Hey tww,
For the last few months I've been building http://www.fridgn.com which essentially scours food websites for recipes and indexes them based on what ingredients are in them. The idea is you can put in the ingredients you have in your fridge and it will spit back what you can make. I'm looking for feed back on what types of features people would find useful at this point.
Peace.

6/15/2011 6:07:13 PM

GET AN AD

6/15/2011 6:07:43 PM

What makes this better than allrecipes.com?

6/15/2011 6:09:16 PM

Quote :

"Ice for Cocktails Description: "Good, fresh ice made with boiled, filtered water will make a noticeable difference in the taste of your cocktails. As Eric Felten advises, 'Use ice untainted by municipal chlorine and free from memories of trout caught last summer.'" Ingredients: water"

brilliant

with salt, pepper, butter, ice and water

i can make ice for cocktails

Quote :

"Sorry, No recipes were found with the ingredients you entered. Try entering additional ingredients. Your ingredients: chicken salt pepperoni mozzarella cheese pizza dough"

damn you

[Edited on June 15, 2011 at 6:11 PM. Reason : .]

6/15/2011 6:09:33 PM

wait i have water in my fridge, and i can make ice with it? fuck me

6/15/2011 6:11:04 PM

lol ncsupiratecaptain at gmail.com

[Edited on June 15, 2011 at 6:14 PM. Reason : also, your www. redirect is a little jarring]

6/15/2011 6:13:24 PM

Lol its the pirate captain.

Good catch ken

6/15/2011 6:17:57 PM

Renders incorrectly in mobile safari.

6/15/2011 6:18:31 PM

awesome project. will/do you allow for substitutes, like recipes that call for baking soda vs. baking powder? what about narrowing the search results? I just added a handful of basic things I could think of out of the fridg and came up with 40 results.. I can imagine if I added everything I have it'd grow exponentially

maybe by style, like by meat main dish or vegetarian, dessert, etc.

6/15/2011 6:29:10 PM

Quote :

"For the last few months I've been building http://www.fridgn.com which essentially scours food websites for recipes and indexes them based on what ingredients are in them. The idea is you can put in the ingredients you have in your fridge and it will spit back what you can make. I'm looking for feed back on what types of features people would find useful at this point."

YES!!!! GO YOU!

i have always wanted a site like this. but i was too lazy to ever execute/figured one probably existed.

my other invention idea also already exists but apparently in poor form: cooling mattress pad.

6/15/2011 6:38:41 PM

concept is great, but the logo and page design could use some help

6/15/2011 6:41:53 PM

http://www.google.com/landing/recipes

btw

6/15/2011 6:46:48 PM

Quote :

"chicken salt pepperoni mozzarella cheese pizza dough""

You should have some kind of tolerance built in so if you have most but not all the ingredients it will still display it.

EDIT:

Oh I see you do already.

Maybe fix the width of your body so the search bar doesn't move around when you re-size.

[Edited on June 15, 2011 at 6:53 PM. Reason : mm]

6/15/2011 6:50:14 PM

Yo but seriously

Hire a designer who knows what they're doing

I'm available

6/15/2011 6:53:46 PM

Chembob -> agreed, I will!

Its indexing allrecipes.com and foodnetwork.com right now, and as I write other adapters its capable of indexing any other sites with recipes.

TreeTwista, I do not suggest mixing all of your ingredients and freezing it. Trust me on this one.

qntmfred -> indeed, good catch.

Alaskan -> dreamweaver 5.5 will allow me to test in all the mobile x browsers thanks for pointing that out.

Paerabol -> I'm trying to get substitutions working right now. There are a ton of things that don't come up because of the missing substitutions... like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Good suggestion on breaking them apart into style. I was also thinking about regional foods as well, eg. Hispanic, french, Chinese, etc.

rbrthwrd -> I agree, and i'd say 'a lot of help' instead of 'some help'

Ernie -> I've seen that kinda cool.

yrrah -> I did, look under the search options, right now you can increase your returns for missing 1, 2 or 3 ingredients, but the list BLOWS up.

6/15/2011 6:57:17 PM

ARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

6/15/2011 8:05:09 PM

you should style your site like a giant fridge with the door open, you could have a two-column layout (menu on the opened door, with the search thing/results inside)

6/15/2011 8:42:55 PM

Coincidentally, I just registered http://www.ralphfridgn.com

6/15/2011 9:31:13 PM

^^ I've thought about that and conceptually it sounds cool. And do kind of a vintage fridge thing. But I'm at a loss for getting it to look right >:|
I do think its definitely worth continuing to pursue, thanks.

