It’s available for download here.

Installation instructions:  Download and unzip the file “cloudme.zip”, then double-click setup.exe to run.

Dependencies:  Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 is required.  If prompted to install this, you can install it (free) from this download link.

Fixes in this release:

• Can open recipe boxes other than the startup standard.crb recipe box
• Proper ingredient upload of non “standard.crb” recipes

Win $200 just by using our Grocery List every week!

To enter, just add any recipes, menus or other items
to BigOven’s auto-sorted Grocery List every week
using our website, or any of our free apps for
iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle Fire or Windows Phone.

Winners receive two BigOven shopping bags plus
a $200 gift card for their favorite grocery store.
A new winner will be chosen each week.

Winners must have at least 10 items added to BigOven’s Grocery List in the last 7 days.
No purchase necessary to enter. Winners must be 18 or older.
Each winner may only win once during the contest.
Winners will be announced every Wednesday on Facebook, starting May 22.
Contest ends Aug 7, 2013.

iPhone App

iPad App

These updates bring the BigOven Recipe Clipper™ to your iPhone and iPad, letting you add recipes from your favorite food websites and blogs, right from within the app.  This is a great way to build up your custom collection and always have it at the grocery store or the kitchen countertop, where you need it most.

Add Recipes from Your Favorite Food Websites and Blogs

We’ve brought our convenient Recipe Clipper feature to your iPad and iPhone.  Coming soon for Android.

You can now add recipes you discover on an ever-expanding list of recipe blogs and websites to your BigOven app with just a single click.

Just click “Add Recipe” / “From website or blog”, then find the recipe details page.  (Make sure it has the recipe on it, with ingredients and instructions.)

Then, click “Import Recipe.”  BigOven will inspect and import the recipe, ingredients, instructions — even photo — with just a single tap of a button.  From there, you can add it to your grocery list, mark it a Try Soon, a Favorite, rescale it up or down, add it to your Menu Planner and much more.

We have a starting list of food sites, and are expanding the list all the time.  As this relies upon third-party websites, we cannot guarantee that this list will remain constant — but we’re hard at work adding more to this list.

Just find the recipe you’d like, click “Import Recipe” in the top menu bar — and bingo, it’s in your collection.  You can categorize it and make any further edits directly via the app.  Changes you make will be automatically synchronized for you across other BigOven points of service, including on the web at  www.bigoven.com.  We’re adding recipe sites to this list all the time — jot us a note using the link on the form if you’ve got one you just can’t live without.  At this writing, we’ve got a good backlog of a few dozen sites to add, so more are coming in the weeks and months ahead!

Edit (or delete) recipes right from the app

Need to make changes?  No problem!  Just tap on the action button in the upper right, choose “Edit Recipe”, make your changes in the text boxes provided, and press Done.

Your changes are synchronized with the website, so your My Recipes Dashboard is updated as well.

You’ll also find the “Delete Recipe” option on the same action button.

Easy Facebook Sharing

Cooking is social, and the new BigOven apps make it easy to share your Favorite and Try Soon recipes with your Facebook friends.  When you mark a recipe “Try Soon” or “Favorite”, you’ll be asked if you want to share it once, always share Favorites or Try Soon discoveries, or never prompt you again.

Benefit:  Your timeline on Facebook keeps handy links of recipes you want to try.  Your friends also get an easy way to see your discoveries.  You can change your preferences at any time; simply visit your “My Profile” area — www.bigoven.com/account/me and customize them as you see fit.

You can notify friends when you mark a recipe Try Soon, when you Favorite a recipe, or when you’ve Loved a recipe (rated it 4 or 5 stars.)  Or, you can choose not to do so at all — it’s all up to you.

Bug fixes

We’re improving BigOven all the time.  But we’re human, and don’t always get it perfect the first time.  Thanks to you, we’ve identified and fixed some important bugs with this release, the most notable ones are a fix to editing ingredients in the grocery list (this used to cause a sporadic crash in the app), and in invitations to Facebook friends (which used to fail silently in most situations, but now work properly.)  Notice any bugs that you’d like fixed?  The quickest way to tell the development team is our feedback form.  While we do read the app reviews, with two million+ registered members, you’re much more likely to reach the developers in a timely way by letting us know directly.  Thanks!

