Blog - GetMeCooking

GetMeCooking Recipe Plugin for WordPress - Video Demo

Thu, 09 May 2013 12:54:09 Z

A huge thanks from us to Al Onkka who has created a 10 minute video demo of our recipe plugin for WordPress!

by Paul on Thursday, May 9, 2013

Conversion Guide for Measurements used in Cooking

Thu, 09 May 2013 09:50:32 Z

We've added a quick reference conversion guide for measurements used in cooking.

The measurements aren't exact, we've rounded them off to be more suitable and easier to read.

We have also included this in our recipe plugin for WordPress, so it's there when you want to add recipes to your site and you want to give measurements in imperial, metric and USA formats.

If there are any measurements you would like us to add, please let us know.

by Paul on Thursday, May 9, 2013

Rating Systems for Recipes - They Don't Work

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 16:52:47 Z

One of the most requested features for our recipe plugin for WordPress is a rating system, that visitors to blogs can use to rate recipes; but people don't really think (or at least they don't tell us) 'why' they want it.

We have thought long and hard (well actually, only for about 8 seconds) and have decided against it.

You see, we only want to include features into our plugin which we think are genuinely useful.

We don't think that rating systems (in particular a star based rating systems) are useful or accurate for recipes. They are open to mis-interpretation, abuse and laziness, as well as a variety of other variables, such as the ingredients used, quality of the chef, cooking equipment, etc.

For example, our recipe plugin for WordPress has been rated 1 star - in fact most of the recipe plugins on WordPress have at least one 1 star rating. If your blog has 10 tomato soup recipes and they all have 5 star ratings, it then doesn't mean much to the visitor as the visitor still can't distinguish between them - the rating just becomes 'noise', on the page.

Plus on WordPress, our recipe plugin has only been rated 13 times, even though it has been downloaded over 14,000 times. So a review from just 13 people is too small a percentage to be at all relevant.

So instead of adding a rating system for recipes, we are concentrating on other features to make the plugin really useful for both the author and the visitor.

by Paul on Monday, March 25, 2013

GetMeCooking recipe plugin for WordPress - Premium version 1.1.2

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 14:30:47 Z

If you have the Premium version of our recipe plugin for WordPress, please check the e-mail we sent you last night for information on the latest version (1.1.2) and how to install it.

In this release of the plugin, we have added:

Language support for Danish and German

and resolved:

A security warning message. This message was introduced in WordPress version 3.5. It was for informational purposes only, and did not break any functionality. Furthermore, it only effected users who had warning messages enabled within their PHP configuration (warning messages should be disabled on production servers)
Some non-English language issues
A rare issue where the categories (such as region and course), would stop the rest of the page from loading

The plugin now supports all these languages:

Danish
Dutch
English
German
Italian
Portuguese
Russian

and we have more on the way!

Please contact us if you have any questions or suggestions.

Happy cooking!

The GetMeCooking team

by Paul on Thursday, March 7, 2013

Improving the logon process

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 14:32:14 Z

As software developers, we are obsessed with the usability and performance of this website. We have written most of the site ourselves from scratch, but for a few things (such as the user logon process), we used code from a third party (this is standard practice).

The software that we have been using for years, now isn’t performing as we’d like; so we have replaced it with something newer and better.

Unfortunately, we have to use one or the other pieces of software, we can’t support both. So we need to ask you to update your logon credentials by clicking on the link in the email we have sent out.

If you didn't get an email then you don't need to do anything as it has only impacted a small number of users who logged in with Google.

Thanks – and happy cooking!

Team GetMeCooking

by KevinUK on Friday, February 15, 2013

Tweaking the Landing Page Design

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 23:12:45 Z

We are always tweaking things. Recently we have changed the design of two of our landing pages:

They have the same basic design, so it made sense to change them both at the same time, to keep things consistent.

The original design had an image, title and short overview on each feature. The problem with this is that it didn’t allow us do properly describe each feature, plus we felt that it was a bit too text-heavy.

