlying process for making the dish, or the resulting dish itself, which are all facts. It will only protect the expression of those facts. That means that someone can express the recipe in a different way — with different expression — and not infringe the recipe creator’s copyright. So they can still put your recipe in a Jamie Oliver cookbook, they just have to put it in their own words as opposed to copy pasting it verbatim.
• troyvit 5y ago
  I have to admit that recipes are valuable enough to me that I'm OK with the crap at the top. It's annoying, but it's an endearing kind of annoyance. The way I see it, they're providing a service and if they want to do it in this stupid way I'll go along with it, especially since the content isn't exactly horrible, it's just silly and inane and somehow adds to the whole cooking experience. Sometimes the stuff I'm cooking actually turns out differently because of all the mad scrolling I do trying to find the next ingredient to add while my sauce pan is boiling over or whatever. Kindof fun. Last, recipe books are a great way to get around this crap, and then you're actually paying for the knowledge you use.
• mtm7 5y ago
  > What is the reason that every single recipe site, without fail, follows this same horrible pattern? I.e. the twenty paragraph "When I was a child growing up in Atlanta..." followed by a crappy in-house video player followed by, finally, the actual recipe? I lived with a food blogger for six years and might be able to provide some more perspective for these types of comments (beyond just SEO). First, there's actually an audience that _is_ interested in this type of content. Some are repeat readers who want to follow food bloggers' lives, similar to how HN readers might follow a streamer on Twitch. It's a much more rewarding journey if people don't just see you as a recipe database and bounce, but actually engage with you and follow you over time. Second, a lot of food bloggers simply enjoy writing and see their blogs as a way to express themselves. Some of them write these stories for their family and friends and didn't think they'd be at the top of Google. Third, it takes a ton of effort to write a single recipe. I can't speak for others, but hers involved multiple days of planning/cooking/shooting, remaking it several times so she knew it'd be consistent for the reader, planning/shooting/editing the photos, and even scrapping recipes altogether if they didn't work out. She also had to deal with the business end of things (like getting a lawyer, accountant, social media manager, and managing contracts with sponsors). Her attitude was basically, "if I'm doing all of these things to provide someone with a free recipe, they can scroll past my story if they don't feel like reading it". (That being said, her site was pretty minimalist compared to other food blogs – she didn't run ads.) FWIW, I don't have a problem with onlyrecipe.app, I just wanted to share this because I'd be interested if I didn't know already.
  • slingnow 5y ago
    I have yet to meet or read about a single person who has ever said "I really enjoy scrolling through twenty paragraphs of backstory and embedded auto-play videos and advertisements while I browse for recipes." So while I'm sure there exist bloggers who put care into these things, a tiny minority of people seem to find any value there. In fact it now seems that so many people are aggravated by this style that an app to remove them all has been developed.
    • SllX 5y ago
      As with all things written: the writing is there for the audience who will read it, not the people that will not.
• temptemptemp111 5y ago
• ryanmcbride 5y ago
  I've all but stopped getting recipes from websites. It always feels like every recipe I find was either just copied from some other site with one ingredient changed, or there's some brand sponsored ingredient shoehorned in. A lot of modern recipe books aren't much better, but there's maybe a little more useful info. The main thing I've done to find decent recipes these days is to check youtube. Not stuff like 5 minute crafts or overproduced tiktok recipe "hacks", but videos by people cooking in their own kitchen, mostly in real time, talking about what they're doing and why. You can see the whole process and see their technique and be reasonably certain that they know what they're doing on some level. Here's a few people I always come back to in case anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNrkDzpgSFY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNrkDzpgSFY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dSeHP14Osc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dSeHP14Osc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uyop7-v3Es https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uyop7-v3Es https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVolu2pxveo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVolu2pxveo
• tlhunter 5y ago
  Is that PWA button fair to use? Been looking for something like that which matches the ubiquitous Android and iOS buttons.
• hagope 5y ago
  Would be cool if you could enter Yotube URL and you parse out the recipe from the audio/video.
• Pete-Codes 5y ago
  ha, I always have to navigate whimsical tales of Italian grandfathers etc to get to the actual recipe so this is a good idea
• datavirtue 5y ago
  Freaking nice! It feels sooo good to dump that SEO garbage into dev/null.
• newfonewhodis 5y ago
  The fact that this app is stealing content (that mostly makes money by ads) and monetizing it with ads is horrible. Right up the entitlement-alley of HN.
  • natch 5y ago
    I take it most of these recipes are hosted on low effort spam sites that stole the content in the first place. Are they also entitled to your righteous defense?
    • drewbeck 5y ago
      That's a very convenient assumption! "People who blog recipes are probably crappy anyway, so I'm morally clean" isn't a successful ethical system.
