x86mitch (u/x86mitch)

x86mitch commented on Show HN: I had issues organizing my favorite recipes, so I built this feastgenius.com/... · Posted by u/x86mitch

tomlong · 6 years ago

Has it been going a while, possibly under another name?

I tried to log in and was told my email address had already used the service, and sure enough, a password reset had me logged in. I have no recollection of using it, so it may have been some time ago.

I like it. It doesn't quite scratch my itch, but it looks a useful tool.

x86mitch · 6 years ago

thats funny, ya I renamed it from recipepoodle.

x86mitch commented on Show HN: I had issues organizing my favorite recipes, so I built this feastgenius.com/... · Posted by u/x86mitch

smt88 · 6 years ago

Normally I'd say you're being too cynical, but in this case it really does look like little more than a recipes-only (social?) bookmarking service.

x86mitch · 6 years ago

At its core that mostly what it is. The project forced me to get out of my comfort zone as a programmer. I picked up 2 new language/frameoworks (rails and angular), had to learn about building infrastructure on top of aws, deep dived into elasticsearch and then pollish everything enough to get it to a "showoff-able"(word?) state.

x86mitch commented on Show HN: I had issues organizing my favorite recipes, so I built this feastgenius.com/... · Posted by u/x86mitch

x86mitch · 6 years ago

Hey cryptica. The intention of this post was not to "raise money from investors" (the service is free and I have no plans to monetize it so it would be a terrible investment). The intention was to show off something I've been working on in my free time. The project did indeed start because I had issues filtering through all the saved recipes in my browser's bookmarks.

x86mitch commented on Show HN: I had issues organizing my favorite recipes, so I built this feastgenius.com/... · Posted by u/x86mitch

pknerd · 6 years ago

Why are you not using Google's Rich Snippets for individual recipes? It will not only help to get more traffic but also to rank better.

x86mitch · 6 years ago

Thank you for pointing this out. I was not even aware of rich snippets. I'll update the site to use this formatting as soon as I can.

x86mitch commented on Show HN: I had issues organizing my favorite recipes, so I built this feastgenius.com/... · Posted by u/x86mitch

bhargav · 6 years ago

The website looks great, love the design and categories.

> "Clip" recipes from anywhere on the web.

I always wondered if recipes would be, like most content, copyrighted. Have you looked into this?

Also, did you try using pen and paper? This sounds silly but when I am fasting, I am get cranky. Writing it down helped me stay focused and not give my self yet another excuse to break the fast.

Edit: Formatting.

x86mitch · 6 years ago

you are absolutely correct, the instructions for a recipe can be copyrighted. If you use the app you'll notice that when a recipe is clipped, in order to see the instructions you will get directed to the original recipe. I want to do right by creators and make sure they get the full credit deserved. What the app is concerned with is the ingredients(which is not copyrighted). I can use that for calculating the nutritional content.

x86mitch commented on Show HN: I had issues organizing my favorite recipes, so I built this feastgenius.com/... · Posted by u/x86mitch

jonas21 · 6 years ago

Apparently the motivation behind creating Elasticsearch was also organizing recipes.

https://www.elastic.co/about/history-of-elasticsearch

x86mitch · 6 years ago

TIL. It's funny because one of my motivations for building this site was to have a project that allowed me to work with ElasticSearch.

x86mitch commented on Show HN: I had issues organizing my favorite recipes, so I built this feastgenius.com/... · Posted by u/x86mitch

SpyKiIIer · 6 years ago

How is this different then the app/website CopyMeThat? I use that app all the time on my ipad to save recipes from random sites to my own "recipe book"

x86mitch · 6 years ago

I've never used CopyMeThat but I just looked through it quickly. It looks like a good app for solving a similar problem that feastgenius is solving. I think the difference with what I built is that it also calculates the nutrition content per serving. This was important for me personally because I use the app to search for recipes in certain macros ranges. For example, Finding chicken recipes in a macro range of (carbs:30-50, protein:20-40, fat:10-20). The search for feastgenius was built on top of elasticseach and in the near future I'll be building out more features based around really robust searching. I'll also be focusing time on building features for discovering new recipes. I hope that answers the question :)

x86mitch commented on Show HN: I had issues organizing my favorite recipes, so I built this feastgenius.com/... · Posted by u/x86mitch

mtlynch · 6 years ago

This is neat!

When I was eating keto, I got frustrated with how bad the search functionality was on all the keto blogs, so I made a similar tool It's a keto recipe searcher/aggregator:

https://ketohub.io

During this, I ended up going down a long rabbit hole trying to figure out how to parse recipe ingredients properly, and eventually spun off a separate ingredient parsing service:

https://zestfuldata.com (the service)

https://mtlynch.io/resurrecting-1/ (a 3-part blog series on how I built it)

OP - if you're interested in adding ingredient parsing to the site, I'd be happy to work with you.

x86mitch · 6 years ago

Zestful looks awesome! I'll take the chance to look into it more over the next few days. But looks like something that I would benefit from using :)

x86mitch commented on Show HN: I had issues organizing my favorite recipes, so I built this feastgenius.com/... · Posted by u/x86mitch

mattmar96 · 6 years ago

Thanks for building this. Funny enough I had a very similar idea last night :) Currently just store recipes in my notes app but its less than ideal

x86mitch · 6 years ago

Adding recipes into my notebook was the origin of this site. I would write out the ingredients and then look up the nutrition content for each one. So the purpose of feastgenius is to automate that :)

x86mitch commented on Show HN: I had issues organizing my favorite recipes, so I built this feastgenius.com/... · Posted by u/x86mitch

benawad · 6 years ago

Cool project, I love that you can search by macros. A few points:

1. Clipping recipes from different websites can be quite challenging because of the varying html structures. I recently tackled this problem and I'm curious what method you used to find recipe content within an html page? I ended up checking to see if the website followed a Recipe schema [1] and if not use a mix of heuristics to try identifying if a line of text was an ingredient. I also was considering using machine learning in there, but couldn't figure out a good way to incorporate it.

2. Is there a reason you don't include the instructions of the recipe on your website?

Awesome to see some fresh sites in this space. I built Saffron [2] which is focused on organizing your recipes into digital cookbooks.

[1] https://schema.org/Recipe

[2] https://www.mysaffronapp.com/

x86mitch · 6 years ago

For this project, I used Spoonaculars API for clipping recipes. I would be very interested in creating my own, similar to what you did. That would give me more control over the process. Did you come across any open source repos when you worked on your crawler?

> Is there a reason you don't include the instructions of the recipe on your website?

Yes, when users clip recipes from another source I want to make sure that users need to navigate back to the original page to see the instructions. This is to ensure the original author gets credit for it. If a user adds a recipe themselves to the site then it will show the instructions. Here is an example of a recipe with instructions for demo purposes, https://www.feastgenius.com/recipes/everything-nice-jerk-chi....