So we decided to revise the design by removing the overview text and replacing it with a full description of each feature, only now; the description is hidden – you now have to click on each heading in order to view the description for it.

We have made the pop-out description show dynamically (animated), plus it is highlighted yellow, along with the feature that it relates to, so that it is clear what you clicked on.

We think that it’s better for people who want a quick overview of what the two products are about, as well as for people who want to read up on each feature in detail.

Old design:

New design:

What do you think?

by Paul on Monday, January 14, 2013

A new visual design for GetMeCooking (and PlateJobs)!

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 00:45:27 Z

It was actually a few months ago now, since we moved to a new visual design for GetMeCooking. Did you notice?

Old design:

New design:

It isn’t vastly different in structure from the previous design, but there is a stark difference if you see them side by side.

We wanted a design to present the information on the site in an obvious manner, whilst remaining clear and easy to use. This isn’t easy as recipe sites are quite complex in their nature due to the amount of information needed to display to the reader.

Job sites share this issue of complexity. When searching for a job, you have a very specific list of criteria in mind, so you want to find a job really by filtering out lots of possibilities first. Then you need to have an easy way to manage the jobs that you’ve applied for (or in the case of a recruiter, jobs that you have posted).

When creating a job site (PlateJobs), we used 99designs to get a series of templates for pages that we knew we wanted. As you can see from the design brief and the resulting screenshots, we knew what we wanted in terms of content and a rough idea of how to structure it – and the designers came up with great suggestions on how to put it all together in a package that was pleasing on the eye. In the end, one design really stood out for us and we went with it. The design was loosely based on the original GetMeCooking design, which was great as we were able to retro-change the GetMeCooking design to match PlateJobs.

PlateJobs design:

The main differentiator between the two sites (GetMeCooking and PlateJobs) is the use of logo and text colour. We think this is a good thing because it provides consistency across our sites, whilst still providing a strong identity.

We will be updating the fonts used on the sites – this is a lot harder than it sounds. We want to use a font that is very easy to read on-screen, scales well, fits in with our theme, works well on all browsers and shows fractions as font values.

What do you think of the new look? Is it easy to use, easy to read and easy to find what you want?

by Paul on Tuesday, November 27, 2012

PlateJobs.com - is now live!

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 14:19:24 Z

As explained in my blog post last August, we have been busy working on a recruitment site for people in the food service industry.

The site (PlateJobs) is now live and open for business. We are really excited about it because it widens our market (which makes life more interesting for us) plus it gives us scope to do things that no other job site has, such as integrate our recipe site (GetMeCooking), into the job site.

You will see that the design of PlateJobs matches the design of GetMeCooking. We actually got PlateJobs designed, then we retro-designed GetMeCooking to match that before we made PlateJobs live. The consistency in design allows users to be familiar and comfortable with both sites, plus it helps promote us as a larger brand. We have used colour to provide distinction to each site - GetMeCooking has an orange logo and red text; PlateJobs has a green logo and text.

Because the site is new, we are pulling in content from another job site. The quality of this content isn’t great, so PlateJobs will improve as the amount of content added to it (directly by recruiters) is increased. We will always prioritise jobs that have been posted directly to PlateJobs over jobs that have been pulled in from external sources.

We are working on lots of new features to make the job search and job recruitment processes more fluid and relevant to the individuals, plus we will have some cross-over with the GetMeCooking site.

Lots more coming soon!

Let us know what you think.

by Paul on Thursday, November 15, 2012

We've exceeded 10,000 downloads of our free recipe plugin for WordPress!

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 17:44:57 Z

I remember Kevin and I working on our recipe plugin for WordPress early last year, rushing to get it ready in time for our Food Blogger Connect presentation in August, but it wasn’t quite ready for then and we didn’t want to release a product that wasn’t up to standard. So we announced it and demonstrated it, but held off from releasing it until 2 weeks later on the 31^st August. This actually worked out to be to our advantage because we got some great feedback and beta testers from the conference, which allowed us to make the first release of our plugin much better than it was going to be.

