Recipe Finder Home Page

It is thus no surprise that more and more people are turning to their own kitchens for food. Even those who may not be natural cooks are trying their hand at cooking. It has helped, of course, that spending some time in the kitchen has become a cool thing. Turn the TV on, and you will find countless cooking shows featuring just as many celebrity chefs. Go online and you will not be lacking for recipe web sites.

One of the newest of these web sites is Recipe Finder, a search engine that provides users with more than a million recipes. What this web site does is collate recipes from hundreds of other recipe web sites and makes sure that the presentation benefits the user.

Just like with Google, you only have to enter a word or a phrase to search for a recipe. What is great about Recipe Finder is that you can make your search as generic or as specific as you want. For example, you can simply enter the name of a dish. Alternatively, you can specify ingredients to include or exclude in your search. If you want to be even more specific, you can refine your search by specifying details such as calorie count, number of servings, and cook time.

You can also control the way you view your search results. First, you can view the results as text, with a small image and a short description of what to expect of the dish. Second, you can view the results as pure images – and you can base your choices on the presentation of the dish!

If you are a stickler for organization, Recipe Finder has the menu and calendar to offer. Using these features, you can plan your meals in advance. Using your Facebook account, you can log in and save your plans. And speaking of Facebook, Recipe Finder also provides options to share your favorite recipes. That way, you can share good food with those who matter. Of course, there is always the good old printing option if you want something tangible.

Are you looking to expand your cooking knowledge? Let Recipe Finder help you!

One of the biggest culprits when developing content for web sites and blogs is not making your content scannable. What does this mean? The tendency of web site readers is to scan to the left, where more information is located. In fact, the common movement of the eye is F-shaped. By employing a weak title, the first two to three words in the title won’t contain any kind of information or keywords that will compel the reader to click on the link. Even though scannability is something that is also important with the body text, it is of greater significance when thinking of a title for your post. Titles should always be within context.

Consider the title as microcontent – small bits of information that already give users a general idea of what the article or blog post will be. By treating your titles like this, users won’t have a problem determining what the article is about and won’t hesitate to click on the link to read it further. Treating titles like microcontent also has another use – it gives you a better representation when the links appear in search engines, RSS feeds and other venues that are link-generated

A gallery that only cares about what your site looks like when it’s printed? Ironic, but that’s what printFancy is all about. Remember those niche design inspiration galleries? This site is obviously another example of that. But that’s not all.

Unfortunately, the fact remains that people still print webpages so they can read them in a more comfortable manner; it’s not very environment-friendly, and frankly, weird behavior to people who are in front of the computer 24/7. (Weirder than using IE6.) But it’s a web designer’s responsibility to accommodate that need. No excuses. Even if sometimes, it does feel like creating a whole other website (except if you’re a minimalist, I guess).

And when you manage to create an effective print version of a site, then printFancy is another opportunity to show it off, another incentive to excel in design. Which is not just about creating something looks pretty, but something that fills a need. In this case, the need to print sites out.

(Then maybe the gallery can have a section like this, and one wouldn’t have to hold a laptop the way Jason Santa Maria did.)

The first person on my list to talk about is Rand Fishkin. Who is Rand Fishkin? Well, first off all the SEO girls want Rand Fishkin. Being a dude, I really can’t say either way why that is, but I am pretty impressed with the site he has built. Rand is the CEO and Co-founder of SEOmoz, a site that includes a blog with over 10,000 RSS readers according to Feedburner. It was voted the best SEO blog in 2006 by Search Engine Journal, and has been mentioned in numerous high level places like USA Today, Washington Post, and Newsweek Magazine.

The reason Rand is an authority is because of his mix of understanding of Finance, due to majoring in the subject, the web, from all his years of experience and bringing it all together. His articles on SEOmoz are some of my favorites, and the site is just a gold mine of information. You can find him at Search Engine Strategies & Pubcon conferences around the world, and of course on SEOmoz.

Brad Colbow: The Brads

Brad’s also been tapped to create more informative strips such as Learning About Contrast in Design and Misunderstanding Markup: XHTML 2/HTML 5.

Kyle Weems: CSS Squirrel

I’ve mentioned CSS Squirrel when he announced his branching out to podcasting, but poking fun at the latest industry developments and insider info is where he shines.

N.C. Winters: Freelance Freedom

NC goes through the ups and downs of freelancing at Freelance Switch’s Freelance Freedom.

