Show HN: Github for recipes (forkingrecipes.com)

Great idea. Needs a better app and UX but really good idea. Good job!

this idea is awesome. The "forking" idea is great for recipes, but you need almost something like a difftool to be able to tell what's different and why? I think with a better UI and way's for users to interact with each other this could be extremely cool. Stick with it and good luck :)

Neat. When I saw the headline I thought that this would be too technical to get traction with non-geeks but it looks nice and I could see it becoming popular especially with particular diet communities like paleo etc.

Interesting application of software development paradigms to cooking. I think it would be useful to have categories, e.g. breakfast/dinner/dessert, hot/cold, and suchlike. And maybe a regular 'featured menu' on the front page to illustrate a meal combination, with a nice photograph shown and some encouraging body text.

Why not build this right on top of GitHub?

    Re: {url_block}/new

    Recipe Name: {name}
    Date: {extracted_from_email}
    Subject: 
    
    {haml_recipe_body}

You need to hire a designer for this. Cooking/recipes/food markets are really visually driven. You also need to define what a fork is right on the landing page. A fork for a cook is not the same as a fork for a programmer. What you should have is a good header area that has the application work flow explained in graphics.

Example:

    Alice liked Juan's recide for thai rice. 
    She wanted to create her own version. Alice
    forked Juan's recipe and modified it to fit
    tastes.

    In forkingrecipes, the act of forking is when
    you give someone else's recipe your own touch.
    Thus creating a new recipe for others to use and fork.

I know a good designer who can help you with this, by the way.

Hey Guys,

I'm the creator of Forking Recipes, I'll be happy to answer any questions you have and thanks for taking a look!

Quoting http://www.badstartupidea.com/:

First, go and find out about Github. Figure out what it is they do, how they attract users, and how they make money. Github is already operating well in the Programming space, but perhaps the same basic ideas can be applied in the Cooking space. That's where you come in.

Edit: I think it's a great idea, it's just funny that that site mentioned this after only a couple refreshes.

You missed the opportunity to use the name GitCipes.

Great idea! It seems obvious in hindsight, at least to people who understand forking and dvcs. Which is great.

Let's see how non-tech people are able to understand and use such concepts.

I find it waaaay too geeky for a cooking website. The idea could be useful but as it is right now, it's very hard to understand how it's supposed to work. (Revision 2, what?)

\o/ I asked for this 16 days ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5033978) and now it exists. God I love HackerNews :D

Probably not related, though still cool.

What I'd like to see though, is for all the pictures to be of food. There's a lot of happy faces, but the point of a cook book is to make me feel hungry when looking at the pictures. Not sure how to achieve that though.

I started something similar[1] last Christmas (but lost interest as I never documented my own experiments). It's a great idea and there's need for a de facto standard source for recipes and cooking instructions.

My "next step" was to contact sous chefs of famous restaurants.

[1] http://palatelab.com/

Edit: rephrased.

Cucumbertown does this very well. They allow you to take a recipe and fork it – called “Write a variation” (on the left) [1]. IIRC quite a few recipes there are created this way.

[1] http://www.cucumbertown.com/recipes/55228/baked-mac-cheese

Having looked at some of the recipes, it might be nice to take the job of layout/formatting away from the recipe submitter and offer some differnt layout options to the person viewing it.

For example, some recipes include the accompanying photos inline, while others collect the photos at the end. If instead, the submitter merely tagged the photos according to what step they accompanied, then the website code can lay them out beatifully in a number of different ways to suit different viewers.

I think I'm thinking something along the lines of LaTeX philosophy: You provide the content and leave the layout to the experts/computer. So you don't write that "Zest of 2 lemons" should be part of a bulleted list, you write that it is an ingredient and leave it to the layout to put it in a suitably formatted ingredient list.

Another advantage is you reduce the ability of less savvy users to make parts of your site look ugly.

User experience still needs a lot of improvement, but I love it. congratulations.

hack the kitchen?

Very nice! I'd like to have the option (but not the requirement) to log in with oauth(2) from Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.

Your site will get a lot more traction if you implement that, I think. Most people (even non-techie folks) are suffering from account proliferation.

Just like every other cool page for managing recipes: Please add automatic conversion from/to metric units.

I like it. You need to improve the editor (normal people won't understand markup, just have a text box for ingredients, another for directions and a list for images).

You also need tags so I can tag a recipe as 'Asian' or 'BBQ' to make it organizable.

You should remove all of the pictures that do not show the food and replace all of the low quality pictures as well. When I went to your website the first thing i saw was a bunch of faces and non-appetizing looking onions. You want to make the food look amazing.

http://www.cucumbertown.com does this very well. Cleaner UI and seamless experience. Also has a lot of celebrity chefs onboard as users.

[Forkinit](http://forkinit.com/) does a good job of this but hasn't been updated in a while. You might check them out for other ideas in this space. Looks like you have a great start.

I like it. It seems you are aiming at geeks. And I think geeks want a powerful search interface and this is why I haven't found a website i really like. I want to make queries like "Recipes with Tomatoes, Paprika but without meat of type soup" or "I only have Garlic, Paprika, bread, Cream, flour, and sugar, eggs and spices , what is the closest meaningful lunch? Not in natural language, but with a interface. Like a textarea for "what i have" "what i don't have/like", and "What kind of meal would it be" each.