6/15/2011 9:41:47 PM

spend a couple grand and hire a designer

6/15/2011 9:45:03 PM

Quote :

"Sorry, No recipes were found with the ingredients you entered. Try entering additional ingredients. Your ingredients: avocados onion jalapeno peppers chicken lime "

this site sucks. yeah, you can't make anything with those common ingredients.

6/15/2011 9:59:09 PM

This is possibly the nicest looking website i have ever seen

I'm AstralAdvent and i approved this message.

6/15/2011 10:01:26 PM

wait, were you the pirate captain? I still have the campaign button on my bookbag

6/15/2011 10:09:33 PM

Quote :

"avocados onion jalapeno peppers chicken lime"

Avocado Soup with Chicken and Lime

http://tinyurl.com/6gbtwxx

6/15/2011 10:11:05 PM

^^ Haha yea, that was hilarious! I actually only have one of those buttons left back in NC myself, though last week I received a magnet in the mail with the same logo on it, kinda cool.

^^^ I will never change then!

^^^^ Okay.
So I think one of the problems is that if you exclude common spices from the list of ingredients that you have, the results are limited. Where as yes, you could make something with avocado, onion, jalapenos chicken and lime... But it would seem that no recipes on foodnetwork or allrecipes have excluded the other less significant spices (black pepper, salt).
I've considered adding some feature that the user could click that would add all sorts of really common spices eg. salt, black pepper, garlic powder, parsley, oregano, etc. However, if you're missing those ingredients and they end up being a key flavor you're SOL. So instead I just added the really basic things when you first visit the site, the black pepper, salt, pepper, water figuring everyone has that stuff.
What would you suggest?

6/16/2011 3:21:34 AM

when i type "pe" for example, it brings up every ingredient that starts with or contains pe" which are many ingredients

however the default drop-down menu doesn't allow scrolling down with the mouse, you have to scroll down the webpage itself by going to the right side of the page and scrolling down...should be an easy fix

6/16/2011 4:19:01 AM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7DwSL2KjQg

[Edited on June 16, 2011 at 4:28 AM. Reason : ...]

6/16/2011 4:24:11 AM

you could establish weights for each type of ingredient, so it's ok to be missing multiple things in the salt, pepper, water category but not in the coconut, avacado, talapia category
(common vs key ingredients)

then instead of having an exact 1,2,3 items missing selection you could have 'exact, close, loose' type of search

6/16/2011 8:42:23 AM

You should use solr and give us some guided navigation.

6/16/2011 8:48:13 AM

I thought this thread was about an obese ex-football coach.

Love the idea; will try this out sometime soon.

6/16/2011 9:09:37 AM

pretty cool!

6/16/2011 10:39:48 AM

Might be nice to have a page for different food groups with check boxes so people can scroll through and check which ones they have to add to the list without having to type in every single item. So have, say, a dairy page that lists different types of milk, cheese, yogurt, etc. Then a veggie page that has broccoli, tomatoes, peppers, onion ...

6/16/2011 10:54:03 AM

Pirate Captain? On my TWW? Awesome

Quote :

"wait i have water in my fridge, and i can make ice with it? fuck me"

6/16/2011 11:20:04 AM

[quote]Might be nice to have a page for different food groups with check boxes so people can scroll through and check which ones they have to add to the list without having to type in every single item. So have, say, a dairy page that lists different types of milk, cheese, yogurt, etc. Then a veggie page that has broccoli, tomatoes, peppers, onion ...

This is a past the point of a good idea...i'd call it (or something like it) necessary. nobody wants to search for 100+ items in their pantry/fridge one by one.

also you're going to want to have user accounts so all that data entry isn't just tied to a simple cookie.

6/16/2011 11:24:43 AM

You should have an option to select recipes that would be found on pirate ships.

6/16/2011 1:06:27 PM

TreeTwista, I see what you're saying, thanks, I'd not noticed that.

Yrrah, I think that's the solution I've been looking for! Thanks. That could solve a lot of problems and ebb some frustration issues with missing minor ingredients keeping things that are almost complete from being found.

AlaskanGrown, I'm not 100% sure what you're saying, probably because I'm not familiar with solr. Is this it? http://lucene.apache.org/solr/tutorial.html

Skwinkle and synapse, that was originally how I was inputting ingredients but test users found it a hassle. It should be easy enough though to put it back in as an option.

Mexican food? check.
Greek food? check.
Pirate food? hells yes!

6/16/2011 3:01:07 PM

Synapse, version 2, once basic functions are in and its a bit more user friendly and the logic is a bit more solid I plan on having user accounts. This will allow for mobile apps as well as tagging favorite recipes and rating them etc. Thanks!

