Search results matching tag 'beta'

Exclude or Include Ingredients in Search with "More Options" (NEW)

stevemur — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 22:37:13 GMT

Now in beta -- Advanced Search Options

One of the most popular feature requests has been to improve searching to explicitly include or exclude ingredients. We're pleased to announce that a beta version of this is now live, on www.bigoven.com.

Simply issue any search on BigOven.com the way you normally would, and click the '[more options]' link that you'll see on the search results page. That lets you further customize your search, adding ingredient keywords for explicit inclusion or exclusion.

Want to only see salads with feta cheese and tomatoes? Easy.

Or, do you have an aversion to cauliflower? Allergic to peanuts? No problem.

Just enter the keyword text you'd like to explicitly include or eliminate, and click "Search BigOven!". Those terms will be used to further refine your search.

NOTE: Currently, BigOven does text searches based on what you enter into those textboxes. This means that if you're allergic to wheat, you should probably enter things like "wheat" in one box and "flour" in another box and maybe even "breadcrumbs" in another box, and then carefully examine the recipe itself to see if it meets your criteria. Additionally, pay close attention to the singular and plural forms of the word(s) you're looking to include or exclude -- at this writing, excluding the team "anchovies" from your search might still return a recipe if it's got 1 and only "anchovy" (because the word "anchovy" is not the same as "anchovies"). Make sense?

We agree it's not perfect, but it's a pretty handy tool that can helpyou zero in on the recipes that are just right for you.

Happy cooking!

Recipe Search

mindyyoung — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 03:45:38 GMT

When you go to the recipe section it lists the recipes you want to try. Bottom links to view all you want to try.

It shows "Inside...170,000 recipes". The link at the bottom takes you to recent raves.

It shows "Recent Raves". The link at the bottom takes you to view all.

I like the recent raves section, but how do you get to the rest of the recipes? I would like to be able to look at catagories like on the old site.

Introducing the new website, BigOven.com (Beta)

stevemur — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:36:53 GMT

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!

New version of website (BigOven.com) now in beta!

stevemur — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:42:19 GMT

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.

Over the coming weeks, we'll be performance tuning and solidifying the beta code, and then cutting the existing www.bigoven.com over to this new site.

This new update brings many new features and improvements:

NEW: Foodie Q & A: A group-discussion area with an emphasis on "Getting Your Cooking Questions Answered" (see below)
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. (This might not be immediately apparent, since much of this is turned down for debugging purposes.)

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.

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.
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, right here on this forum. Happy Cooking!

New on BigOven.com: Step by Step Photos with Captions

stevemur — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:27:19 GMT

We're pleased to announce the beta release of Step By Step Photos, with captions.

You can reorder the photos submitted, and edit the captions. Recipes that have more than one photo are now displayed with the other key image thumbnails on the page.

Clicking on any of these smaller images thumbnails will take you to the step-by-step photo page.

If you are logged in, you can also help out by adding to the captions. Each caption can be 1,000 characters long (no HTML please).

Feel free to submit photos for the archive, and tell your story with captions -- photos make the site much better for everyone!

Now in Beta -- Keep your Friends up to date with FriendFeed !

stevemur — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 20:00:22 GMT

Today, BigOven.com became the first recipe sharing site to support FriendFeed(tm), a rapidly-growing social network aggregation service.

This service is completely free, and in beta. (Please send beta feedback here, thanks!)

What does this mean, and why is this useful?

About FriendFeed: FriendFeed makes it possible to update all of your social contacts at once on the web activity you generate.

With a 2 minute account setup at FriendFeed.com, you'll get a single, consolidated "stream" view of all your web activity -- whether that's posts you might make on your blog, photos you might upload to flickr or Picasa, videos you might post to YouTube, messages you might send on Twitter, or more.

Better yet, you can subscribe or view your friend and family's streams, seeing their consolidated activity in a single glance as it happens, and staying in touch with things they like and don't like. For instance, you can see our founder's FriendFeed here: http://friendfeed.com/stevemur. Or, a much more prolific FriendFeeder, journalist and tech-blogger, here: http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer .

And now, BigOven is part of the fun. In fact, we're the first foodie social network to directly integrate with FriendFeed. We're all about sharing great recipes, and FriendFeed is all about sharing what you have to say on the Web with others, easily.

Once you get FriendFeed added to your BigOven account (takes about 1 minute), every time you post a recipe, or upload a photo or a video, or rate a recipe highly with 4 or 5 stars, BigOven will automatically add it to your FriendFeed stream. These streams can then be subscribed-to by your friends, added to your blog or website, shown on your Facebook profile, or many other places.

It's a great way to alert friends and family when you do something interesting on the web. FriendFeed and our service are completely free.

And it's simple!

1) You'll need a free FriendFeed account. Get one here.

2) After you've created FriendFeed account, visit www.bigoven.com/friendfeed to tell BigOven which alerts to send on your FriendFeed. Simply check the boxes you'd like to send.. that's it! (You can return to this page at any time either via the direct link, or your "My Settings" area, which can be reached from your chef page's "Edit My Page" button.)

(Note that BigOven never sees your FriendFeed username and password, only the "RemoteKey", which is public, and can be reset by you at any time.)

After you click "authorize", your friends will see your stream like this:

Questions you may have:

1. Can you tell me more about the relationship between you two companies?

There's no business relationship between us, we at BigOven.com just think it's cool.

2. Will alerts be sent if I don't want them to be sent?

Just uncheck any boxes for the alerts you want to remove from your FriendFeed.

3. Does this apply only to recipes posted from the browser, or does the desktop recipe software work this way too?

Alerts are added to your FriendFeed whether you post from the web or your desktop. And recipe ratings work the same way, if you've checked the box "share this on BigOven.com" in your desktop application when rating a recipe.