Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

Today I’m announcing my new personal web project, Open Source Food.

Lately I’ve been putting a lot of energy into my new business venture jonkenpon, which has left little time for me to enjoy myself on personal projects. That’s a shame as I often have ideas that I feel would be better executed by myself alone (i.e. the theme is something I’m personally invested in) or ideas where the theme is too niche to consider making into a jonkenpon project. However for the past week I’ve been going to bed at 4am each day, working on my personal stuff in the night and in the morning and am proud today to launch my first personal project of 2007.

This is Open Source Food and it is one of 3 big personal projects I aim to launch this year.

What is Open Source Food?

Open Source Food is a place to show off, a place to learn and a place to get motivated about food and cooking. It is a platform for sharing recipes, improving upon them, and looking at lots and lots of sexy food pics (and sexy pics of the people who cooked the food…).

On OSF you can upload recipes with pics, rate other people’s recipes according to originality, presentation and overall yumminess, use drag & drop to create original menus from any combination of recipes on OSF, get a blog widget for your blog that shows your last 10 recipes in a beautiful slideshow, and other tantalising features. It’s a social celebration of food for the new web.

How do I submit a recipe?

First you need to sign up then you just need to click the big “Add Recipe” button at the top. Adding a recipe is simple - and you can even save your recipes as a draft until later if it’s too long to finish in one sitting!

What’s the difference between a recipe and a menu?

Recipes are…recipes. No surprises there. A menu is a user-created collection of recipes that they think work well together. You might want to create a menu on an ethnic theme (”Spicy Asian Menu”), or in celebration of a special occasion (”Romantic Menu for 2…”). You can create menus through a simple drag & drop interface from any recipes on Open Source Food. I think menus will be a great way of seeing how individual users think about food and how flavours, colours and themes work together.

Latest Recipes Blog Widget

Yes! Every member of OSF gets a beautiful little (discreet but noticeable, if there is such a thing) blog widget to put in their blog’s sidebar. It shows your last 10 recipes in a slideshow and of course, if you click on a pic it takes you to the recipe. Here’s my one:

And you can also see it in its permanent location in my sidebar :)

Individual Recipes Blog Widget

New feature as of May 26th 2007. Now anyone can blog any individual recipe simply by copy and pasting a little snippet of code (a la youtube etc). Found a great recipe? Want to put it on your blog? You can! The blog widget will give you the recipe’s picture and your blog readers can view the recipe text from a handy slide-in drawer, right in the recipe pic - so they don’t have to leave your page :) A few examples are below:

mmmmmm mignon.

Can I Join In?

Yes, you can sign up here!

Go! Play! Spread the word to your food-loving friends. I’ll be adding new features as time goes on. I want to make OSF the yummiest place on the web :) If you are a food blogger please, please give me feedback below - OSF has been built with you in mind and I’d love to know your thoughts on how it can be improved.

Cheers!

Jon

This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 7:10 am and is filed under Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.