

Show HN: RecipeWriter – An editor to write recipes - Cherian
http://www.cucumbertown.com/writer/#

======
sugarpirate
Hey, this looks really good!

I'd like to make a suggestion for a cool feature: being able to clone someone
else's recipe and put my own 'twist' on it. Almost like a git fork, if you
want to use that analogy. You could also submit pull requests... you get the
idea.

~~~
Cherian
We had a feature – “create a variation”. Unfortunately the feature did not
work well in the real world and we had to pull the plug.

Literature cannot be forked the way we think about it in code. My variation of
the potpie isn’t simply a fork of the ingredients and editing lines. It’s
“likely” a different style altogether and in most cases required the new
author to write something ground up. We tried fixing this but the edge cases
became too complex to handle.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _My variation of the potpie isn’t simply a fork of the ingredients and
> editing lines._ //

There's a few recipes I've used for which this is the case. Same for my mum -
I've got magazine clipped recipes of hers that say something along the lines
of "add cherries at the end, use sultanas instead of currants; I add a dash of
brandy" or others that say "you need to cook for about 45 mins, not 30".

I think variations allow for a sort of evolution of a recipe towards your own
personal preference.

But of course that doesn't take account of the actual implementation of such a
feature being possible to do in a way that works well and fits with the aims
of this site.

I'd be interested to know what sort of edge cases make it complex. Surely it's
just a pre-filled version of a page, that one edits and optionally has a link
saying "based on $recipe". I could see it getting abused for people wanting to
link their recipes to popular ones (like youtube response vids that aren't
really responses) but beyond that sort of thing it seems pretty basic. Were
you trying to digest the multiple variations to offer options within a recipe
or something?

~~~
anandgrafiti
I guess the use case you mentioned is more to adding variations like an
alternate ingredient, or a tip to a step or something like alternative to what
is suggested in the original recipe.

We have a wish list in our mind where we can add structured annotations
(tips/alt ingredient/photo) to the original literature and have a repository
of such stuff residing on top of the original recipe itself.

This way it can become a far more richer data, set in the original context and
offer mutual learning to all.

Thoughts?

------
mattbreeden
Really nice looking editor. I don't cook, but if I was going to use this I
would want an option to turn off automatic parsing of the ingredient list (did
not check to see if you had that).

Also, if it's something you care about, you mis-spelled 'consistency' in your
intro video as 'consistecny' on the 1st step of the recipe.

~~~
bazzargh
Seconded. The parser is very odd; it turns 'a nice cream' into 'nice cream'
but 'an ice cream' is left alone. Moving the sentence structure around doesn't
scan right, eg

    
    
      Golden Rings 5
      Calling Birds 4
      French Hens 3
      Turtle Doves 2
      partridge in a pear tree 
    

it's inconsistent, you have to retype things after correction to get something
grammatical:

* '2 oz of butter' becomes 'butter _2 oz_ of'.

* '2 rashers of bacon' becomes 'rashers of bacon _2_ '.

it's wrong for some things, with apparently no workaround:

* 'five-spice powder' becomes 'spice powder _five-_ '

* 'three cheese coleslaw' becomes 'cheese coleslaw _three_ '

Apart from the last two - can't you just highlight the numbers without moving
them?

Edited to add: looking at the way the recipes are presented on the site - with
the quantities in a different column, rather than tagged on the end - makes me
think that it would be clearer if it looked that way in the editor too, so you
don't think of it as a sentence.

~~~
anandgrafiti
Sorry about that, We took a calculated call with the editor. For the consumer,
a structured tabular view of ingredients make sense but for the author, the
structured way of entering it in tables becomes a chore. This is the main
problem with creating good recipes. So we try to hit a sweet spot, and bring
up a bit of that desired structure the way we parse the ingredients.

The writer is learning continuously with more people using it, and we
correcting the imperfections as we spot them. There is no end to the ways in
which people may enter ingredients. Our bet is, once the user get to see how
it is presented on the final output, the second time they will start
visualising the way it needs to be entered. A bit of mutual learning.
Meanwhile, we keep looking for patterns and keep correcting these rough edges.

Also there are tons of use cases that we try to solve here. For instance,
people who have recipes stored on their personal Onenote/Evernotes accounts or
blogs can simply copy/paste the ingredients and steps to the free form
editor.This would not have been possible in a structured form.

