Just yesterday I was looking up an online recipe for chocolate chip cookies that I had found earlier. I had my netbook in the kitchen with the recipe up on it,

Just yesterday I was looking up an online recipe for chocolate chip cookies that I had found earlier. I had my netbook in the kitchen with the recipe up on it, and something immediately struck me. It's an Acer Aspire One with a small widescreen 1024x600 display, and the mouse touchpad is a bit temperamental. Now, the recipe was on an ad-supported site, and the recipe itself was in a narrow column in the centre of the page with the recipe sections (title, description, ingredient list, directions) stacked vertically on top of each other. The menu was on the left, and the banner ads were on the right. The entire recipe was pretty small and would easily have fit easily on one screen, but because of the boilerplate and ads, I repeatedly had to scroll up and down to switch between the ingredients and direction. Again, because scrolling is a bit awkward on the Acer touchpad, I was particularly conscious of it. I found myself thinking: I should develop my own online collection of recipes and display them with the ingredients on the left and the directions on the right.