Live cook book: our culinary and software hobby

Hello. In this article I want to tell you about our small startup, the culinary site of livecookbook.ru , which just a few days ago was a year old. Do not rush to browse further, this topic is no worse than topics about life extension or photo contests.
We did not set ourselves the goal of getting the maximum audience (so you probably did not hear about us), or make a lot of money. Our goal was to make a site that would be primarily pleasant and convenient to use yourself. We did not give up work, did not hire freelancers. The main working time is night, the main assistants are our friends, the source of most ideas is our own imagination and the desire to have something tasty for dinner.

Who needs it at all?

A year ago, there were no UGC culinary sites in runet, except LJ. That's when we started building our site. Now there are 2 "big" competitors - a cook and a cook - however, to my mind a web programmer and a person who likes to cook, it is impossible to use these sites.

What we have achieved over the past year.

Recipes - the core of our site. Like the copyright law ( expert commentary ), we believe that the recipes posted on the web have no author - the recipes belong to everyone. Therefore, you can add your own image to any recipe on our website, and you can create your own cookbooks from any recipes, including those added by other users. We really want the site not to become a big dump of copy-paste recipes, although, like others, we still do not know what to do with a large number of recipes. So far we have few of them (several hundred, against tens of thousands on other resources), and we are trying to make working with recipes easier. This way, a parser of ingredients has already been created (we can assume that it is now in “beta”), which in a semi-automatic mode parses the ingredients set in free form. Thanks to this, we have a “ bachelor ” search, where you can enter foods stored in the refrigerator and get a list of recipes, sorted by the number of missing ingredients. Or, for example, if you enter “ meat ” as an ingredient in the advanced search , the results will include recipes that do not directly mention meat, but only beef steak , or, for example, pork fillet .

Because the audience of our site is not geeky, we have made a number of services that, in principle, exist on the Internet. So, we have a storage system for bookmarks , and although it probably lags behind delitions and others, you can assign bookmarks to the bookmarks — cookbooks. This is convenient, since in the culinary book “cocktails” you can store both existing favorite cocktail recipes from the site and bookmarks from other sites.
')
We also made a shopping list , in which you can automatically (left click of the mouse, aha ;-)) add the ingredients of a potential dinner. Yes, and since half of the developers have an iPhone, it is clear that this list will be available from the phone in the store.

We are new to the brutal world of social services, so we randomly added such things as a wish list , which stores recipes that must be prepared (I have 3 snacks: eclairs in chocolate glaze, banana croutons and “curly rake” ), and an analogue of otvety.google.com or Answers@Mail.Ru, called (oddly ;-)) " Questions and Answers ". But, again, our questions and answers seem to us more suitable for discussing culinary issues.

And one of the first features of the story appeared - based on the bitter experience of searching for a recipe, which I liked so much yesterday, but today is not at all, we started storing all the “sign” (viewing, rating, adding photos, reviews, comments, etc. .) user actions.

SECTION number 3

That's what happened to be done during the first year, not so little for the project on the air, right? And we still have a whole bunch of plans - at least 2 secret, but completely destructive possibilities, waiting for users (waiting while in my head, but not for long).

You can also say about what could not be achieved: it was not possible to find-do-get a beautiful logo (something that is very lacking). Unfortunately, we do not know how to draw, and all the experiences of communicating with familiar artists ended only in promises.

PS Thank you, Habr, you helped us finish the help section and brush the site.

PPS To survive habraeffekt, we needed to go to VPS2 from RBC hosting. Strangely enough, the bottleneck in our ROR application was not at all in the rails, and not in the mysql database, but in the maximum number of connections — in fact, we had to pay to increase the numtcpsock parameter. It is a pity that hosters have done this for so long ...
And, by the way, thanks, habr, now we understand that we will not soon take up the fastening of caching =)