Show HN: Github for recipes

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.<p>Example:<p><pre><code> 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. </code></pre> I know a good designer who can help you with this, by the way.

We launched Fork the Cookbook about the same time as Forking Recipes too. You might want to check it out: <a href="http://forkthecookbook.com" rel="nofollow">http://forkthecookbook.com</a><p>We try not to call it Github for Recipes because that's not our target market (although other people have called us Github for Recipes)<p>We blog over at <a href="http://theforkingchef.com" rel="nofollow">http://theforkingchef.com</a> so you might also want to check that out.<p>OK, self promotion over

\o/ I asked for this 16 days ago (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5033978" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5033978</a>) and now it exists. God I love HackerNews :D<p>Probably not related, though still cool.<p>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.

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.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.cucumbertown.com/recipes/55228/baked-mac-cheese" rel="nofollow">http://www.cucumbertown.com/recipes/55228/baked-mac-cheese</a>

I like it, although I think there are other organizing principles to explore. Seconded on all the 'fork' comments its not at all intuitive to a chef what you mean here.<p>At present the top level abstraction is the recipe which you've sort of equated to 'source code' but when you look at something like Github or Sourceforge the high level abstraction is the 'project' and in the food world the closest I could come up with is 'cuisine.'<p>Consider one of my daughters favorite sites: <a href="http://smittenkitchen.com/" rel="nofollow">http://smittenkitchen.com/</a> this site has lots of interesting recipes, and one might use them as a top level abstraction. So you've got the 'smittenkitchen' project equivlent or maybe 'smittenkitchen-breakfast' project which is breakfasts from smitten kitchen.<p>Then there are chefs which are much more important in the cooking world than individual developers are in the programming world. That is because the chef's 'taste' really defines the product in a way that is fundamental to the enjoyment. So you might want to build a '&#60;Chef&#62;-&#60;category&#62;' type model. Then you could do a pull of &#60;Ramsay&#62;-&#60;appetizer&#62; and get various appetizers that Gordon Ramsay makes.<p>Of course that will get you into a licensing battle. Because like fonts, recipes have this weird quasi relationship to name vs instructions (can't copyright instructions, can copyright the name, google Font Copyright for more info)<p>Conceptually I think this is a really winner idea (sadly easy to copy) but if you get the right mix going and critical mass it could easily be as successful as github or sourceforge.

I like how easy recipe discovery is on forkingrecipes. I think the waterfall layout and search bar were good decisions.<p>Mappum and I made something pretty similar for the last Node Knockout.<p><a href="http://foodhub.jit.su/" rel="nofollow">http://foodhub.jit.su/</a><p>Like orangethirty said, foodies tend to be really visual, so we encourage the user to take a high quality photo by making it the focus of their recipe page.<p>Good job, I'm excited to see where you go with this. :)

[Forkinit](<a href="http://forkinit.com/" rel="nofollow">http://forkinit.com/</a>) 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.

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

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.

Quoting <a href="http://www.badstartupidea.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.badstartupidea.com/</a>:<p>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.<p>Edit: I think it's a great idea, it's just funny that that site mentioned this after only a couple refreshes.

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

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.<p>My "next step" was to contact sous chefs of famous restaurants.<p>[1] <a href="http://palatelab.com/" rel="nofollow">http://palatelab.com/</a><p>Edit: rephrased.

I've thought a lot about this idea as something to add to my site Eat This Much (<a href="http://www.eatthismuch.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.eatthismuch.com</a>)<p>I have a pretty basic implementation of it right now - you can click a "personalize recipe" button on recipe pages to make modifications to it, and watch the nutrition change as you make changes. As a premium member, you can then have the meal plan generator suggest your modified version of the recipe in place of the original. When I have the time, I'm hoping to make all the existing branches and variations browsable.<p>There are some pretty great suggestions here I think. It would be really cool if you could build out an API similar to yummly's for serving up recipes. With different branches for each recipe, you could easily search through the variations to satisfy filters based on a user's tastes.

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

<a href="http://www.cucumbertown.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.cucumbertown.com</a> does this very well. Cleaner UI and seamless experience. Also has a lot of celebrity chefs onboard as users.

I know that twitter boostrap is a great tool to start a project and to prove the concept. I love the idea as a amateur cook and developer (not amateur :D), but if you want to reach a larger public (non developers) I think you should invest some time (and probably money) into a good designer (by the way, is a website where we could really "rent" a webdesigner? I know some where you coul rent a coder but not a designer).

I love this. Every time I look up a recipe, I read the comments to see popular modifications and tweaks to the original recipe, and thought it would be awesome if those could branch off and become their own, with the most popular 'forks' floating to the top (even dethroning the original recipe, if they are indeed better). I'm glad to see this come to fruition!

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.

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 :)

<a href="http://www.chefday.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.chefday.com/</a> is Heroku for cooking :)

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.

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

This is awesome. I think it's a coincidence because the other day on HN someone said something about a "github for recipes". I'm not saying that to be coy or to be condescending, simply coincidental.<p>Keep up the good work! As an avid amateur chef, this could be fun.

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

This is pretty amazing. I had thought how cool it'd be to have something like this a bunch of times (specially when I want to find simplified curry recipes.)<p>I seem to recall someone put something similar on HN a few months ago. Any ideas who it was?

That's cool!! Can this be adapted for curriculums? I am a medical student and have been posting medical curriculum at <a href="https://github.com/aloo/hack_medicine" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/aloo/hack_medicine</a>

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.

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?)

Great idea! It seems obvious in hindsight, at least to people who understand forking and dvcs. Which is great.<p>Let's see how non-tech people are able to understand and use such concepts.

We made something very similar for Node Knockout (the 48-hour hackathon), <a href="http://foodhub.jit.su" rel="nofollow">http://foodhub.jit.su</a>.

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

<a href="http://startupsupper.com" rel="nofollow">http://startupsupper.com</a>

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

You missed the opportunity to use the name GitCipes.

Why not build this right on top of GitHub?

What an awesome idea! Love the site.

Man, I had this very idea a few months ago. :-)