[http://raymondsfood.cucumbertown.com/](http://raymondsfood.cucumbertown.com/)
recreated around 100 recipes from his blog over a weekend using the editor!
Sure, it could still render buggy, but it is possible to iron out the bugs
with more data coming in and patterns detected.

~~~
bazzargh
No need to apologise! I agree that trying to edit in tabular form would be
worse than you have now; I was thinking of nudging the users towards the
correct mental model purely by styling the divs that don't have the 'current'
class.

~~~
anandgrafiti
I get what you are saying. This is something we are yet to explore. The
freeform content editable input mechanism that we use currently is far from
perfect with several browser quirks. Added to the common use cases of
selection, moving the caret with keyboard etc, it becomes tad more tedius. But
it is something we are planning to invest more time on. Thanks a ton for the
feedback.

------
Cherian
We built this with a lot of feedback and help from the HN community.

When Cucumbertown[1] launched we had a lot of HNers like Trey who used to keep
recipes in a Dropbox folder and share. The first version of the editor was
form based (a bit like a survey form) and inhibited copy/paste and free form
cursor movements. We hacked around that version for sometime time till we hit
the limits. A textfield could only do so much.

So some time back we decided to do a full rewrite, ground up pushing our
limits with everything we learned.

This editor tries to be unobtrusive, simple and smart. The engine behind the
scenes does a lot of work including parsing, numbering, autocomplete etc. all
the way to a beautiful output.

Here’s an example: [http://www.cucumbertown.com/onion-puffs-recipe-
dish](http://www.cucumbertown.com/onion-puffs-recipe-dish)

This is just a start and there’s a lot ahead of us. As always we would love
your feedback.

I hope this help HNers like munificient[2] move from textfiles to a better
solution.

[1] [http://cucumbertown.com/](http://cucumbertown.com/)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8358827](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8358827)

~~~
digitalpbk
Dev here...

We have tied together parts of [https://github.com/daviferreira/medium-
editor](https://github.com/daviferreira/medium-editor), vanilla-js and jquery
:)

------
cooperadymas
I have been typing up all of my recipes off of my sticky notes. (Using a
WordPress plugin called RecipePress.) My biggest annoyance that I thought your
editor might fix is repeating myself.

Say I'm making spaghetti. In the steps I want to just type "boil 1 lb
spaghetti in 4 cups water for 4-5 minutes" and have the tool parse the "1 lb
spaghetti" out into the ingredient list. As it is, I have to type "spaghetti"
twice. I know it may seem lazy, but when you are entering hundreds of these
things it gets annoying.

Looks like the parsing code might already be there since you're doing it to
the ingredient list. Anyway, looks miles ahead of what I'm using. I've been a
Cucumbertown member for a long time but haven't visited much, looks like a lot
has improved!

~~~
anandgrafiti
Ha! You have just suggested a terrific feature. I have no idea how we could
implement something like that even with the parsing logic. I mean, we see way
too many writing patterns on a restricted ingredient entry area itself. So
imagining the multitude of edge cases makes my head spin:)

But will definitely give it a shot. We had something like this planned early
on, but were too scared to try it out. And yes, we have been improving a lot
on the site, please do come frequently:)

------
cos2pi
This is really cool. I've already shown your site to my mom, who loves it.

However, I can't seem to find a way to display the recipes that I "crave" \-
seems like this would be a good way to save tasty meals for later cooking.

~~~
Cherian
A long requested feature – I hope we get time to build a mini bookmarking
feature.

------
anilgulecha
Pretty! Well done.

Can you let the recipe page be only about that dish? The "similar dishes"
below it can all be collapsed if needed. Because many will just want to print
scroll the actual content and not get lost in other things.

Requests that'd make be use it: * special indian section (or others) * Special
indian + vegetarian. add the greed/red dot and you instantly have a large
audience. * I guess you could just allow special tags, and that could make
above possible. * printable/downloadable book. Not strictly necessary, I could
just run phantomjs and print out a list of pages, but if this was pre-done
that'd be nice.

~~~
Cherian
Actually we had the print version, which was more readable, and attention
focused. That didn’t make it in the current iteration. Point noted.

------
pbhjpbhj
Aside: from the vid, what are "2ons" of onion? I've searched and can't find it
on Wikipedia. Google's doing it's thing of not letting me limit SERPs to those
with the terms I want (yes even when they're in ""). I found a couple of
recipes that mention "X ons" of ingredient but ... is it USA ounces to
distinguish from "oz" as imperial ounces?

