Strangely-Normal.com

The Category screen. Rather than having a separate create/edit screen, I’ve added the form to the bottom of the category list page. Using the Ajax edit in place functionality that Scriptaculous provides, users are able to click on the category name if a spelling mistake is made. The checkmarks and Xs are links which toggle the activation and deactivation of that category.

The create a recipe screen. Gives instructions for the format of the recipe and then a textarea to paste that direction into.

I then go through the text provided and attempt to fill in the blanks in this form. Recipes will have a few different sections:

• Header: Provide the name of the recipe, cooking and prep times, number of servings as well as blurb about the recipe if so desired. Can also put the nutritional information on a single line (because one of the cookbooks I have does that)
• Nutritional Information: Optional. Format: {name}: {measure}{unit}
• Ingredients: A list of the ingredients as well as preparation instructions such as ‘thinly sliced’ or ‘diced’ or whatever. Format: {measurement}{unit} {item}, {preparation instruction}
• Directions: A list of directions, one per line. Splits on a newline character.

Anything the parser doesn’t know what to do with will be shown as an unprocessed line. Currently working on making the process a little more robust, but it’s a good first step.

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.