Strangely-Normal.com

Since moving in October for my job, I have found myself driving a significant distance daily. My commute often involves stops at whatever fast food joint is on my way, as the evening drive starts at 5:30, just when I’m really hungry. I rarely feel like waiting until a quarter to seven when I get home to even start making dinner. As such, and more importantly due to my sedentary lifestyle, I have found that I’ve packed on a significant number of pounds onto my already too-large frame.

Which brings me to my newest project. I have found a number of great recipe sharing sites, and a number of terrible diet-tracking sites, but nothing that mixes the two ideas together into one package. The ultimate goal is for me to have the ultimate dietary database.

The features I would like to ultimately include are:

• Recipes, with nutritional information, scalability with regards to serving sizes and a rating system
• Food Journal, to keep track of previous day’s eating
• Menu Planning, with requirements for a week or what have you
• Shopping Lists, from the pre-planned menus

I’m starting with one of the smaller and simpler modules, recipes. I will be using symfony as a development framework. We use symfony at work and I have been quite impressed by its versatility and want to do something that is all my own with it.

Today I spent a couple of hours setting up a development environment on my home server. Downloaded and installed postgres 8.3, php5, symfony, and some development applications. I have a database model in my head and want to get it down on paper shortly. Will post the table definitions when I blog next.

Comments and suggestions are always appreciated.