Business Guys on Business Trips

BGOBT tells the most awful office tales in detailed narrations but minimal line art.

Matthew Inman: The Oatmeal

The man behind Mingle² and SEOmoz, Matthew has gone on to create humorous quizzes and infographic-style comics at the very viral The Oatmeal.

Phil Thompson: The FrontEnders

Phil does a front-end spin on the British soap The Eastenders.

Ricardo Gimenes: Behind the Websites

Ricardo creates a fleet of colorful characters to represent different websites, and now makes strips for Smashing Magazine’s The Smashing Cartoons.

Contrary to popular belief, Microsoft is committed to building a better web with with a redesigned MIX Online and its horde of interesting resources, from articles to web development tools to delightful goodies.

We’ve all been guilty of bashing Microsoft for several different reasons, but now is a great time to give it a second (or a hundredth) chance. After all, it’s Christmas!

Articles and Opinions

Let’s start with readable sources on MIX Online, the Articles and Opinions sections. Skim through them and you’ll get a good sense that MIX Online shaping up to be a reputable web design source that’s passionate about web standards, user experience, and best practices. Read Nishant Kothary’s walkthrough of the site redesign, transforming moleskine sketches to a cool community running on their new CMS platform (more on that later).

Oxite

Oxite seems to have all the magic keywords you’d want in a CMS: it’s open source, extensible, and standards-compliant. Whether you want to put up a new blog or a full-blown website, you might want to try Oxite.

One of the most exciting things we’ve seen as a result of the Oxite launch, is renewed attention to “standards first, markup first” functionality across the board. While the other engines don’t claim to be focused on “standards first”, you can fully expect that some will be tweaked soon to encourage and support professional front-end web engineering best practices. The positive feedback from those of you doing “standards first, markup first” development has been encouraging, and will undoubtedly influence all of us who build platforms.

Oomph

Oomph makes building, discovering, and styling Microformats a more pleasant experience. View Microformats-powered sites with the Internet Explorer add-on, add contact hCard information using the Windows Live Writer plug-in, and grab some CSS styles for your own pages.

Descry

Descry is an upcoming tool that will help interpret massive amounts of data through visualization.

A Website Named Desire

A Website Named Desire not exactly a MIX Online product, but an interesting offshoot nonetheless. It’s the virtual version of this 25×33″ print that depicts the complex process of building a website. Want!

When Obama Wins scours and displays tweets containing the phrase 'when Obama wins'

I’m fascinated by the single-purpose websites that have been cropping up for the past year. I’m not much of an internet historian to track down exactly when the first of their kind came out, but they officially entered meme status when Jason Kottke wrote about it back in February.

In the era of 140-character microblogging and 10-inch subnotebook computing, brevity is king. But these straight-to-the-point sites aren’t exactly the iPhone-friendly versions of our increasingly bloated, self-centered homepages and bookmarks. (That’s a different phenomenon altogether and worth discussing in a separate article.)

They’re in a different group themselves, in a peanut gallery of sorts, poking fun at the rest of the all-too serious internet population. Stop worrying whether websites need to look exactly the same in every browser, you should use tables for layout (give up?), Diet Coke will kills us, graphic design is art, Barack Obama is Muslim or muslin or President, or it’s Tuesday, April Fool’s, Christmas, or a leap year yet.

The color of the Empire State Building on November 11. On November 11 it was Purple, Purple, White. As of writing it's White, White, White.

Of course some of these one-trick ponies are web apps and mashups that do exactly one thing really well, whether it’s helping you look forward to the day when Obama wins, decide if you should bring an umbrella today, bitch and moan about our dear Adobe, or figure out whether Twitter, Gmail, the Apple Store, or some other site is down or it’s just you.

Not to mention spell definitely and other words correctly, insert angled quotes », «, ›, ‹, discover your IP address, and play a instant rimshot.

Visit A List Of Sites for more of the madness! Or go through them randomly ala StumbleUpon.

More Artist than Web Designer

To be a sketch designer, you need to have artistic skill: be able to draw and sketch and have a masterful understanding of color. Contrast that with a standard web designer who finds color palettes, instead of creating them, and who can’t sketch a stick figure, much less anything more complex. If you really think about it, a basic web design is nothing more than a glorified set of rectangles. A sketch design breaks the boundaries of grids, while keeping all of the content elements in focus. To achieve this effect, the designer must be highly skilled and knowledgeable in how to layout a design, such that if the artistic flare wasn’t there, the content would still make sense (obviously, standards play a key role here).

