Dork Chow

Archive for March, 2010

This was my first experiment with using the hRecipe microformat plugin. The plugin does not include a photo field, although the full hRecipe specification has provisions for a graphic. I failed to capture the moment last night when I made this, and this dish isn’t much of a looker anyway. The plugin seems to break the background gradient in my current theme, but I don’t care that much because this theme is getting a bit long in the tooth and I’ll replace it with a more up-to-date one some day when I have a couple of hours. (Don’t hold your breath!) The plugin did not automatically tag the ingredients, nor number the steps on my first go. I had to go back and edit the raw HTML, because I didn’t see a way to revise once you insert a recipe via the plugin. I’m guessing there is a way to make it do that in the first place and I should have RTFM. Oh well, I’m a very early adopter of the plugin, and it’s certainly better than nothing! Let’s see how the search engines like it.

I am not a vegetarian and I have no problems with hunting free animals.  However I do disagree with how meat animals are raised.  And more importantly, I care about others on the planet having enough to eat.  That is why I prefer that meat (when I use it) be used as a condiment or flavoring, and not served in huge chunks.  I also believe in giving thanks to the spirit of the animal whenever using meat.  Anyway, this embedded video explains and simplifies how your and my choices of foods and ingredients affect malnourished people in other parts of the globe.   It’s very well done, about nine minutes long.  Enjoy!

How to feed the world ? from Denis van Waerebeke on Vimeo.

Continuing from my previous post about microformats, I went googling to see what I could find.  Lo and behold, there is a hRecipe plugin for WordPress (in case you hadn’t guessed, this blog sits on the WordPress platform.)  As you may know installing plugins in WordPress is ridiculously easy, and there is nothing to configure with hRecipe.  After activating the plugin, I was at first not even sure it had done anything at all.  But then I spotted it:  a little star icon in the blog post editor (circled in red).

This is what you see when you click the star:  a popup window with tabs where you can enter various aspects of your recipe.

What does this do for you?  A couple of things:  You don’t have to learn the hRecipe markup labels because it just does them (well at least some of them)  for you.   You can attach your own styles to the various classes if you want, and have a consistent look for your recipes.  (You could have always done that, but if you follow standard conventions, your work will be more portable.)  Software that is able to find and read hRecipe pages will be able to “read” and export your recipe.  Meanwhile, it just looks like an ordinary recipe.  All the special markup is invisible to people;   however, search engines will be able to find your recipe more the way you want it found.  And if you want your recipe shared, it makes it easier for that to happen.

hRecipe is relatively new.  There is only one application that supports it as I write.  A handful of forward looking recipe sites have marked up their recipes in hRecipe.  I don’t expect it to take off virally, as most of visitors this blog post have probably left by now, or if you  did get this far,  you’re saying, “huh?” because you skimmed it too fast.

What I’m saying is:  if you install the plugin and start using it, don’t expect to see huge jump in your Google analytics right away.  But microformats including hRecipe are catching on, albeit slowly, and the people who wrap their content in microformat   will be  well positioned when the Google crawlers evolve to be fully aware of them.  And anyway,  it’s a nice way to organize your content if you have a recipe blog.

My next post will be a recipe in hRecipe.  It won’t hurt, I promise!

I am going to combine my foodage and my geekage in this post. Yes I know, I haven’t posted for a LONG LONG time. There are reasons for that, but we’ll dispense with the excuses.

What I am going to do in this post:

• describe a problem that we foodies have, and a lot of us don’t realize it
• convince you that it is, in fact, a problem
• give examples of other similar problems and how they have been solved
• propose a solution to our foodie problem
• muse on why this particular problem solution has not gotten very far, so far

Here is the problem: I have many friends who are happy to send me recipes. The method they invariably use is email. I have told them that they can become registered on the blog and post recipes directly, but it is a barrier! The capability is there but the FACT is that foodies who don’t have their own food blog are intimidated by technology and don’t want to do this. It’s taken them 15 years to get comfortable with email for God’s sake!

Why it is a problem: Now, when I receive these emails, what do I do (presuming I like the recipe and want to publish it)? I have to tweak it up to fit the format this blog likes. Why is that a problem? Because it doesn’t scale and it wastes work. My friend has already sort of formatted the recipe, usually into a list of ingredients and the instructions blurb. But I have to edit it more. Yuck! I’d rather be cooking!

A similar problem and its solution: Several years back there was a similar issue with calendar data. Joe needs to publish his day planner so his secretary can schedule appointments for him. Or, you go to the calendar from your favorite venue and you would like to add Thursday night’s jam session to your personal calendar. You’re more likely to do that if it doesn’t involve a lot of needless make work. The best solution is you just click a button and boom it’s on your calendar. What that button click actually does is exports the calendar data to a common format that is understood by your calendar application. Then your calendar application imports it and converts it to whatever internal format it uses.

A solution for recipes: OK, now I’m gonna get a little geeky here, but bear with me and keep your eyes on the prize, the prize being: the ability to grab a recipe from some recipe website and put it in your favorite personal recipe collection with a single click, just like you can for calendar events. You KNOW you’d love that! It’s worth the geekiness, believe me. There does exist such a solution, and it’s called hRecipe. The only problem is that not too many people use it. It was the same problem when these open calendar formats were introduced, but people started to use them because the benefit was very clear, and so they have gained wide acceptance.

Why has hRecipe not caught on?: I think that it’s due to mental blockage common to foodies. The same reason my friends will email me but they won’t join my blog and post directly: They lump it into the category of “geekage” and they put themselves in the category of “non geek” so they step aside when they see it coming and continue to do things the old comfortable labor-intensive (to me that equals TIME WASTING) way. It’s completely irrational. Think about it.

I don’t have 20 minutes to learn a skill that would save me weeks and weeks of time in the long run.

Balderdash! You’re not afraid to try new recipes or new kitchen gear. Why should a format be any different?

What you can do:

• Help make people aware of hRecipe and websites that use it.
• Use the links at the bottom of this post (e.g. Stumble Upon etc.) to spread it around.
• Agitate on your favorite website that they use it if they don’t.
• Comment on your experience with hRecipe.
• Find places where you can share hRecipes.
• Agitate for foodie desktop applications to recognize it.
• Follow Dork Chow to keep up with anything I do to push open recipe formats.
• Step out of your mental block and do something geeky. This is the information age. We’re all geeks, like it or not!