Yongfook is a web producer based in Tokyo

Posted on February 18th, 2008 at 2:14 am

WHOO!

Open Source Food has been revamped and relaunched! It’s now almost a year after the initial launch of OSF. I’ve been really pleased with it so far, but there was always a few things that I wanted to change here and there, some of them big, big changes, others just cool new features. I started work on it just after Christmas, and so after about 1.5 months of on-and-off development, here we are…

The New OVERVIEW page…

The New HOMEPAGE

One of the NEW recipe filter pages

There were two big issues I wanted to address with OSF2. One was scalability (and maintainability) of the architecture, one was scalability of the interface. The architecture side of things you can’t really see (I’m talking about the underlying software) but basically it involved a complete, ground-up re-write to…

1. make it neater and easier for me to maintain (and thus add new features to) with regard to file structure, application architecture etc
2. tidy up the db schema and make it more compact and sexy
3. kill scriptaculous and slot in jquery (yay)

With regard to scalability of the interface, what I’m referring to is as the site grows and the number of recipes increases we need a better way to interact with it all. The old way of displaying some categories and a list of thumbnails just wasn’t enough. So now you can apply filters, follow certain people, attach tags…more on that below.

OSF2 - New Features

FRIENDS!

Well kind of. You can now “follow” people you like on the site, to keep up to date with their recipes. Just click the “follow” button underneath anyone’s name (when logged in). Then you’ll see their recipes on the homepage when you visit the site, and also under Recipes > By Friends.

FILTER! FILTER! PARRY! DODGE! SPIN!

There are a number of ways you can filter through recipes now to find stuff you like. Under the Recipes tab you can browse through the entire collection, or you can just view the Recently Popular ones, or drool over the All Time Best, or view the latest recipes by your friends (only when logged in). And on each of these you can filter further by choosing to view all the recipes under that filter, or only the ones by pro members. Oh and there are also TAGS! Yes, I’ve killed the categories, you can now freely tag your recipes with whatever you like (and I automatically added tags to your recipes already so you don’t have to go back and re-tag them, unless there’s tags you want to add).

BETTER SEARCH!

It’s way better. Try it. You can also now search your own recipes, or the recipes of any individual member, if you go to their page.

THE OVERVIEW

I liked the idea of having a “My Page” that tells you a lot about the member. The new “Overview” (the page you see when you click on any member) gives you a brief snapshot of that member - their latest recipes, the ones they voted on, activity on their recipes; and potentially more in the future.

THE SPOTLIGHT RECIPE

Some recipes really deserve to get recognition and that’s what the spotlight area is for. At the very top of the page, in the header (and as the background image) you will notice random recipes in rotation. These are high-voted recipes that have been promoted to spotlight status. Unfortunately due to the way the old site was built, old recipes cannot be spotlight recipes unless you re-upload the photo. So if you have a high-voted recipe that you added a while back, take a few seconds to edit it to re-upload the photo, and it will probably find its way into the spotlight area.

If you are on a member page, OSF will try to show you spotlight recipes by that member, unless there aren’t any.

TAG AUTO GENERATE

When you go to add a new recipe there is a rather nifty AUTO GENERATE tag feature. Basically after you’ve written your ingredients and method you can just click a button and OSF will generate tags for you, based on the content. Saves a lot of thinking time.

RELATED RECIPES

On each recipe now there is a list of related recipes at the bottom, by other users. I thought this was more relevant and more fun than the old way of just showing a couple of random recipes by the same user. It gets you browsing round the site much more.

Ok and now some stuff that I’ve taken out

Right. The big thing that I’ve removed, or rather, tweaked significantly, is the star rating system. Some of you won’t like this, but just hear me out - it make more sense this way…

The star rating system simply wasn’t working. I mean really, who gives 1 star? I’ll tell you - no one. Out of all the recipes with star ratings on OSF, less than 1% had 1 star ratings. The problem is of course that if you feel motivated enough to give a star rating at all, 9 times out of 10 you will give a 3 star rating, just to make it worth your while. This then massively skews the results. We’re no longer looking at results based on a sliding scale of 1 to 3 stars, we’re looking at results based on whether a user was motivated enough to click or not - and if that is the case, we can simplify things so that they make much more sense.

Under the new system, there is just a simple vote button. Vote if you like it. If you vote, the recipe becomes more popular. It’s that simple. I’m not going to bother with bar graphs or flashing vote counts just yet, because frankly I don’t see the need for comparison - a 35-vote recipe is not necessarily better than a 25-vote recipe; they are both good and I don’t want users using some arbitrary measure like that when deciding on which one to click on. If it’s popular it will end up in the popular recipes area. If a member pumps out a handful of popular recipes, they will eventually become a PRO member.

I’m not saying this is the perfect system, I’m saying the old one wasn’t working, so this is where we’re going to start from now. Nobody has “lost” ratings here - all the ratings of the old site were converted into new ratings for this site. Your popular recipes are still popular ;)

I’m open to suggestions on this so let me know if you have any good ideas below (please don’t mention stars).

Ok and now some stuff that I still have to put back in

I decided to launch today despite the new version not being 100% ready. I know, I know. But seriously, if it wasn’t this weekend, it could drag on and on forever if I waited until everything was 100% perfect so I decided to just make a big push to get as much done as I could and launch, with a view to add and refactor parts of the site over the next week or so. So things still to put back in:

1. Mail / Messaging - yes don’t worry, it will go back in ASAP
2. Static pages (About, FAQ etc)
3. Widgets are a bit borked
4. Profile edit!111

Ok and now some new stuff that I will be adding…

This isn’t the end - one of the reasons for the re-write was so that it’s easier for me to add new features. Some that I have in mind:

1. API - actually already started on that one.
2. More stuff on the Add Recipe page e.g. additional pics if you have them, video…
3. Learning and Recommendation functionality - so OSF starts to recognise what kind of food you like (but doesn’t become self-aware and destroy humanity)
4. Lil recipe newsletter to send out each week (opt-in of course)

That’s all for now. Boy I’m tired. I haven’t even left my apartment for 2 days now. I’m babbling. Time for sweet black sleep.