Enough rambling. Let’s take a look at some examples of this style. The first two I have showcased are by a fantastic designer named Nick La. The first is N.Design Studio, his personal portfolio, and the second is Web Designer Wall, which discusses trends in design.

Nick uses many stylish elements in these two designs. Florals are a key aspect of the look and feel. As I mentioned earlier, these elements break the boundaries of the grids that hold the contents, giving them an almost natural feel. Something else that is very popular is the use of paper, which is of course the original medium of sketching!

The next couple of designs I want to showcase implement the artistic sketch technique, but in a rougher way. The two sites that I picked are the Biola Undergrad site and JESUS RODRIGUES VELASCO.

The look that is accomplished with the technique here is quite natural. It actually looks like pencil sketching on a canvas as opposed to a website on a screen. The use of textures and crooked elements really set these two designs apart.

To pull off this kind of look, you really have to be quite skilled artistically. I taught myself web design using books and online tutorials. However, to be a Sketch Designer, you almost have to have proper artistic training. Sure, there are scattered tutorials to teach you certain techniques, but to really stand out, you have to do something original; something that you have perfected after a long time of practice. Most designs are a variation of a simple grid (think of all of those bare bones css templates you see on Del.icio.us), but Sketch Design can break the boundaries and truly make a design great.

This post was written by J David Macor.

Can TechCrunch Quick Start Platforms?

Michael Arrington and TC are a respected tandem in the tech scene, daily asked by many start-ups to feature their product. VCs read TC.
Often reviewed sites are in closed beta invitation phase and TC readers can’t access them unless they know someone who has invitations. Sometimes even the TC crew has no access to featured sites.
As user the only option is to submit your email address and wait until you get an invite. Often only months later.
InviteShare and TC’s community might soon change this and lead thousands of new members to a site within only some days.

Is TC Creating A New Test Benchmark for Web Sites?

If the combo TC-InviteShare takes off and the TC users play the game, this could become a new benchmark for platforms.
First test for startups will be to get featured on TC, hopefully with a positive review. Second will be to show that the presented platform useful, accessible and stable is. I bet VCs will observe this evolution rigorously.

Does InviteShare Fit TC?

InviteShare surely can be compatible with the TC community. If the platform can be stabilized and regularly new sites are included, new platforms could quickly go viral and InviteShare is set to become a popular place in the tech world.

Neil Patel, TC’s SEO consultant, many positive reviews and direct links on the TC Network sites are a warrant for lots of SE-traffic.

Success will depend on the fast integration of new platforms and the community’s participation though.

How Will InviteShare Be Named?

Arrington hinted in his entry that the site might be moved to a crunchier domain. Some guessing took place in the comments, but of course nothing was disclosed.
At the moment of writing this, CrunchShare.com hasn’t been registered yet, but both InviteCrunch.com and CrunchInvite.com were registered July 19th. CrunchInvite.com is registered at Schlundt & Partner – 1&1, which is what Arrington used for TechCrunch.
CrunchInvites.com was registered on July 21st. Michael wrote his entry July 19th, my money is on CrunchInvite.com.

But Last.fm might be on to something and could become the new MTV, the MTV2.0 with a personalized video clip streams. But much improvement needs to be made to the actual offer.

• More video content.
• Integrate video in to the last.fm client and a pop-out video player to the website.
  With the growing amount of wide screen monitors, video can become really popular when the user can watch the clips next to the browser window. A resizable video player lets the user watch video clips on every free real estate area, without having to lose focus on the open window. If you only have 800*640 monitor width, it’s time to upgrade. ;-).
• Allow only high quality videos: who can be bothered to watch clips if a 300*200px large video is pixelated? Full screen view shouldn’t be considered as long as low quality clips are offered.
• Make videos embeddable.
• Videos must be scrobbled. Last.fm is all about scrobbling, building your profile and getting targeted radio, recommendations.

Once all this implemented, I can perfectly imagine a new music revolution and many users watching non-stop video clips instead of only listening to last.fm radio.
A good start would be to offer every new video clip. Only remaining question is if the user base will wait until there is enough of video content.

Update: Last.fm videoclips are now scrollable and embeddable.