      • natch 5y ago
        But I wasn’t sweeping up all recipe blogs, only those that are festooned with obnoxious ads. As to moral cleanliness (wow) it matters what use the recipe will be put to. If I just want to cook something, it’s fair use. If I am setting out to scrape massively and create my own spammy site, that’s not cool obviously. Please consider more angles here.
        • PolandKid 5y ago
          We're considering the angle of an app whose sole purpose is to capture the valuable IP of an author and remove their ability to monetize it. It's not like they're paying them via some publisher program, just pure scraping and re-organizing.
          • natch 5y ago
            You may be right, if the sites truly own original content that is then being displayed in the app. It seems that is often not the case though.
• soamv 5y ago
  For me, the context and reasoning behind why the recipe does what it does is much more important than the recipe itself; that makes such apps counterproductive. I can imagine that "just the recipe" is useful for very novice cooks, but most of the time it's much better to learn the patterns and techniques than to follow the precise recipe. You'll be much more prepared that way when things don't go to plan, or when you're missing a few ingredients. And this may be unpopular here, but I often enjoy the "life story" too: for me, many of the joys of cooking are in the connections made to other people. And if the recipe writer wants to build a connection with the cook because they poured so much effort into the recipe, I'm open to that -- and whatever it may bring to the actual cooking. (Maybe I should make a "just the code" browser extension for Github that deletes README files ;) )
  • jagged-chisel 5y ago
    The common complaint is about the unnecessary prose around the author's life history and other fluff that's useless to the goal of producing the food item. IME, seldom do those sites actually contain useful information about cooking practices in addition to the fluff.
    • soamv 5y ago
      It's not fluff to me -- it's human connection. Why we cook the way we do is deeply linked to our history and our "life stories".
      • datavirtue 5y ago
        It's not human connection. It is SEO fluff. Made up garbage.
  • butwhywhyoh 5y ago
    If README files were: 1. Full of tangential life-story BS 2. Placed far above the content I went to the repo for 3. Filled with advertisements I would love your browser extension. Also, you claim the story is "much more important" than the recipe itself. So then I guess you would enjoy these recipes pretty much equally if they completely removed the ingredients of what they actually cooked? It's so much less important, after all.
• black_13 5y ago
• mothsonasloth 5y ago
  I would recommend https://based.cooking/ https://based.cooking/ It started out as a joke but I have made a point of picking a recipe out of it every week to try. The stone soup one is fun and a nice story - https://based.cooking/almeirim-stone-soup.html https://based.cooking/almeirim-stone-soup.html You can also submit recipes on the Github repo - https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/based.cooking https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/based.cooking
• figbert 5y ago
  You simply must try https://www.mysaffronapp.com https://www.mysaffronapp.com It really successfully imports and de-clutters recipes from any and all recipe sites I've thrown at it. Ben Awad, the programmer behind Saffron, actually posted about their scraping technique on HN to significant success: https://www.benawad.com/scraping-recipe-websites/ https://www.benawad.com/scraping-recipe-websites/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23142220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23142220) Their UX is unmatched, they've got apps for iOS and Android in addition to the web app itself. Undoubtedly one of my favorite pieces of software.
• perakojotgenije 5y ago
  Shameless plug: you can save your favorite recipes to gabngabn.com[1] and then have your recipes without clutter. [1] https://gabngabn.com/init/default/about https://gabngabn.com/init/default/about
• lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  Reading good food writers is the whole point of having good food writers. They can build an evocative sense of the time and place, the sense of why a recipie is the way it is. Its sometimes a personal journey, its sometimes escapism. And yes it changes - Elizabeth David sounds outrageously prissy to modern ears - but food has always been part of human culture, and as we evolve so will our food. Its fine to read the wikipedia "plot" section if you want a shortcut. But its nice to know you can just read the whole book. Slowly.
  • brailsafe 5y ago
    Save it for a read that someone would seek out deliberately for the long-form content though. This wouldn't exist if people loved the long rambling intros about how ever since the 1400s Spaghetti Bolognese has captured the hearts and minds of italians and their diaspora. blah blah blah
    • lifeisstillgood 5y ago
      I did say good food writers :-)
  • robotpony 5y ago
    I like the Serious Eats format, where they provide both a brief recipe and an optional backstory. Some of the research and reasoning is interesting for certain recipes (like pressure cooker French Onion soup), though when actually cooking the story makes finding the details a bit more work.
