How to feed the world ? from Denis van Waerebeke on Vimeo.

This is what you see when you click the star:  a popup window with tabs where you can enter various aspects of your recipe.

What does this do for you?  A couple of things:  You don’t have to learn the hRecipe markup labels because it just does them (well at least some of them)  for you.   You can attach your own styles to the various classes if you want, and have a consistent look for your recipes.  (You could have always done that, but if you follow standard conventions, your work will be more portable.)  Software that is able to find and read hRecipe pages will be able to “read” and export your recipe.  Meanwhile, it just looks like an ordinary recipe.  All the special markup is invisible to people;   however, search engines will be able to find your recipe more the way you want it found.  And if you want your recipe shared, it makes it easier for that to happen.

hRecipe is relatively new.  There is only one application that supports it as I write.  A handful of forward looking recipe sites have marked up their recipes in hRecipe.  I don’t expect it to take off virally, as most of visitors this blog post have probably left by now, or if you  did get this far,  you’re saying, “huh?” because you skimmed it too fast.

What I’m saying is:  if you install the plugin and start using it, don’t expect to see huge jump in your Google analytics right away.  But microformats including hRecipe are catching on, albeit slowly, and the people who wrap their content in microformat   will be  well positioned when the Google crawlers evolve to be fully aware of them.  And anyway,  it’s a nice way to organize your content if you have a recipe blog.

My next post will be a recipe in hRecipe.  It won’t hurt, I promise!

What I am going to do in this post:

• describe a problem that we foodies have, and most of us don’t realize it
• convince you that it is, in fact, a problem
• give examples of other similar problems and how they have been solved
• propose a solution to our foodie problem
• muse on why this particular problem solution has not gotten very far, so far

Here is the problem: I have many friends who are happy to send me recipes. The method they invariably use is email. I have told them that they can become registered on the blog and post recipes directly, but it is a barrier! The capability is there but the FACT is that foodies who don’t have their own food blog are intimidated by technology and don’t want to do this. It’s taken them 15 years to get comfortable with email for God’s sake!

Why it is a problem: Now, when I receive these emails, what do I do (presuming I like the recipe and want to publish it)? I have to tweak it up to fit the format this blog likes. Why is that a problem? Because it doesn’t scale and it wastes work. My friend has already sort of formatted the recipe, usually into a list of ingredients and the instructions blurb. But I have to edit it more. Yuck! I’d rather be cooking!

A similar problem and its solution: Several years back there was a similar issue with calendar data. Joe needs to publish his day planner so his secretary can schedule appointments for him. Or, you go to the calendar from your favorite venue and you would like to add Thursday night’s jam session to your personal calendar. You’re more likely to do that if it doesn’t involve a lot of copy/paste. The best solution is you just click a button and boom it’s on your calendar. What that button click actually does is exports the calendar data to a common format that is understood by your calendar application. Then your calendar application imports it and converts it to whatever internal format it uses.

A solution for recipes: OK, now I’m gonna get a little geeky here, but bear with me and keep your eyes on the prize, the prize being: the ability to grab a recipe from some recipe website and put it in your favorite personal recipe collection with a single click, just like you can for calendar events. You KNOW you’d love that! It’s worth the geekiness, believe me. There does exist such a solution, and it’s called hRecipe. The only problem is that not too many people use it. It was the same problem when these open calendar formats were introduced, but people started to use them because the benefit was very clear, and so they have gained wide acceptance.

Why has hRecipe not caught on?: I think that it’s due to mental blockage common to foodies. The same reason my friends will email me but they won’t join my blog and post directly: They lump it into the category of “geekage” and they put themselves in the category of “non geek” so they step aside when they see it coming and continue to do things the old comfortable labor-intensive way. It’s completely irrational. Think about it.
“I don’t have 20 minutes to learn a skill that would save me weeks and weeks of time in the long run.”

What you can do:

• Help make people aware of hRecipe and websites that use it.
• Use the links at the bottom of this post (e.g. Stumble Upon etc.) to spread it around.
• Agitate on your favorite website that they use it if they don’t.
• Comment on your experience with hRecipe.
• Find places where you can share hRecipes.
• Agitate for foodie desktop applications to recognize it.
• Follow Dork Chow to keep up with anything I do to push open recipe formats.
• Step out of your mental block and do something geeky. This is the information age. We’re all geeks, like it or not!

350 made of veggies at Coburg Civic Centre, in the township of Moreland (the near north suburbs of Melbourne, Australia.) The white leaves are cabbage. It is a shame there were no rooftops to climb on to get a good angle on it and alas, Melbourne is flat and this district is pretty urban, so no green hillsides either. I gave a little schpiel on plarn at this do. (Search blog for plarn if you don’t know what that is.) Beyond Zero Emissions gave a very nice schpiel. Australia is a huge exporter of coal so there are a large number of anti-greens because they think of all the $$$ they will lose in the short run. But think about it! Australia uses only a tiny percentage of its own coal. It’s not about them, it’s about their CUSTOMERS! Many of their biggest coal customers are making great strides to reduce THEIR carbon, ergo use other fuels and reduce their coal. Australia would do better to anticipate this and come up with some alternate plan.

Heheh. This combines my love of music with my love of vegetables. What a hoot. Literally.

A delicious twist on an old standby. Good and good for you!