Thanks for all your ideas and support

In every release, roughly half of all new features come from suggestions you make.  We’re listening.

If you find the BigOven app helpful in the kitchen, we’d love it if you take a moment to say so with an App Store review.  That’s a great way to spread the word about BigOven, which means more recipes, photos, reviews, and tips for you!

From all of us here at BigOven, happy cooking.  Make something great tonight.

Today, we welcomed our two millionth member

Today, we welcomed our two millionth registered member to BigOven.

Together, we’re building something great.  Thanks for sharing your ratings, photos, recipes, and for spreading the word!

We’re listening, and constantly working on improving BigOven.   We’ve got a lot more in the queue to make it an even better best friend in the kitchen.  It also always warms our heart to read your stories and comments in the App Store — how it’s saved you time, how it’s helping you cook more at-home meals, and much more.

On behalf of the whole team, thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts on BigOven, and for telling your friends and family about BigOven!

Here are some of our favorite recent reviews:

From the Apple App Store

 From Google Play

From Windows Phone Marketplace

 From Amazon.com

Thank you!

BigOven for Windows users:  we’re now in beta of our new Recipe Cloud Uploader tool which lets you easily migrate your recipe collection to the web and mobile!

Download it here.  Simply extract the zip file and run setup.exe.  It’s in beta — if you notice any bugs, please submit a support ticket.

Once your recipes are in your personal recipe cloud on BigOven.com, you can take your recipes anywhere.  Our free recipe apps let you access your recipes, resize them up or down, add them to grocery lists and more.  They’re easier to access and easier to share than ever before.  

About the Recipe Cloud Uploader

If you’re a BigOven for Windows user, you may already know that you can already post recipes to BigOven.com from BigOven for Windows via the “Post” button on the toolbar when viewing a recipe.  But it’s a one-by-one process, and it requires you to walk through a tagging/categorization dialog each time.

The new tool lets you bulk upload up to 1,000 recipes in a single session, unattended.  This has been a popular feature request, as we noted in a previous post about how to migrate your recipes from the desktop to the web.  Thanks for your patience, as we had quite a few tricky issues to navigate, as the prior blog post discusses.

Requirements and Notes

• All your recipes are posted privately, which means you will only see them when you are signed in.  
• Recipe images are not automatically uploaded at this time.  To add images to your recipes, simply visit the recipe page online (or via your mobile app) and upload a photo.
• Recipes are not categorized (i.e., Dessert, Salad, Sou, etc.) — that’s because the desktop recipe software uses a different taxonomy than the website for legacy reasons.  During alpha testing, we’ll be investigating to see if there are some simple ways the tool can make some general guesses, but our current thinking is to rather put that development effort into really-easy-to-use bulk editing tools on the web.
• Pro members can make any of their recipes public via the edit screen (please respect copyright.)  We also expect to release some bulk-editing tools on your web dashboard that will make bulk public-assignment easier.
• You can post a maximum of 1,000 recipes.   Pro membership is required.

Demo Video

Here’s a quick preview:

Status:  Beta

We shipped the beta tool on May 18, 2003.  Download link is above.

Thanks and happy cooking!

BigOven now has filters for the most common food allergies and diet situations.

NOTE:  Some allergies carry severe health risks.  Always consult a licensed nutritionist or physician before beginning any diet regimen, and double-check the recipe ingredients before shopping or preparing.  We make every effort to ensure proper categorization of these recipes, but recipes are being added all the time, and the recipes posted to BigOven are added by cooks from around the world simply sharing their recipes with others.  Be sure to double-check and adjust as needed before preparing.

How to do a simple dietary filter

Simply do any recipe search, then click the “Refine my search” bar:

You’ll see this bar at the top of the recipe list when viewing a bunch of recipe results.

Clicking this bar will expand and show you the following options:

The search filters currently available are:

Vegetarian, Vegan, Contains Cheese, Gluten-free, Nut-free, Tree nut free, Dairy-free, No Shellfish, No White Meat, No Red Meat, and Contains Pasta.

What do I do if I see a recipe that’s miscategorized?

Simple!  Just click the “[alert editor]” link in the ingredients box of the recipe on BigOven.com (coming to our mobile apps).  Enter your concern, and a BigOven editor will take a look at the recipe right away.

