BigOven Blog

Be a Kitchen Helper!

Steve Murch — Tue, 22 May 2012 13:03:32 -0700

We’re looking for cooks to become part of our new, paid Kitchen Helpers team. Kitchen Helpers work from home on whatever schedule they’d like, and help us edit, improve and curate the massive and growing recipe collection on BigOven.

We Need You.

At this writing, BigOven has over 270,000 recipes, with thousands and thousands of new recipes added every month.

Here at BigOven, our core team is made up of software engineers, web and mobile designers, moms and dads who like to cook and support staff. Our goal is to keep this engineering team as focused on our customers and building the platform as possible. A great deal of what we do is free to the millions of cooks who use the site and mobile apps on a monthly basis, and that’s the way we’d like to keep it. But we also want the contributed recipes themselves to be the highest-possible quality – and linked up with all the correct nutrition information -- today and in the future.

Simply put, we just can’t hire enough people here to cover all 270,000 recipes with a review pass, and by the time they did, there may be another several hundred thousand more to do!

When we thought about this challenge, we instantly thought of you -- our community filled with knowledgeable, passionate cooks. So, if you’re someone who enjoys cooking and is comfortable with and knowledgeable about a variety of recipes, we’re reaching out to get your help in reviewing the recipes, linking in nutrition facts, verifying serving sizes, and more.

In short, we want to enlist a team of curators for this great collection.

While our automated nutrition facts linking engine continues to get smarter and smarter (at present, well over half of our ingredients are linked up to nutrition data), human beings are still far smarter than computers. Thank goodness for that! But, since there is such a vast variety in the ways that recipes can be written, some are still not completely nutritionally linked.

For instance, recipes might be in need of:

minor fixup in the way ingredients are posted, so the auto-linker can do its work
less-common ingredients which need to be added to the nutrition database
serving size editing – improper serving size estimates for the recipe can cause the per-serving counts to be off

At present time, we’re not asking Kitchen Helpers to make the recipes, merely to closely review the recipe as written, and link up the nutritional information. It can be easily done from any computer with a high-speed internet connection. You’ll need a good depth of cooking knowledge – for instance, to verify that yes, the overall quantity ingredients as listed look like they’d truly serve 4. (Of course, it’s a judgment call, and some subjectivity comes into play as with all curation/editorial tasks.)

How Kitchen Helpers Works

Kitchen Helpers have special status on BigOven and can uniquely verify recipes. We have a system in place to capture who verifies a recipe, and some criteria in place for when a recipe is eligible to be verified (e.g., all ingredient lines must be fully nutritionally linked).

It’s simple to be part of the Kitchen Helper team. Visit http://www.bigoven.com/join-kitchen-helpers, and express your interest at the bottom of the form. Jot us a note about your cooking expertise, and, if you’ve posted recipes on BigOven, we’ll look at those, too.

Once admitted into the team, you can work from home, and participate whenever you’d like.

BigOven pays you two times a month (via PayPal to your registered BigOven email address) for the recipes you’ve linked and verified during that period on a per-recipe basis. This per-recipe payment starts today at $0.20 per recipe. This rate may change over time – this is a new program, and we’re sure we’ll be learning!

Our goal is to get every single recipe on the site verified by a Kitchen Helper. So far, about 70,000 of our recipes are verified, which means 200,000 are not! We have over 1.5 million registered members -- if we get, say, 1,000 Kitchen Helpers, this task won’t take very long. If we hired a full-time editorial team here, we’d have substantial magazine-like costs and lag-time that we’d eventually impact you, our customers.

What do Kitchen Helpers Do?

You, as a Kitchen Helper, will get special access to a Kitchen Helper Dashboard which shows a dozen or so currently-unverified recipes. You will get the ability to review and edit recipes, even if they are not your own. (We will review these edits.)

The dashboard gives you some recipes that are unverified. You simply visit the recipe, double-check the nutrition linkings and serving sizes. You may also make minor edits to the recipe to improve its readability, without changing the author’s intent meaning. When all ingredients are properly linked to the nutrition information, the serving size looks correct and any minor edits are done, click “Verify” on the recipe.

We then review your work, and pay you twice each month for the recipes you’ve verified.

We have screencasts and of course our support desk to help you out if you’re stuck. There are no minimum hours, no specific working hours – you get paid on a job-completed basis. There’s no need to check in with us, or reporting to do – just let us know if you have a question.

