December 2007
Common Kitchen Substitutions
The internet version of “by popular request” is when Google throws you some traffic that you don’t deserve. We were getting all sorts of people looking for “Common Kitchen Substitutions” and so we created just that! We’re currently working on a list of “Common Kitchen Terms” to keep uninterested parties from ending up looking at our terms and conditions page.
Common Kitchen Tutorial: Adding Recipes
We often get asked how to add a favorite cookbook or recipe on Common Kitchen, so we thought we’d prepare a quick tutorial. This should take only 10 minutes to try, and when you are done you will be an expert at sharing cookbooks and their recipes!
1. Find a favorite cookbook
Grab a couple of your favorite cookbooks off your shelf. Let’s do a quick search to find one already listed on Common Kitchen. Go to the Cookbooks page, enter a few words from the title (or author, or ISBN) in the search box, and click “Search Cookbooks”. If it’s there, check the ISBN to make sure you have the same edition, then click on the title and skip right to Section 2. If its not there, try another one — with over 750 cookbooks on Common Kitchen it’s very likely that we have at least 3 of your top 5 cookbooks.
2. Add a recipe
Find an interesting recipe in the cookbook, and check that it isn’t already listed in the “Recipes” section of its page on Common Kitchen. Click “Add a recipe from this cookbook,” and you will arrive at a page where you can enter a recipe title and page number, as well as an optional description, tags, and key ingredients. If it’s a recipe that you have tried before, check “Tested,” or if it’s one you want to make sometime in the future, check “Untested,” and we will save it to your “Recipe Box”. If you want to review the recipe, click “Review now!” and a review form will appear. When you are done, click “Save,” and you will be returned to the cookbook page.
Now you know how to add and review recipes! Enter a few more of your favorites so people with the same cookbooks will know what to try.
3. Check out other people’s reviews
If the cookbooks you use have recipes that are already reviewed on the site (Fannie Farmer, for example), you will see some number of stars on the right hand side of the recipe list. If you click on one of those recipes (such as Fannie’s Apple Crisp) you will see the text of the reviews, as well as any secondary sources. In this case, someone has posted a link to a blog where you can find this recipe online. From any recipe page you can add your own review by clicking “Write a review.”
4. Try adding some other things
Were there any of your cookbooks that we didn’t have in our database? You can add them very easily, then add recipes as above. Likewise, your favorite recipe sites and magazines. You can also add and review restaurants (and even dishes for a given restaurant).
Have fun with the site, and let us know if you have any questions or suggestions.
Extra: Find yourself a friend or two
We automatically add the Common Kitchen team to your friend list when you sign up, but if you have other friends who use the site you can search for them by username or email address. Once you have found someone, just click “Add to your network,” and you will see their reviews as “Activity in my network.” They will also appear on Facebook if you have our application installed.
You can always remove friends by clicking the [X] next to their name on your profile page. Know someone who would like the site? Invite them to join!
Facebook updates for Common Kitchen
Since things have been bubbling quite publicly over at Facebook recently, I thought I’d post an update about Common Kitchen’s presence on Facebook and where we are with our application and other Facebook activity.
First, some progress: we have a “page” now, so you can become a “fan” of Common Kitchen. I think Facebook created these “pages” as a way to avoid the phenomenon of “fakesters,” where people create false profiles as stand-ins for companies, mascots, etc. (or less commercial concepts.) We’re not really sure what being a “fan” of Common Kitchen will mean in the long run, but we’ll see what we can do to make it a positive experience.
Second, we’ve “published” our application, which means it shows up in Facebook’s official lists of applications. It’s seen a fair amount of traffic since then, which is good news and actually a little surprising to us, given that (*cough*) it doesn’t do much yet. Mostly, it attempts to push your activity on Common Kitchen (posting reviews, etc.) into your Facebook news feed, and it puts a link to Common Kitchen in your profile.
What’s interesting here is that Facebook’s new (and controversial) “Beacon” service has pretty much the same function of our application: if we were to sign up for Beacon, we could use that to publish the same information to your news feed or mini-feed, and presumably with more consistency (because we’d be paying for it.) This does make us question where the Common Kitchen application is headed in the long run: what can we do with it to provide the greatest utility to our users? Right now, the answer to that is unclear, so we don’t have (m)any immediate plans for it.
Beacon, on the other hand, seems like a bad bet until Facebook irons out its many problems. For one thing, its opt-out nature is troubling; you would have to tell Facebook not to publish Common Kitchen stories, unlike our application, where adding the application is an affirmative action on your part. (We doubt too many Common Kitchen feed stories would be something you’d want to hide, but the principle stands.) The opt-out process has been poorly handled by Facebook and still has major issues, but they’re getting better. For another, there’s a lot of troubling information floating around suggesting that Beacon, even if it’s not publishing to your news feed, is helping Facebook track your online activity outside its own domain. Nothing Google, Microsoft and Amazon haven’t been doing for years, of course (yes, I have the Alexa Firefox extension installed, thanks) but a bit disturbing without an opt-in.
So for the time being, we’re staying on the course we’ve already plotted. We’ll keep you posted if and when it changes.