A more major point is that I don't seem to be able to select text to copy and paste. I had to type out "391.32 gram strained greek yogurt" like some sort of caveman. And that makes me wonder what a screen reader would make of it...
Also the ability to halve recipes would be great, sometimes you just want to make less.
When I sign up, I get an error when confirming my email: This site can’t be reached The webpage at https://api.onlyrecipeapp.com/?code=XXX
Good work, looks very promising.
Suggestion: similar to what you've done with your HN link, it would be nice to have some suggested URLs in a dropdown on the homepage searchbox to give new visitors something to try immediately, to get a feel for what it does (without having to leave the site & find their own link to trial the functionality with).
Also - minor bug report: I've imported 1 recipe (by clicking your HN link) but the upsell popup tells me I've imported 4 recipes.
Some nits/notes:
- Browser history seems to go in a circle (at least in Chrome); try use the browser's native "back" arrow a few times after clicking through the link you shared from HN.
- Transition animations and element "load-in" animations make the whole thing feel slow and hard to use. As it is, I'm frustrated trying to look through recipes or moving through pages.
Please make the recipe page scrollable with arrow keys or pgUp pgDn.
Get rid of the image so the entire list of ingredients is visible.
The metric conversion seems off as there are very different amounts for the number before the listed ingredient and after it (in parentheses)... I'd paste an example but your page does not allow text selection.
Make the text selectable.
https://onlyrecipeapp.com/recipe-details?canonicalUrl=https:...
- 12 ounces bread flour became just "12 ounce" - Yield of 2 dozen cookies became just "2 servings"
Also, not really a bug per se, but the site contains both metric and imperial measures already, and I see that you only take the imperial units and convert them on demand. For some of the measures, like for the butter, the difference is significant. Not huge, but enough to be noticeable.
All that said: this is pretty great. I've actually been thinking about making a recipe app for quite a while now, and I see the most interesting features I thought of you have implemented. Scraping recipes on demand, interactive timers, recipe scaling. Really cool!
Only idea I had that I don't see here is automatically estimating nutrients and calories. But that's probably for the best: When I tried making the aforementioned app, I started by diving right into that particular rabbit hole, and, well... I still don't have any recipe app to show for it :p Here be dragons!
The linked recipe is a great example. The 1/2 teaspoon in step 1 is never modified regardless of the scale of the recipe.
Also scale should go below 1 (like .5).
Curious as to how you get around some of the anti-scraping measures like Cloudflare. I put in a recipe blog (https://www.maangchi.com) that usually blocks me with Cloudflare but your site was able to scrape it just fine.
Edit: also as a very minor point your counter on how many recipes have been imported seems to keep going up each time I try to visit the same recipe. It says I've converted 5 but I've just tried to visit the same recipe 5 times.
One aspect that I've been really wrestling with is how can we make the end user experience of seeing a recipe better, while still providing meaningful income to the recipe creators who labor so much to share their stuff with us. I'd be interested in your thoughts on this. That to me would be the very meaningful, positive change: that end users get a better experience, and creators get paid. That's been my overarching goal and motivation.
- instead of grams I would like also tell me how many americano coffee cups more or less than looking for scale.
- I wanna scale down - if serving is for 6 people i want to scale down to to servings
I created an account, but when I clicked on the confirmation link in the resulting E-mail, it took me to a log-in page that said, "Sign in to api.onlyrecipe.com:443.
I wasn't surprised when I used my sign-up info and got nothing but a Kong error for my troubles. So... looks like sign-up is not yet working.
I posted the first version of OnlyRecipe here about four years ago [1], and the response was incredible. The feedback in that thread shaped a lot of what I wanted to build next. That initial momentum proved that the core problem (ads, life stories, and clutter on recipe blogs) needed a solution.
Progress since then has been slower than I hoped — I had some health issues and was building on and off — but I kept coming back to this project because I genuinely love working on it. I’ve been working on the project on and off, fitting development in whenever I could. This post represents a huge personal milestone.
Here’s what’s new after all this time:
Import from Videos: Import directly from TikTok, Instagram, Youtube and Facebook videos
Import from Handwritten recipes: Import from handwritten notes and screenshots
Unit Conversion: A highly-requested feature. Instantly convert US Customary (cups/oz) to Metric (grams/ml) for any extracted recipe.