Benefits

If you’re passionate about cooking, you’ll learn even more. You’ll discover great recipes, and we’ll pay you to share your cooking expertise. We only want Kitchen Helpers who are comfortable in the kitchen, know cooking and the most common ingredients, and who write well. We will also happily pay for your BigOven PRO membership, if you cross a minimum hurdle of work for the year (this hurdle is not yet finalized, but likely to be about 250 recipes).

We’ve got several other opportunities in mind for Kitchen Helpers in the future – this is just where we’re start.

Ready to apply? Apply to be a Kitchen Helper today.

We’re going to start by accepting the best first ten or so candidates and monitoring the results before widening the program. Thanks!

Menu Planner on Android (and NOOK, Kindle Fire)

Steve Murch — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:30:06 -0700

A few weeks ago, we released updates for our Android-powered applications, bringing BigOven’s handy Menu Planning features to all Android users.

Menu Planner can now be found on:

Android Phones
Android Tablets
Kindle Fire™ tablets
NOOK reader tablets
iPhone
iPad
Web (www.bigoven.com/plan)

With BigOven’s Menu Planner, you can easily add recipes to a calendar and then generate a grocery list for any date range. These menu plans synchronize with your menu plan on BigOven (find it easily at www.bigoven.com/plan), letting you plan your meal in advance and then generate a grocery list at your leisure. Your grocery list is grouped for you by aisle.

Kindle Fire

Simply tap the magnifying glass (search), star (Favorites), thumbs-up (Try Soon) to add recipes to your menu plan.

NOOK tablet

Android Tablet

Your Favorites, Try Soons, Added Recipes Now Sort First

Steve Murch — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:54:39 -0700

We’ve improved the recipe search on BigOven, helping you get more quickly to the recipes you want. Starting now, your Favorites, Try Soons, and Recipes You’ve Added will sort before other recipes.

Of course, you must be logged in to BigOven – either website or mobile apps, so BigOven knows who you are.

Then, simply do a search by title, keyword, or something else. You’ll now see your recipes up front, before other recipes that match the same search terms.

Example

Over the past couple years, I’ve added three “Caesar Salad” type recipes.

If I visit BigOven and type in “Caesar” without logging in, I’ll see the sort order below, which is a proprietary scoring algorithm ranking recipes with “best overall rating” first. (One factor in our scoring algorithm -- BigOven will rank recipes with a lot of different positive reviews higher than a single 5-star average review.)

So, doing a search for “Caesar” (while not logged in) shows me:

But when I log in, I see the Recipes I’ve Added, or Favorited, or marked “Try Soon” right at the top.

Here’s my search on “Caesar” when I’m logged in, below. Notice that unlike the default search, the very first recipes are the three recipes that I’ve added (that match “Caesar”):

Tip: How to Mark/Unmark Favorites and Try Soons

Simply log in, and, on the recipe details page (web) or screen (apps), mark it a Favorite by clicking the appropriate link or menu item. You can unmark it the same way – just tap it again. Same goes for “Try Soons”.

On BigOven, the “Favorite” list is meant for recipes you have truly tried and are truly your Favorites. If you’re simply marking a recipe for the future, add it to your Try Soon list, then you can easily add it to your Menu Plan or Grocery List.

Tip: Searches are Cached (currently 6 minutes)

To help speed the website and mobile apps for everyone, search results are cached.

For instance, since a LOT of people are clicking on “recent raves”, BigOven doesn’t have to work as hard to serve every single one – it just keeps the snapshot of a similar query. At current writing, these snapshots are held for 6 minutes.

So, if you just recently have added or removed a Favorite or Try Soon, you may not see the recipe show up right at the top, if you’re re-executing the exact same search. The simple solution is to modify your search slightly without changing the meaning (e.g., reverse the words), or narrow your search further. But over time, you’ll find that recipes you’ve marked Favorite or Try Soon (or recipes you’ve added) will sort first.

Tip: Applicable to General Search, Not Yet in Menu Planner

This enhancement is live on general recipe search in the apps and on the website. However, the “find a recipe” feature that is used in the Menu Planner and to attach a recipe on another user’s wall (in a comment) do not yet have this feature.

Edit Images for any Recipe You Have Added

Steve Murch — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:32:06 -0700

Recipe owners can now edit the recipe images for any recipe they’ve added.

Currently, this includes selecting a primary image for the recipe and deleting any images that you don’t want. Previously, editing images required a support request, but now it’s in your hands, too.

Look for the “Edit Recipe” and “Edit Images” button on the website

Simply log into BigOven, and find the recipe in question. If it’s a recipe you own, you’ll see an “Edit this recipe” and “Edit images” button in the right-hand bar:

Clicking on the “Edit this recipe” button takes you to a form where you can alter the recipe – ingredients, title, text, etc.