It's not in the Dummies book, not on Betty Crockers list, not on Wikipedia,
not on a list I found on epinions, ...?

This brings to mind, does the recipe auto-convert to metric (eg from cups or
imperial). How does it handle that?

~~~
bazzargh
In the vid they say '2 nos', not 'ons' for onions and also '4 nos' for lasagna
sheets. I'm guessing whoever typed that thought units were required and typed
a variant of 'nºs' to mean 'numbers'. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numero_sign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numero_sign)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Lol, yes, now you mention it ... oops.

------
simi_
I was _very_ skeptical starting watching the video, but you guys totally won
me over by the end. I'm recommending the site to my wife now, who's an avid
amateur cook.

------
sondr3
This is incredibly neat, I love it. I haven't used it extensively, but would
there be any way to easily export things so you can import it to say AnyList
for shopping? I normally would just use Paprika for this, however the recipes
here looks gorgeous.

edit: Also, I forgot to mention but it's a bit annoying that there's an upper
limit to password length.

~~~
aqeel
You can use longer passwords now!

------
Haddit
Liked the Ingredient suggestion thing in the editor, And also ingredients on
the side bar makes it easy while cooking ! Good job

------
infruset
Hey! This is really nice. Maybe I missed it but there doesn't seem to be a way
to have the ingredients be proportional to the number of people you want to
prepare it for. Of course, some things are not linear, and there should be a
way to specify it (like the $ in Excel or Calc).

~~~
Cherian
We want to build this as a platform exposing the data where you can write an
app on top of this and do this calculations. Think FB apps on FB.

------
prawn
Very nice. I clicked to try entering a recipe, went straight to a page and
quite liked the experience from there. I would rather "1 teaspoon" stayed on
the left of "newt eyes" than the right, but I like that they are styled
differently.

------
jv22222
This site is a masterclass in how to build a niche online community. Nice
work.

------
seektemp001
Cannot click the footer links, it keep pulling more data and pushing it down.
Was trying to get to about, faq etc.

~~~
anandgrafiti
A long pending complaint. Been keeping it to the backburner for a while. SOrry
about that. The auto loading stops after a while and becomes user triggered.

Meanwhile here is the link you were looking for
[http://cucumbertown.com/humans](http://cucumbertown.com/humans)

------
nobodysfool
No autocomplete for julienne, sautee, carmelize. It seems like this was
written without any input from a trained chef.

Hint:
[http://www.d.umn.edu/~alphanu/cookery/glossary_cooking.html](http://www.d.umn.edu/~alphanu/cookery/glossary_cooking.html)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
"carmelize"? I've heard US Americans saying it but I just thought it was poor
diction for "caramelize" [bleurgh, of course caramelise is the _correct_
spelling ;0) ]. Did you typo it or is this becoming an accepted spelling?

Wonder if you can build in synonyms without making it cluttered: julienne is
for _home_ purposes used as equivalent to allumette, or matchsticks, or long
thin strips, or batons. In a professional kitchen I think batons|batonnet are
fatter, julienne are skinny and long, allumet|matchsticks are as the name
suggests but a usually a little thinner.

Standardising recipe descriptions is probably pretty hard.

~~~
nobodysfool
It is becoming an accepted spelling.

[http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/carmelize](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/carmelize)

Also it's not 'US Americans' but Usanians.

------
Fastidious
It would be nice if I could see the recipes without the need to sign on.

~~~
Cherian
The homepage is the only one with a signup page. Everything else is accessible
directly.

e.g.
[http://raymondsfood.cucumbertown.com/](http://raymondsfood.cucumbertown.com/)

~~~
kolev
How do you get a subdomain like that?

~~~
Cherian
When you cross a threshold of recipes, we assign the domain. Else the whole
page looks very empty.

~~~
kolev
Is that threshold a secret?

~~~
Cherian
Nope. 300 points. Each recipe can be crave/rated for points.

------
Human_USB
How does one export data from this? JSON / Markdown?

~~~
Cherian
We don’t have an explicit button but if you need the data we can export it for
you.

Alternatively all the content is in hrecipe format. It shouldn’t be much work
to take a dump.

------
stinky613
Please, please allow passwords longer than 10 characters

~~~
aqeel
Done!

