BigOven

Announcing the new BigOven.com

We've given our website, BigOven.com, a whole new look!

A brand new version of bigoven.com is now in beta, at beta.bigoven.com.  We've been working very hard on this upgrade and would like you to take a look when you get a moment, and send us your comments.

How You Can Help

Give the site a try.  Drop by our Beta Forum and post any feedback, bug reports, or suggestions.  Please use the Beta Forum rather than emailing our support team for now, while we're in beta.  (This saves us considerable time in writing the same answer to multiple folks, if you each notice an area that needs to be addressed.)

We'll be in beta several weeks.

Over the coming weeks, we'll be bug-fixing, performance tuning and solidifying the beta code.  This site will eventualy replace the existing www.bigoven.com.  As a result, we'd like to focus our development on the beta website, so any major feature improvements or fixes will most likely be targeted to the new site first, so we can push that to the live site.

This new update brings many new features and improvements, among them:

• NEW:  Foodie Q & A:  A group-discussion area with an emphasis on "Getting Your Cooking Questions Answered".  Please see below for more information on this new area.
• NEW:  Get to work more quickly.  You can sign in from any page without clicking off to a new page.
  
• NEW:  Your chef page has been redesigned, making it much easier to find your (and other people's) stuff
• NEW:  "Photos by member" (found on the member's page) now only displays the photos submitted by that particular member; previously, it would display all the recipes that have photos submitted by the member.  In this way, it's a much more accurate view of the photos that a particular member is responsible for.
  
• NEW:  Easily show recipes with photos only (recent raves only right now)
  
• NEW:  Top medal-winners for the past 30 days now featured prominently on the home page.
  
• NEW:  More recent raves -- you can now scroll back to over 200 "recent rave" recipes
• NEW:  High-res photo support -- new recipe image uploads can support up to 1280x1280 pixel sizes, so get those high-quality photos uploaded!  (Higher res photos are currently stored but not yet displayed.)
  
• NEW:  Recipe results display shows more of what you want in search results (larger recipe photo, number of comments).  See the number of comments a given recipe's gotten right on the results page.
• NEW:  Toggle on and off "recipes with photos" more easily (currently limited to "recent raves", soon spread across all search results)
• NEW:  Simplified signup, all on one page
  
• NEW:  Access the Leftover Wizard, What's Fresh and Flavor Combiner from most pages in a single click.
  
• NEW:  You no longer have to be a member of a group to post a question, comment or answer to it.
  
• NEW:  Want to look up a recipe quickly?  Just type the recipe id # into the searchbox at the top of the page
• NEW:  Submitting recipe comments just got easier; just look at the bottom of the page.
• NEW:  Search for cookbooks by name right from the top menu
  
• NEW:  Search for kitchen appliances by name in our kitchen store right from the top menu
  
• NEW:  Several performance caching improvements are focused on speeding page-loads.

Introducing "Foodie Q & A"

We took a hard look at the "groups" area of BigOven.com, and noticed that well over 80% of the usage of this area was when one individual posted a single cooking question as a new topic, and then was looking for feedback or answers. So we've reshaped the groups area and are now introducing "Foodie Q & A". 

Foodie Q & A still permits (and encourages!) free-form discussion of cooking and food, but has the added benefit of being able to track Questions and Answers.

Here's how it works.  When you post a new topic, you can mark it as a Question or just a Comment.  By posting it as a Question, your discussion bubble is color-coded yellow, and that'll signal to others that you're hoping for an answer.  It also allows the website to show and sort on "unanswered questions", and also track (and perhaps someday reward) those who are most helpful at answering questions.  When an answer comes in for your question, you can mark it as a "best answer", which will be color coded for easy reading by everyone later. In addition, you can vote up or down the helpfulness of anyone's question and answers, to help rate the discussion further.  (You are currently given 500 voting points over the course of the month; this will likely change as we see how folks use this new feature.)

We hope you'll try out the new version of the site, and drop by here to give us your feedback.

A few important site-wide notes / known issues:

• The beta site and the main site share the same live data.  You can view and update that data from the beta site.  Sometimes, however, new photos submitted won't show up on the beta site, but they are still there.  DO NOT SUBMIT DUPLICATE recipes, videos, images, etc. for both the beta and main site.  Submit only one in the location of your choice.
  
  
• Known display bug:  Sometimes recipe thumbnails are shifted in the grid display, so they look a bit off.  In some browsers and on some pages, you have to refresh the page again after the initial page-load to get the layout to display properly.  This is a known issue and will be worked on.   [we think this is now fixed, but are still working on it -- ed.]
   
  
• You may encounter some broken image links on the beta site for recipes and/or video thumbnail images.
  
  
• A technique called "Caching" is used on the beta site to speed up display, and deserves some explanation.  Caching means, essentially, that the website now saves "snapshots" of parts of the page at different intervals (currently 10-15 minutes), and those caches are displayed.  This saves the servers considerable work in fetching, calculating, and rendering the same exact page over and over again from the database servers. 
  
  The impact for users is that data updates are not real-time immediate, in many cases, they are delayed about 15 minutes.  Any ratings you submit, or even edits to recipes, might not show up for 15 minutes.  We will be tuning the caching algorithms considerably during the beta, so your mileage may vary.  (In general, if you're sure you submitted a comment, don't submit a duplicate, or log a bug with us if you don't happen to see it right away; please wait about 15 minutes to see if it's been submitted.)

We'd love to hear your thoughts on beta.bigoven.com, on our Website Beta Feedback Forum.  Happy Cooking!