Clicking on the “Edit images” button will take you to a screen like this (below), where you can choose the primary recipe image, and/or delete any images you don’t like. If you delete an image that is the primary image, BigOven will choose another image to be the primary image for the recipe. The “primary image” is the one that shows up when searching for the recipe.

If I click the “Make Primary” button next to the last photo, here’s what the new recipe page looks like:

Note that deleting images is permanent – you’ll get a pop-up confirmation before you delete the image.

Guidelines We Use In Selecting “Primary Image”

The BigOven search experience is greatly enhanced with good photos. We care deeply about making the recipe images as useful as they can be. For that reason, please choose a “primary image” for the recipe that is most representative of the recipe. This is usually the finished dish, but it doesn’t always have to be. It should be a close-up, it should be in-focus, well-lit, and as beautiful as possible.

You can reward great photographers by giving them medals (simply click on the Medal icon right beneath the photo), and take a moment to mention how you appreciate their contribution!

Every month, we give away a $100 Amazon.com Gift Card to the person who submits the best recipe photo for the month. There’s no cost to enter. Learn more on our Monthly Food Photo Contest page.

Please Take Care with Other People’s Images

If you post a recipe and create a new recipe entry on BigOven, you now have the power to delete the images that other people have taken the time to submit. Until now, this was only under administrative control. Please use some care in determining whether to delete a photo.

If you find the image not representative of the recipe or your taste, by all means delete it, but please keep the Golden Rule in mind – treat other people’s submissions the way you’d like your own to be treated.

Take Better Food Photos

Want to take better food photos? See “Looks Good Enough To Eat – The Food Photography Guide”, a resource on BigOven.

Tip: Consider Contributing a Step-by-Step Photo Series of your Favorite Recipe

Some of our recipes have terrific Step-by-Step photos, for instance: Greek Style Moussaka. Check out how a series like this can convey the preparation in detail:

Happy cooking!

BigOven Earns Registered Trademark

Steve Murch — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 11:22:41 -0700

Earlier this week, we got approval of our registered trademark application, which has been many months in the making! The process of going from ™ to ® is complete.

BigOven and the BigOven logo are now a registered trademarks:

“Look Inside” Recipes with Nutrition Insights™ from BigOven

Steve Murch — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 20:25:51 -0700

Ever wonder how to reduce the fat, sodium, carbs or calories in a recipe?

A key step in tailoring a recipe to your own dietary preferences is knowing which ingredients contribute the most calories, fat, carbs, sodium or protein. Then, you can consider substitutes for that ingredient, reduction in the amount or alternate variations.

Starting today, we’re making that much easier. BigOven PRO members can now “look inside” recipes with Nutrition Insights™. The Nutrition Insights page gives you a nutritional breakdown, by ingredient for any recipe.

How To View Nutrition Insights

Visit any recipe page on www.bigoven.com and log in with your BigOven PRO membership. Then, simply click on the word “Insights” in the nutrition table, and BigOven will show you a line-by-line analysis of where your recipe gets most of its calories, fat, protein and sodium, in an easy-to-read, graphical format:

Sample

Let’s examine Chicken and Bacon Shish Kabobs. With Nutrition Insights, we can quickly see which ingredients contribute the most calories, fat, protein, carbohydrates, sodium and overall weight to the recipe:

How to Read the Insights Chart

The ingredients are listed as rows, and the key nutritional elements are listed as columns. For any given box, BigOven displays the per-serving calculated total for that ingredient. The larger the circle -- and the brighter the color -- the greater its percent contribution to the overall total for that column. So, if you’re simply looking for the biggest contributors, just pick the column(s) you care most about and locate the largest, brightest circle.

For instance, for the Chicken and Bacon Shish Kebobs recipe above, sodium watchers would quickly notice that the bacon in the recipe accounts for more than half of the overall sodium of this particular recipe. Reducing, removing, or substituting this bacon would likely dramatically cut the sodium, calorie, and fat total for the recipe.

Notice that “skewers”, the last line, has no nutrition information, since they have not been linked in – they are (we sure hope!) not an edible part of the recipe.

Nutrition Summary Also Available

BigOven PRO members have been able to see Nutrition facts right next to the recipe page on BigOven.com, as follows:

Sesame-Crusted Ahi Tuna – it’s all in the dressing!

Taking a look at a second Nutrition Insights page, this for Sesame-Crusted Ahi Salad, you can quickly see that the calories, fat, and sodium all largely stem from the dressing, not the ahi or the salad itself.

Nutrition Linking Status – Work Continues!