After going live, the same beta testers helped us find issues with it and suggest new features, so over the first few months, we brought out a lot of changes in a very short space of time. Importantly, it proved to be robust, the take-up was good, food bloggers loved it, visitors to food blogs found it really nice and we were getting good quality recipes into GetMeCooking.

Just over a year later (and after a lot of updates), we have passed the 10,000 downloads milestone of our free recipe plugin (you can view the stats on the WordPress Plugin site). This is an amazing achievement!

Kevin and I designed the plugin from scratch and have put a great deal of work into it, so we have great pride in the plugin, its quality and how well it’s doing – it’s very personal to us. We are also very thankful to the food bloggers who have given us lots of positive feedback and suggestions for new features.

We fully believe that it’s the best all-round recipe plugin available and we are working on new features and design improvements all the time, as well as closer integration with the GetMeCooking site.

Around 6 months ago we brought out a premium version of the plugin. We will always have a free version (which is more than adequate for most food bloggers) but the premium version is a fair way of allowing us to get some income from professional food bloggers who can make use of the more advanced features.

Recently, at Food Blogger Connect in September 2012, I gave a presentation about food plugins in general – and why food bloggers need them in order to save time, do more, be more consistent and offer a better experience for the visitors. I used our recipe plugin as an example and again I got a lot of very positive feedback.

Developing our recipe plugin for WordPress has been a brilliant experience – it helps us out as many food bloggers submit recipes to it, to be placed on GetMeCooking; it helps bloggers out as it gives them recipe specific tools for their blog, as well as excellent SEO and SEM (both of which have proven to lead to increased traffic for their blogs) and it has been a lot of fun.

The future of food blogging is exciting – as we are right at the forefront of it!

by Paul on Tuesday, October 16, 2012

We're presenting at Food Blogger Connect 2012

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 10:43:12 Z

Last year I gave a presentation at Food Blogger Connect (Europe's largest food blogging conference) about our recipe plugin for WordPress, which wasn't even out yet!

Since then, we have had almost 10,000 downloads of the free version of our plugin and we have released a premium version of the plugin with even more advanced features - and that is proving to be popular too.

I am very pleased that I have been invited back to talk again, at this year's Food Blogger Connect event at 11:45 on Saturday 29th September.

This year, I will be talking about recipe plugins in general. I will of course be referencing our plugin (because it's the best!) but really, I just want people to be more aware of how recipe specific plugins can help enhance your blog, bring more visitors to your blog and save you a lot of time and effort.

If there is something specific you would like me to talk about during my presentation, or see me about in person during the day, please let me know in the comments below, or via e-mail.

If you haven't got a ticket to the event yet, you can purchase a ticket, or follow @bloggerconnect on twitter as they often give out free tickets in competitions.

P.S. if you're a professional working in, or recruiting for jobs in the food service industry, I will be happy to talk to you about PlateJobs - our careers site.

See you there!

by Paul on Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Foodies Festival 2012 in Oxford - are you going?

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 21:29:14 Z

Thanks to winning a pair of tickets on the blog Girl Eats Oxford, we are going to attend the Foodies Festival in Oxford this Sunday.

The event runs from 25th - 27th August and I'll be there on Sunday afternoon.

Please let me know if you'd like to chat with me about GetMeCooking, our Recipe plugin for WordPress, PlateJobs (our job site for professionals in the food service industry) or just want to say hi!

by Paul on Tuesday, August 21, 2012

PlateJobs.com - a new way to advertise for (and find) jobs in the food service industry

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 13:05:15 Z

Our about page describes why my brother Kevin and I created GetMeCooking - basically it was because we didn't know how to cook and when we looked online, there weren't any recipe websites we liked - so we created this recipe website and a recipe plugin to encourage food bloggers to fill it with really good quality, well written recipes.