Demonstration video:

Often, testers wonder aloud why we don’t make “sort by rating” the default sort order.  Who wouldn’t want to see all the 5-star recipes before all the 4-star recipes?

Here’s why. We think that a recipe that has an average 4.8 star rating from 350 different cooks deserves to be shown ahead of an average 5 star rating with one rating just from a single cook (the one who posted it.)  We also think that if you’re searching for, say, chicken recipes, those chicken recipes that you’ve favorited or added also deserve to be boosted in priority.

Average rating is given heavy weight in the overall sorting, but it’s not the only factor considered in default search order.

We do provide the option to sort purely by average rating, but our default sort order (which we somewhat loosely  term “Quality”) incorporates some of the following factors:

• Who you are (recipes you’ve favorited or try-sooned or added will be boosted)
• How many different people have favorited or try-sooned the recipe
• Whether the recipe has a photo or not
• How many comments there are
• … and more

Hope this brief explanation is helpful.  You can learn more about refining searches on BigOven, to find just the recipe you’re looking for.

I’ve been a RiceSelect customer for years, and particularly enjoy their Light Brown Rice and Texmati® products.

If you’re looking for an easy, nutritious, low-calorie meal tonight, consider making this Middle East Rice Tabbouleh, which comes together in just 20 minutes.  It makes a great side dish with grilled chicken or fish, or is absolutely delicious on its own for brunch or lunch:

Middle East Rice Tabbouleh

Find more great recipes at RiceSelect and their chef page on BigOven.

Why move from one blogging platform to another?  In my view, WordPress has won the blog-platform war, and is now embraced by millions of writers around the world.  It’s a tremendously flexible platform, and many functional and responsive themes are available that scale particularly well to mobile and desktop screens.  Wordpress is made particularly vibrant by a vast library of extremely useful plugins, letting us add additional features to the blog without additional code.  In short:  Typepad, while perfectly adequate as a blogging platform, in my opinion loses out to WordPress in virtually every measure.

What do you think of the new design?  Let us know.

Typepad to WordPress: Migration Tips

The rest of this blog post is for those who want the specifics about migrating from Typepad to WordPress; I wanted to share some tips on the migration for those who want to do the same.  Fair warning though — it gets pretty technical.

How to Move from TypePad to WordPress on IIS

I spent a good half-day migrating the content from our blog from Typepad to WordPress, and thought I’d pass along some tips.

Option A:  Outsource the whole thing

The nice folks at tp2wp.com have a “valet” service, currently priced at $1499, that will get you a full migration, soup-to-nuts.  They do tech support, and have a great migration tool that handles some of the nitty-gritty below.  If you’re looking for a “set it and forget it” solution, I’d suggest you fill out their contact form.

[Edit -- Thanks to a comment from Alec from FolioVision, I now know that they too have a migration service priced significantly less, Silver T2WPMove at $500.  See the comments for details.]

Option B:  Do-it-yourself

I chose the do-it-yourself option.

The first step is to get your WordPress server ready.  You can choose a third-party service like WordPress.com, or you can use a shared or dedicated server.  At BigOven, we happen to have a spare Windows 2008 server in our farm, leftover from previous system upgrades.  It’s running IIS6, and for various reasons I wanted to keep it that way — it’s perfectly adequate for our blog and miscellaneous other duties.

Here are the steps in migrating from Typepad to WordPress (hosted on Windows):

1. Export the existing blog from within TypePad.  This is done via Blogs > Settings > Import/Export.
   
   
2. Install WordPress (and PHP and MySQL) on Windows 2008.  Microsoft makes this really easy with a special “Install WordPress For Windows” powered by their Web Platform Installer.  I found the installer worked flawlessly and installed PHP, mySQL and WordPress.  (It did require a server restart, however, so do this on a time that you can bring the box down for a restart.)  Still stuck?  Read the gory details of installing WordPress for Windows.  The installer will automatically create a username and password for accessing mySQL.  You can write it down during the install, or you can always view it later via the config file on the IIS box.
3. Now, you’re ready to import the post content!  Once WordPress is up and running on IIS, log into the admin panel, and install the handy plugin “Movable Type and TypePad Importer”.  This will do the lion’s share of the work.  Once this plugin is activated, you can go into the settings for it and give it the .WXR file you created in step #1.  After a few minutes – voila – your content should be live in your WordPress blog.By now, you’re humming along and must be thinking “that’s not so bad” — and you’re right.
4. Solve two big gotchas:
   a)  Preserving permalinks (and creating new ones that match your old site structure)
   b)  Getting your images hosted by your new server
5. Point your DNS server to your new WordPress site

It’s step 4a and 4b that take the bulk of the work.  Here’s how I tackled them:

Getting Permalinks To Transfer (4a)

What they are:  Permalinks are the actual absolute URL links for your blog articles.