Grocery Lists: Consolidate ingredients from multiple saved recipes into a single, clean shopping list.
Meal Plan: Plan your weekly meals in advance
Controls: Full recipe editing, PDF export, printing, and cross-device sync
Mobile-First Design: While the web view (linked above) is great for quickly seeing the result, the mobile apps have dedicated native controls for cooking mode (e.g., screen stay-awake, timers, and offline access).
In-App Browser: Directly import from any site within the app and many more...
To see these features in action quickly (small gif/videos), check it out on the landing page [2]
The link above is a deep link to a live demo on the web app.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the new utility features and the performance of the parser! Try it out here [5]
[1] Original post from Jan 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29795482
[2] Landing Page: https://get.onlyrecipeapp.com
[3] iOS App: https://apps.apple.com/in/app/only-recipe/id1602130759
[4] Android App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nsqr.onlyr...
[5] Web app: https://onlyrecipeapp.com
i dont have ingredient x, but i do have y, which is close enough
like, i just ran out of browb sugar, but i do have some melases or honey
[comment about issue that is present in original recipe removed]
Seriously. I also feel like you're owed an apology for having had to write this in the first place.
I'm coming at "figuring out the Kitchen" for what is almost the first time in my life in I-wish-I-were-in-my-mid-40s[0] and I'm thinking "The Internet in the Early 00s was pretty good for that." And then I fire up a browser on desktop while making a grocery list and once you filter for "things that are obviously AI Hallucinations representing partial recipes", I'm met with one or all of the following: (1) Pages and pages and pages of obviously made-up nonsense anecdotes about the discovery of this magical, uh, air fryer grilled chicken marinade, (2) a pretty haphazard set of instructions that don't bother to include ingredients separated with pleasant units and conversions, but hide them throughout with quantities like "a few tomatoes" here, "an onion" there, (3) which doesn't seem to impact the 4.8 stars after hundreds of "user ratings.". (4) And rather than help these miserable imprecise, ingredient-less recipes with pictures of what "until moist and brown" might appear, you're going to show me a bunch of chopped ingredients in separated bowls that I don't have and then a picture of it finished, delicately decorated in whatever-or-another sauce, and "HEY, here's some lady who's cooking something unrelated to the recipe in this neat little video window I popped up for you! Let's watch the top of her head and this bowl of something on mute for a little while!"
Good God, man, it's like they've optimized the design to break people with ADHD. Some sites were so bad, it felt like "the actual recipe I was looking for" was obfuscated on the page like sketchy sites will hide the "actual Download button" somewhere unexpected and give you a big green "Download" button that leads to revenue. And that's not even getting into the weird bad on some of these AI-churn sites. I end up opening a notepad on the side and refactoring the things that seem like they might work from time to time, but I popped a few recipes in there, including a Chili recipe that "barely had any problems other than layout and annoying cooking lady videos" and just turned it into the perfect representation of that recipe.
I don't know what the original feedback was, but beyond how clear and organized laid out the recipe, here's what I saw as really useful little touches (I'm half wondering if some were even intended): (1) Besides my affinity for circled numbers, I lose my spot when referring to recipes so I like to print out the ones I really like, laminate them, and mark 'em up with the whiteboard markers I have for fridge notes as I go, you gave me a wonderful spot for that -- I'm so prone to re-read/second-guess where I'm at when I need to "put a bunch of things together at the last moment", that was the first thing I noticed, (2) Your highlighting did the same thing for making my grocery list (I DoorDashed it, today) -- it's so much more readable and "easy to find my spot" the way it appears on my desktop compared to any other site, (3) Because of your choice positioning, I can scroll down slightly and see the ingredients and all of the instructions without having to touch this thing, again, while I'm cooking if I use the tablet in the kitchen.
Oh, and thank you for making it just work in the browser. I hate using my phone for this kind of thing and I'm not even crazy about using my tablet for it.
[0] The backstory being unexpected, but very much desired, custody change led to me cooking for my children all of the time, including one who struggles with weight. I was blessed without that struggle, I eat "whatever" atrociously (not picky), and about what I burn, I'm under-weight and my blood work is perfect. One of my kids is identical, just not the one that sounds exactly like me :).