The GetMeCooking website and our recipe plugin for WordPress have been an obsession of ours for around six years now. They have cost us a lot of money and thousands of man-hours of work. Kevin is working on the GetMeCooking things on a full-time basis and I’m working on it in my spare time (as well as sneakily at work, during my day job!). We truely believe that we can turn our obsession into a viable, profit making business – but it isn’t yet. So we have been thinking about how we can generate some money…

We have got a roadmap for how to generate money within GetMeCooking, but we are building it slowly and we don’t want lots of adverts on our nice clean site. We have got ideas for other areas to expand into (including one really fantastic idea with a low-friction entry point and a big market – but it will take a long time to develop and see any real return on). We wanted something that we could set up quickly, start earning from and be able to develop upon, so… we came upon the idea of creating a recruitment site for people in the food service industry. It fits in well with our brand, can integrate well with the GetMeCooking website and we are excited to be able to have a more commercial side to what we do. Plus – we looked around and couldn’t find any decent recruitment websites!!!

We think that a good recruitment website will be quick and easy to develop, in fact within just a few weeks, we have already developed 85% of the first version (it will be basic at first, but still better than 99% out there) and we will try to attract attention from recruiters and candidates (initially for free whilst we get feedback). Then we’ll start adding more features (which we have already planned) and hopefully generate some revenue, which we can then re-invest into our core work. There will also be an opportunity to work in some cross-over functionality between PlateJobs, GetMeCooking and our WordPress plugin - the three products will suppliment each other really well.

So if you fit into one of these categories:

Candidate:

Chef/cook
Front of house
Waiter/waitress
Bar staff
Management
etc.

Recruiter:

Professional recruitment agent
Owner of a restaurant, café, bar, etc. who recruits staff on an ad-hoc basis

Then please give PlateJobs a try! We want to make it easy for recruiters to find enthusiastic, good quality staff – and for staff to find good quality jobs, where they can advance their career.

As I said earlier, the site will start off with a very basic set of features, but will improve quickly, with lots more features, just as GetMeCooking has.

You can learn more about it by:

Visiting the PlateJobs website (currently only an e-mail list that you can sign up to for notifications)
Follow PlateJobs on twitter
Follow PlateJobs on Facebook

If you have any feedback, comments, suggestions for what you would like to see in a new recruitment site, please let us know - either in the comments below, or e-mail us.

by Paul on Sunday, August 5, 2012

We’ve moved our WordPress Demo site - into the cloud!

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 12:54:04 Z

Today we have moved our WordPress Demo site (which showcases our recipe plugin for WordPress) from running on our own web server, to running on Amazon Web Services – i.e. it’s in the cloud.

And we’ve done it for free with appfog…

With appfog, we simply had to do this:

Sign up to appfog
Chose WordPress as the application
Selected Amazon Web Services as the infrastructure
Entered a subdomain (this is only really used to get started – you can assign your own DNS name later)
Waited for WordPress to be installed (took less than a minute)
Entered some standard WordPress configuration information
Set up WordPress to how we wanted it (including adding all plugins and content)
Moved the domain name wpdemo.getmecooking.com to point to this new WordPress instance

That’s it! It was all very quick and easy.

The WordPress site seems very quick and should also be very reliable as it’s built on Amazon Web Services.

For a site with low traffic (it’s just our demo site), it’s a perfect solution for us. It will also be perfect for development and test sites – and even most people’s live food blogs as 50GB’s data transfer limit is very good. If you need more power, it gives you the option to scale up, at a reasonable cost.

See their pricing page for full details of pricing and capacity.

If you want to see how it performs, check out our site!

by Paul on Tuesday, July 31, 2012

We’re in the cloud!

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 08:59:48 Z

For over a year, we have wanted to host this website in the cloud and for various reasons, we wanted to use the WindowsAzure cloud service. The main thing that was preventing us from jumping straight onto the service were some technical limitations, but they have stepped up some levels of supported software, so that allowed us to get on board.