BigOven has well over 200,000 recipes online, and an average of 7 ingredients per recipe – well over 1.7 million ingredients to link up. Not every single one of them is fully nutritionally-linked, though the vast majority are, and most of our most frequently-viewed ones are. We’re linking the remaining (and newly edited ones) rapidly, and further tuning our auto-linking system.

PRO members can help us link in more nutrition information with the steps described in this technote: How to Calculate Nutrition Information for a Recipe You've Added.

When you add a new recipe, after about 4 hours, the nutrition linking daemon should hit your recipe and link up what it can. The more you enter your ingredient lines in “standard” form – e.g., with the quantity, unit, name and prepnotes in the proper boxes, the greater accuracy the automatic linker will have in finding the relevant nutritional item and weight. To inspect the nutrition link, simply click on the bullet to the left of the ingredient line.

Nutrition Insights: Now in Beta for all BigOven PRO members

Nutrition Insights is a BigOven PRO feature only. It is now in beta on our website; it is not yet available in our mobile apps. Have questions or comments? Please drop us a note.

Add Your Own Recipes – Get Nutrition Insights!

Remember, BigOven is all about letting you build and organize your own recipe collection, and Nutrition Insights are available for those recipes you add. You can finally find out just how many calories are in that apple strudel recipe – or how much protein is in that smoothie, and find ways to make it even better for you. It’s free to join BigOven and add recipes, but to gain Nutrition Insights and loads of other great features, you need to be a BigOven PRO member.

Introducing BigOven for Nook Tablet

Steve Murch — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 10:03:31 -0700

We are pleased to announce that BigOven is now available for free download on the Nook® Tablet by Barnes & Noble.

Search 200,000+ recipes
Enter 3 ingredients from your fridge or pantry and find out what you can make
See Recent Raves – recipes that have recently earned 4 or 5 star reviews
Get full recipe details including photos, reviews, and more
Random recipe
Mark recipes Favorites or Try Soons
Build a Favorites and Try Soon list
Share recipes with friends through Facebook, Twitter and Email
Fully synchronize with your BigOven account on the web (BigOven.com) and our other mobile devices (iPad, iPhone, Windows Phone, Android, Android Tablet, Kindle Fire) – including grocery list, favorites, try soons, menu plan and more.
Add your favorites on www.bigoven.com/recipe/post and see them here

BigOven PRO members can do more:

Create grocery lists – add individual items or recipes
Create and edit your Menu Plan
Get detailed nutrition facts for recipes
Enjoy an advertising-free experience
Post private recipes on the web
Add recipes from around the web with our Add Recipe bookmarklet
Scan recipes

We’ve just received approval of the app, and it should be available shortly in the Barnes & Noble app store. The NOOK app only runs on those NOOK® platforms that support downloadable Android apps, not earlier e-reader versions.

If you like this free app or find it useful, we’d love a review in the Barnes & Noble app store!

Our other free recipe apps include:

iPhone
iPad
Android
Android Tablet
Kindle Fire
Windows Phone
Windows

BigOven Now Supports Facebook Timeline

Steve Murch — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 09:13:02 -0700

BigOven now lets you share the recipes you’ve made easily with your Facebook friends and keep a log right on Facebook.

It’s an optional feature utilizing Facebook’s “Open Graph” engine. The direct integration has now been approved by Facebook and is out of beta.

With this fun feature, you can easily inform your friends about the recipes you’ve enjoyed without having to leave BigOven. (Not the Facebook-sharing type? Don’t worry, you don’t have to do anything.)

How to “Make” a recipe on Facebook: Simply click a link on the recipe detail page

On any recipe page, you’ll see a link for “Make (Facebook Timeline)” on the right hand action bar:

When you click the link called “Make (Facebook Timeline)”, BigOven will add the recipe to your Facebook Timeline. This will log it for you right on Facebook, so you can look back and see what you’ve made.

In addition, your Facebook friends will see this on the right hand side of their newsfeed display – see the top item:

And, on your Facebook Timeline, they (and you) will see a history of recipes you’ve made on BigOven, along with photos and brief descriptions:

Of course, you can change the permissions that BigOven has at any time. To link to Facebook or change the Facebook-sharing preferences at any time, visit your BigOven profile settings page at www.bigoven.com/account/me.

Happy cooking!

Why doesn’t BigOven combine like-items on the grocery list?

Steve Murch — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 11:02:56 -0800

As you may know, our development team reads every single suggestion that comes in via our feedback form.

One of the more common feature requests is to combine like-items on the grocery list, and sometimes, people wonder why this isn’t already done, since it seems so easy – simply take 1 egg, 2 eggs, and add them together, and boom – that’s 3 eggs.

