Due to some unordinarily high traffic our website had some problems today. The good news is we are back up without any loss of data. Please enjoy and we'll try to do a better job of handling the additional traffic. Thanks

Now when you browse the Discover area, you may see little orange icons for certain lists of recipes. When you click on those icons you'll have the chance to subscribe to those lists in your favorite rss reader, including widgets on the Google and Live start pages. Try it out.

In the previous post we talked about some beta changes to the recipe manager. As of a few days ago the changes have been turned on for everyone. We hope you like the new additions:

 

List options allow you to set sort order, result limits and size of the recipe lists on the right side.

 

Member tab now shows all your favorite members with easy access to their recipe tags and common recipe searches.

 

Discover tab will now recommend recipes from Discover that are similar to your selected recipe.

 

Sharing info has been added to the bottom of your recipes that shows any Discover info available like members that like it and comments.

We are slowly making some changes to our recipe manager. You won't see the changes by default. You have to click on the BETA link at the top. It will switch you over to new version of the recipe manager so you can try it out. Let us know if you like it or like part of it by posting in the forum. You can always switch back to the normal one if you feel more comfortable or have problems. Thanks

As some of you may have already noticed, we've added a Category section to the recipe area. You can specify things like the Dish or Main Ingredients. It also provides a list of check boxes for the Features of your recipe like Vegetarian or Fat-Free. Add categories to all of your recipes to better organize and enable more detailed searches. These categories are also available in the Discover area for viewing and searching.

For the past several weeks we've been in the process of rolling out a new addition to our website. We call it "Discover". It's a place where you can go to see other member's public recipes. Recipes you like can be marked as favorites and you'll see them in your My Recipes area. It's also an easy way to make friends. We will be adding new features to the Discover area in the next few months to help build some community around our 20,000+ and growing recipes and almost 6000 members. Please try it out and if you have any additional ideas for getting people involved, start a topic in our forum. We've already had some great ideas that we are planning on incorporating.

If a spike in visitors is an indication of something good, then I think we got a half-decent recommendation from The Marker website. Unfortunately the website is in Hebrew, which I don't read or know how to translate. If anyone can translate the article, please email it to feedback@wegottaeat.com.

It's been one full year since we opened the virtual doors of WeGottaEat. Things have been pretty busy around here and we thought it would be a good time to update you on our progress for the year. Here is a list of the highlights:

 

• We just got finished sending out our first newsletter which points out some changes made over the summer.
• We have a total of 3700 members to date and more signing up daily.
• There are over 8300 recipes from our members.
• There are over 15000 items checked in our members shopping lists.
• We started a user forum to let us hear from you in an open way.
• WeGottaEat was featured in a newspaper article that was syndicated across the country.

 

We are very excited about our progress and look forward to the next year. We have some cool things coming so stay tuned!

We've added a new print bar when you print your shopping list. At the top of the print window you'll find 2 additional options. The dropdown allows you to sort your shopping list by Place, Tag or both. You can also change the font size of the items in the list to help make the list more readable.

WeGottaEat does not have a public area where you can find new recipes. Until we offer that, here's a quick way to achieve the same thing. Say you've found a great recipe by searching on Epicurious.com and you want to save it in your own recipe list here. You could transcribe the title, ingredients and directions from that web page which takes some time to do.

If you're short on time, most recipe sites have a print view which makes it easy to print the recipe. Click on that link to see the printable view.

 

 

That should show a formatted, mostly text view of the recipe. Next, use your mouse to select the text of entire recipe (the description, ingredients and directions).

 

 

Copy that selected recipe to your clipboard and jump to your WeGottaEat recipe list. Click to add a new recipe. Type in the recipe title and paste the recipe body into the description box. You can select some tags to help you organize the recipe. Hit the Ok button when you're done.

 

 

You should now see the entire recipe on the View Recipe tab. It's smart enough not to show the normal Ingredient and Direction lists. You may want to add a picture from the original recipe or enter some notes about it. I find it helpful to copy and paste the link to the original recipe in the notes section.

 

This is a great way to keep all your recipes at one place and can save you a bit of time. If you really like the recipe you may want to come back and format it like your other recipes (when you have more time). It's also helpful to tag the recipe as one the needs to be re-formatted. Maybe use a tag like 'unformatted' or something like that to make them easy to find.

We've made some changes recently to try and make this website easier to use. Most of them are minor and you probably won't notice them. One that you might appreciate is the ability to add one or more dividers in your ingredient list. A lot of recipes have multiple parts to the recipe, like sauces or icing for two examples. Now when you're editing your recipe, you can insert the dividers (as shown in the image to the right) and position them by dragging.

 

Most of the changes we've made were based on feedback from our members. This feedback is very important to us and helps make the site better for everyone. Please post your feedback in the forum. Thanks.