Why you should care:  If you want to maintain your user experience and search engine presence, you don’t want a whole lot of broken links out there after you flip the switch and move your domain name to your new WordPress-powered blog.  Wordpress and Typepad use a different default syntax for building URLs.

How to tackle this.  First, I inspected our Typepad blog.  Our TypePad blog had links that looked like this (bold added for emphasis):

http://blog.bigoven.com/blog/2013/04/tips-new-features-added-this-week.html

By default, WordPress generates permalinks in a different format.  But, lucky you, you can tell WordPress how to generate these permalinks!  In the WordPress admin panel, go into Settings > Permalinks.  To preserve the “old” method, set yours to “Custom”, and use the format corresponding to your blog.  In our case, it’s:

/blog/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

This works, but with IIS6 at least, there’s still a problem.  While the WordPress engine now publishes articles using this format, IIS6 needs a way to route links of this kind to the WordPress engine.  When I try to browse any of these new Custom Permalinks, WordPress on IIS gives a 404 (not found) error.  Essentially, you need to tell IIS6 — “when a link comes in, hand it off to WordPress’s index.php for handling”.

*Note — as Alec indicates in the comments, we are able to do this because for our blog at least, we’ve never hand-edited the URL slug.  If you’ve hand-edited the permalink in Typepad, you might be interested in FolioVisions service.  See the comments for more information.

To solve this, I had to download and install a “URL Rewriter” – for IIS6, the one to use is the free (donationware-supported) Ionics IIRF – you can download it from:  http://iirf.codeplex.com/.  After it’s installed, you’ll want to use notepad to create a file called IIRF.ini, and put it in the base directory where your new WordPress site is located.

I’ve told it to route all requests through the WordPress engine with these lines:

# Iirf.ini
RewriteEngine ON
StatusInquiry ON
IterationLimit 5

# this will allow ugly URLs 
# to not be processed at all
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule /. /index.php [L,QSA]

Restart your WordPress site, and voila!  Now, the “old” site links, as well as the new ones, should be working.

Importing Images into WordPress (4b)

What they are:  These are all the .png, .jpg, .gif and other files you may have on your old Typepad site.  In our case, we also have some embedded videos from YouTube, but these won’t be affected at all, since the URLs are absolute.

Why you should care:  While your blog might appear to be functioning just fine, if you look closely at the HTML that is rendered in your new WordPress account, it’s still pulling the images from your old Typepad account.

Unless you do something, when you shut off your Typepad account, these images will all be broken links.

For those of us on Windows hosting, there’s another catch — Typepad likes to store images in a subfolder called “.a” (period-a).  Windows doesn’t like folder names that start with a dot, so you have to rename this destination, and in turn, rename all the hyperlinks in the post.  Fortunately, if you know a little SQL, that’s simple.

The best way to handle this situation is to migrate all the images from your TypePad account to your new account.  You can use a tool like the HTTrack to download all the images from your old blog to a specific folder on your hard drive.  Then, FTP them to the new IIS6 server, to a folder that lives under the “wp-content” folder.

The last step is to point your old posts to the right subfolder for these images, and for that, you’ll need to go in and update the WordPress posts database in mySQL.  In brief, what you do is get the login credentials from wp-config.php – that will tell you the username and password that wordpress uses for mySQL access.  You can use the mySQL Workbench to issue a query that looks something like this:

update wp_posts set post_content=replace(post_content,’/.a/’,’/wp-content/img/’) where post_content like ‘%/.a/%’

WARNING:  Always be careful when issuing bulk queries against your database!  You can corrupt the data if you do it wrong.  So always do a SELECT on this and triple-check the output before UPDATE-ing the entire database.

If you get this bulk url correct, your posts should now be pointing to the right images, on the new WordPress site.

And then, once it’s up and running, you can ask your DNS administrator to point the blog to your newly established WordPress site.  Happy writing!