Introducing Our Newsfeed
I wanted to add a newsfeed to the site as a place to provide updates on website design/feature changes as well as announcing new recipe additions. Believe it or not it's only been two weeks since we stood this site up but we've already come a long way in that time. I'll go over some of the milestones from our journey so far but in the future I'll do my best to be better at announcing these changes as they happen rather than retroactively.
Web Design
My initial motivation for this project was simply a place for Holly to store her recipes and was planning to just host it locally for our own private use.
What I ended up building I think is worth sharing. This site is completely dynamic with all recipes saved in yaml format and as Holly adds them a new page is automatically created for it. This setup makes it easy for Holly to add new recipes in a semi user friendly format (what the heck is yaml?) without having to muck with html. The yaml structure also gives us the ability to create our super cool serving size adjuster, and easily manage our tags and searchables.
In the past two weeks I've been working to make the site useable, and mobile friendly (which is something I previously had no experience with). I think we are pretty far along on that front but still have lots of planned improvements ahead. I have also been doing my best trying to navigate the mysterious world of SEO. Getting our pages indexed on google, working out twitter cards (The image and description that displays when you share one of our pages on twitter) was an absolute nightmare -- for some reason they do it differently than every other site.
Hosting
Our self hosting solution certainly wasn't sustainable, so we are now renting a cloud VM and using cloudflare CDN. I work for one of the largest cloud providers in my day job so renting a vm from one of our competitors feels wrong, but so far I'm happy with their service. Our VM currently resides in Arizona so the further you are from that the more latency you might experience but cloudflare is caching our site worldwide so subsequent requests should be significantly faster.
New Recipes
Holly has been working diligently to push up new recipes, and while she's working hard, she admirably refuses to rush the process. We have no shortage of recipes that need to be added but she has been working on organizing them, writing them into a format that is digestible to others, and retesting any recipes we haven't made in a while. I even got her working out of evernote instead of sticky notes!
Social Media
We have pages up on twitter and facebook where we'll post more updates like these as well as frequently share recipes. So please give us a follow.