6/16/2011 3:03:10 PM

i was just thinking you could keep track of how many times an ingredient is part of a group with no recipes found, use that to adjust your weights - or have a "not what I was looking for" button and track that also

6/17/2011 7:34:16 PM

I once downloaded an app that claimed to do this but it worked like crap. So far this site looks better

Quote :

"my other invention idea also already exists but apparently in poor form: cooling mattress pad."

heh they have them in Asia.

6/17/2011 7:41:41 PM

iop1. Well done!
It only pulls recipes from AllRecipes and the Food Network, are those the only places it pulls from?

6/18/2011 11:29:20 AM

Aha, wait, TPC?

Sup man? You were actually my orientation/campus tour guide/whatever the fuck way back when. And then you were TPC.

Also, if this ends up working proper one day I might use the hell out of it.

6/18/2011 12:21:42 PM

Update!

So I've been working on Fridgn on and off and it looks like the next big thing I'm throwing in there will be the users accounts and some behind the scene stuff for being able to reindex recipes. I'm also changing the way ingredients are stored which is allowing me to weight them.

But since I last posted (sorry for the incredi-delay) I've updated with a bunch of search options.

^^ Yes right now it only pulls from the food network and AllRecipes as I write a little crawler that indexes them independently. With the two of them I have about 60k recipes... enough for some decent results.

What other recipe sites are legit that you all like?

^haha yea I was an orientation counselor. That job was crazy. The hours were insane, but I got to meet a truck load of people and that was pretty sick. I also got to spread rumors that all the buildings on campus were sinking because of a lack of bedrock... the fiasco with harrelson hall added legitimacy. Since then I've heard that rumor from a few people... delightful. On a side note to that, if you ever have to play a "get to know everyone" game, there is some game where everyone has to get m&m's out of a bag, and then how ever many m&m's they took they have to say one fact about themselves. Have people play this game outside and use skittles... they stick to every thing and dye your hands if they get warm. Its hilarious to see people staring at their hands in dismay throughout the day. If I did that to you... I'm... not sorry. Its still funny.

8/4/2011 5:52:46 PM

^ Yeah, that was what I meant. Solr would allow you to provide faceted navigation over your data set. So if you wanted to see all recipes with chicken, you click the chicken dimension and your results list and refinement dimensions are updated. You would store your recipes as records and tag the ingredients as navigable properties. It is a really powerful tool for discovery, best of all it is free.

8/4/2011 6:52:36 PM

Sounds like a Pokemon.

8/4/2011 7:11:12 PM

So I got users implemented on http://www.fridgn.com. It will track your ingredients currently so you can log in when ever to recall them.

Along with this I want people to be able to tag recipes that they like to keep track of those as well.

That's going in next.

What other features would be useful with the users?

9/7/2011 12:45:19 AM

shareable links

http://fridgn.com/bacon+wrapped+steak

[Edited on September 7, 2011 at 10:03 AM. Reason : it'll be better for SEO anyways - rather than your current ajax pseudoframe technique]

9/7/2011 10:02:26 AM

what a fabulous idea. Are these recipes the healthy kind at all?

9/7/2011 10:03:30 AM

a few more thoughts

the logo should be a link back to fridgn.com, and get rid of the Home link
the click to remove on the left is kinda awkward. at least show an [X] inside each ingredient when you hover over it (nobody will read the Click to remove instruction - people will recognize on sight what an X means)
if the search bar at the top is Basic Recipe Search, where is Advanced Recipe Search?

[Edited on September 7, 2011 at 10:13 AM. Reason : .]

9/7/2011 10:13:18 AM

^&^^^
Good call on the home link. A couple times I've moused over the image and been like "oh yea."
Gotcha on the 'x', and I guess I should rename it "keyword search" to be more clear. Thanks.
And as far as having sharable links that's coming along. I just need to get the layouts to work.

^^
I was actually trying to think of a way to get the nutrition information for all of the recipes. Something like breaking ingredients down into a mass measurement when the recipe is looked up and summing up all the nutritional values. But yes, bacon wrapped steaks are healthy. By healthy I mean delicious! And by delicious I mean 12.99 for 6 at costco! Dinner!

9/7/2011 7:39:06 PM

Quote :

""Ice for Cocktails Description: "Good, fresh ice made with boiled, filtered water will make a noticeable difference in the taste of your cocktails. As Eric Felten advises, 'Use ice untainted by municipal chlorine and free from memories of trout caught last summer.'" Ingredients: water""

9/7/2011 7:47:38 PM