Group Recipes Blog

Hey folks. Just to give you an update. We’ve been plugging away on the new site for awhile now. Things are looking fantastic. You don’t have too long of a wait, so hang in there. The site is immeasurably better (read cleaner, simpler, more useful).

Site speed issues resolved. Added a new box and all is well.

The site has been moving slowly the past few days. We’re sorry about that. We are adding new capacity this week to alleviate the load. Stay tuned on that front. Other than that we are in the process of working on major functionality upgrades.

Will post here when everything is up and running.

Quick post. More UI work is being done this week. You will notice some small changes on search, tag, and recipe pages. We are also adding tag/flavor refinement for the Directory. There will also be a few simple style changes to your “my stuff” page. Just a few things to make scanning information a little easier on the eyes.

We have had a menus feature written for more than a month now, but didn’t push it live because we had no where to put it. Right now it rests in the “Explore” section. Give it a Try! It is a very young, but works pretty well.

This brings us to the next point. The UI needs a bit of work. There are a few small issues that need to be tinkered with. One point of interest is the need to come up with a better navigation structure to hold an expanding feature set. We have a friend, and former Yahoo!/Ebay UI wizzard working with us now, so things should go smoothly.
Another little addition this week was the ability to search users by food(s) & flavor(s). Again, this is something we have had written for awhile, but just implemented. The feature is user-history-based, so scaling issues needed to be addressed.

That just about sums it up for now. Sorry about the lack of updates here. Rest assured that the GR Team is always working on new features regardless of what is (not) posted here.

Small update. You can now edit all of your comments (on recipe, personal, & place pages). I was going to add a spellcheck for comments as well, but considering Firefox (the world’s best browser imho) already does this, I didn’t do it.

There will be a series of updates over the next week.

When you find a recipe you like, you often want to quickly see other recipes by the same user. In the past, this would entail going to a person’s food page to see their list of submissions. Now, you can simply click the “see all of [username’s] dishes” link. This will bring up a box of 20 recipes at a time. You can page through this user’s recipes until you’ve seen them all without having to leave the page. It is very handy, and we are a bit embarrassed we didn’t think of this feature before. It will save countless pageviews. Enjoy.

I got a few emails from people asking why the taste compatibility values are different on the people search and the actual user’s page. The answer is computational complexity. The foodie-to-foodie comparisons on a user’s personal page take into account a heck of a lot more factors and are more accurate than those in the search result set. The bottom line is that the compatibility values in the search result set are close enough to serve as a general guide (the value will fall within one standard deviation of the value on the user’s page).

So this isn’t a “bug” perse, but probably needs a bit of documentation. Ahhh….documentation…I swear it is coming.

If you check out your “my stuff” page you can see the new recipe management system. We are calling it v0.1 because it only has a glimpse of the functionality that it will soon have. Regardless, it is a vast improvement over what was in place before. You can now bookmark and view recipes from other sites. Stay tuned for more updates on this…there should be quite a few.

We just re-worked the “foodie-to-foodie” comparison algorithm and are pushing it out on the live boxes this afternoon. The team spent a good amount of time working on this and I must say I am rather impressed. A plethora of new independent vars have been added to the regression analysis. There will be tweaks to the weighting here and there, so you might witness fluctuations this week.