    • TheFlyingFish 5y ago
      Agreed. I would even be ok with the SE format if they didn't split out the main recipe from the backstory, because with them the backstory is usually something of substance. They often go through multiple iterations, explaining what tweaks they introduced and what the effects were, so that you can understand not only the final recipe but also the principles that went into making it. That they also give you a quick-and-easy "here's just the recipe" page is just an added bonus, for me.
• seabea 5y ago
  Looks poorly tested. QR code scanner doesn't work and the "how to use?" tip doesn't display anything. Manually entering a url requires the user to include the subdomain AND http/https (instead of defaulting to "http://www http://www".
  • AwkwardPanda 5y ago
    QR code scanner does work. I've scanned hundreds of QR codes. If you can share the url, I can see what's wrong. Regarding "How to use?", yes this is an issue on android. If you click multiple times, it will work. I will fix it. Regarding http/https, I'll implement that.
• AlunAlun 5y ago
  I rarely post on HN, but I’m breaking my silence to say that this app is amazing and I can see it changing my life!
• me_me_mu_mu 5y ago
  One trick you can do is just to Print the recipe, and you get all ads removed in a nice clean view. Almost all the recipe sites I use have a Print button somewhere on the page. You could make an extension that literally calls Print on the page, and turn it into a PDF view from which you can save it. Your recipes could get stored locally or something, so you always have the website URL + clean recipe view stored. That way you support the site, and you get your recipes without destroying your eyes.
• harel 5y ago
  Every time I open a recipe online these days, I sigh so loudly out of desperation of what I need to scroll through to get to the actual recipe. And that is before I do the cookie dance. I guess you guys heard my sighs!!! Amazing. Thanks!
• m4rc3lv 5y ago
  Works on a lot of sites, nice job. I can't pull recipes from McDougall. https://www.drmcdougall.com/recipes/white-beans-mexicali/ https://www.drmcdougall.com/recipes/white-beans-mexicali/
• brutal_chaos_ 5y ago
  I really like the concept so I gave your PWA a try. The first recipe I tried[1] did not work as the app said it was unable to find a recipe. The wording also went down past the bottom of the screen, but I was unable to scroll to see the rest of the text. I used the "Desktop site" option my browser has and then was able to read the full message. [1]: https://www.food.com/recipe/homemade-curry-powder-38702 https://www.food.com/recipe/homemade-curry-powder-38702
• amelius 5y ago
  Isn't this what "Reader Mode" is for?
• mattschkolnick 5y ago
  [dead]
  • mjballs 5y ago
    this is amazing. clean interface for me to just work off my phone on the counter. also I think this solves recipe quality & copyright issues?
• v_p_n_p_v 5y ago
  My dream is to build a browser to do this for the entire web, using AI/ML to "translate" ad-ridden sites to their pure HTML/CSS counterpart. Lots of pre-trained models can make sense of pages based on visual layout. Seq2seq/summarizer models can work hand-in-hand to take out the cruft. I imagine a cache of this simple web shared across all browsers. Imagine translating all PDF manuals, scientific research, and yes, recipes, in this decentralized manner. The dataset would be clean both for human consumption as well as ML training.
• jessehattabaugh 5y ago
  Props for building a PWA, but why do I have to copy paste a url into it when the Share Target API would allow me to send the URL directly to you app using the browser's share feature?
  • AwkwardPanda 5y ago
    There are multiple ways to do it. Copy-paste and share both are supported. You can use whichever is convenient.
• kpmcc 5y ago
  I just tried Firefox's 'Reader Mode' for my go to recipe site (food52) and it worked like a charm making everything less distracting.
• cabalamat 5y ago
  Why does it need a URL? I should be able to search on e.g. "banana cake" and get banana cake recipes.
• dskloet 5y ago
  If an image fails to load, there is an animation which is still quite distracting. Can that just be a static broken imagine icon? For example here: https://onlyrecipe.app/?url=https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/12682/apple-pie-by-grandma-ople/ https://onlyrecipe.app/?url=https://www.allrecipes.com/recip...
• dskloet 5y ago
  If you create a bookmark with the following URL, you can click it while on a recipe site to go to the OnlyRecipe version: javascript:window.location.href='https://onlyrecipe.app/?url=' + (window.location.href)
• danguson 5y ago
  It's a helpful app that makes cooking easier and intuitive.
• lanamo 5y ago
  I am using MELA https://mela.recipes https://mela.recipes - also being frustrated with recipes and the amount of unnecessary blabla, this app is awesome. it de-clutters recipes, has a cooking mode (shows you step by step) and a grocery shopping function. It is the same developer as the awesome Reeder RSS app. Very nice design as well. Check it out and happy cooking!
• srg0 5y ago
  Suggestion: add a switch to convert American units (cups, lb, inches) to international units (ml, g, cm) and vice versa.