We are definitely looking at this type of feature, but I first wanted to take a moment to explain why it’s not as trivial a feature as it first may appear.

Major design goals we have for BigOven that impact our ability to deliver this include:

allow cooks to ADD entire recipes to the grocery list,
allow cooks to DELETE recipes, right up until the last minute, even at the grocery store, and have their list accurately reflect their change-of-mind
allow cooks to add recipes to the site in as unconstrained-a-way as we can – i.e., keep the text the way the cook wants to express it (we support snapping photos of handwritten recipes, entering them by URL and typing them in by hand)
allow cooks to use any of the 200,000+ recipes already entered in the site

If you cook like me, your grocery list can change right at the last minute, when you suddenly notice that avocados are in season and on-sale at the grocery store. We want to be sure that if you change your mind, you can simply swipe the entire recipe off the grocery list, and all the underlying items for that recipe are automatically deleted for you, and no more. Summing the items together would certainly present a challenge in later subtracting that out – or, conversely, we’d have to engineer two “views” of the grocery list, the underlying one and the consolidated one. Providing two views of the grocery list can add complexity, not just to the development but also the usage of the app and site.

Another related goal is to allow people to post recipes in as unconstrained a manner as possible. That is, we don’t want to “shoehorn” the user into a rigid data entry process, because one person’s “scallions” are another person’s “green onions”, and some would like to express their prepnotes as “finely chopped” and others would like to say “finely diced”. We consider your recipe your own, and don’t want to mess with the way that the text is written.

Thus, recipes can end up with:

2 whole green onions, finely diced

and another recipe can have:

3 scallions, chopped

A final matter is that not every cook fully respects the “Item Name” and “Prepnotes” boxes – some might enter “finely chopped scallions” as the item name, and others might enter “scallions” in the item name and “finely chopped” in the prepnotes (the preferred style).

Now, BigOven knows that both “green onions” and “scallions” can be found in “Produce”. But to collapse it into 5 green onions for you, and also allow you to remove one of the recipes at the last minute, and present that to you accurately at every stage across the platforms, is not as trivial as it first appears.

Showing a consolidated list would make it very difficult to then subtract-out the recipe and all the ingredients at the last minute, and would also make it difficult to combine the prepnotes in a logical way. We are looking into it, but that’s why this seemingly trivial feature (combining like items) isn’t quite as easy as it first appears, given our goal to allow the removal of recipes right up at the grocery store.

Instead, what BigOven does is group items by aisle for you, and sort them alphabetically within that aisle. Then, you can quickly scan the list to see what you need.

This isn’t to say that we think the design as-is is finished and perfect – we’re always looking to make it better. It’s simply an update on why this “please combine items automatically” isn’t quite as trivial as it first may seem, and it does come with tradeoffs.

New My Recipes area helps you organize and share all your recipes

Steve Murch — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 12:33:57 -0800

We’ve upgraded the “My Recipes” area on BigOven.com to help you see all your recipes at a glance, and share them more easily with friends and family.

Improvements

1) Now uses all of widescreen

We’ve taken a design cue from Pinterest, and are using the entire width of the screen for the display of your recipes.

2) “My Recipes” no longer requires a login. So you can now share the URL with others!

If you notice, when you click on the “My Recipes” tab when you’re logged into BigOven.com, it will automatically redirect you to a URL of the form www.bigoven.com/myrecipes/{username}.

For instance, my username is stevemur, so the URL I can share for friends and family to see my favorites is http://www.bigoven.com/myrecipes/stevemur

We’ve added handy “Share on Facebook / Share on Pinterest” buttons for you in the upper right corner:

3) You can much more easily easily browse other cook’s public Favorites, Try Soons, and recipes they’ve Added for inspiration or reference

By this same principle, I can now easily browse other cook’s recipes very easily. We’ve got a lot of great contributors to BigOven. Some recipe pages I’d encourage you to visit are:

www.bigoven.com/myrecipes/sgrishka – sgrishka

www.bigoven.com/myrecipes/promfh – promfh

www.bigoven.com/myrecipes/ellie36 – ellie36

www.bigoven.com/myrecipes/cajuntoast – cajuntoast

4) Progressive loading rather than paging

The page loads with AJAX, providing a much smoother experience.

See the “More…” button at the bottom of the page:

When you click it, the next chunk of recipes will load, preserving the other ones on the page.

Give ideas to your friends and family!

Have you built up a recipe collection on BigOven? If so, consider sharing it with friends and family on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, your blog (if you have one) or your favorite sharing platform.

Just give them the URL and they’re set!