So a few months ago, we moved GetMeCooking from our own dedicated web server, onto the WindowsAzure cloud service. Since then we have monitored and tweaked quite a few things, to bring about better stability and performance. It wasn’t a simple move over to the cloud – we did have to make quite a few changes to our core site and we found that some things (such as mobile views – i.e. views on mobile devices such as the iPhone) didn’t initially work on Azure, but they did on our old server. But overall, it hasn’t been too difficult and the advantages have been fantastic.

Some of the advantages include:

No downtime – ever! Well hopefully anyway. With two web instances (in different physical locations), if one fails, people will be routed onto the other one
Transparent website updates – we can put site updates onto staging area (and test them) before making them live. The transition from staging to live is instant
Better resilience and security – properly maintained hardware, fault tolerance, backups, use of virtualisation, etc. means our web services and databases will always run on servers and networks that are fully maintained and kept up-to-date
Better performance – improved web caching and positioning of servers
Geo-location – with web servers currently in Western Europe and America, our visitors will be directed to whichever server is closest to them
CDN – with Content Distribution Networks all over the world, static content (including images and cookies) can be retrieved from servers near visitors, they don’t have to retrieve them from the web service
Scalability – we can move to more powerful web servers, or expand to additional web servers as we grow
Less maintenance – spending less time managing our web server, means that we can spend more time focusing on developing GetMeCooking

In short, our website is now faster and more highly available than ever before – so you can spend less time in front of the computer and more time in the kitchen!

by Paul on Tuesday, July 31, 2012

GetMeCooking Recipe plugin - updates for both the free and premium versions

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 16:55:25 Z

We have just released new versions of both our free and premium editions of our recipe plugin for WordPress.

Free Plugin

We’ve fixed these things in the free version:

Only the recipe title that matches the blog post is hidden when the option is enabled. Before, all of the recipe titles in the blog post would be hidden (assuming you had more than one recipe in the blog post), not just the recipe with the matching title as the blog post
Adding an apostrophe to a custom heading no longer adds a backslash
Preview changes button now shows again. Changes in WordPress version 3.4 broke this

Premium Plugin

In the premium version, we have added some popular new features.

Latest Recipe Slideshow

As well as being able to display your recipes as a list (text and/or image), you can now display them in a slideshow format.

We have even included all these options, so you can get it looking exactly how you want:

You can add the slideshow to any post, page, side menu or widget.

For examples, please see our demo site:

The menu on the right hand side of http://wpdemo.getmecooking.com/
The page http://wpdemo.getmecooking.com/latest-recipes/

Nutritional Information

You can now add nutritional information to your recipes.

We support detailed and summary layouts, as well as all these options:

When you add information to a recipe, any fields you leave blank won’t be shown on the blog post.

Multi-Language Support

Our plugin is installed in many countries around the world, so it makes sense for it to fully support all languages.

Right now it supports:

English
Italian
Dutch
Portuguese
Russian

We are keen to have our plugin available in other languages. If you want to see it in your language, please let us know. Plus if you would like to help with the translation, we are willing to give you a copy of our Premium plugin in exchange for a conversion (about 600 phrases).

Finally

Thanks to everyone who is using our plugin. The feedback we're getting is amazing and we're thrilled that you're enjoying it.

Please rate us, because it makes us feel special :-)

If you like our free plugin, you’ll love our premium recipe plugin for WordPress – give it a try, with a 60 day, no-quibble money back guarantee!

Thanks - and happy cooking!

GetMeCooking team - Kevin and Paul

by KevinUK on Sunday, July 15, 2012

Want to be a better food blogger?

Sat, 09 Jun 2012 15:15:41 Z

We are in the process of writing an ebook about food blogging. It will actually be useful for all types of bloggers, but we are writing it specifically with food blogging in mind.

The book will cover all of the technical aspects of setting up and monitoring a blog, branding, promotion, social media, Search Engine Optimisation (and Search Engine Marketing), how to make your blog load faster (and why it’s important), how to meet other food bloggers, plus many other things.

It will be a complete A-Z for people who want to start off as food bloggers as it will guide them step by step through all of the technical, marketing and social aspects of starting and running a food blog. It will also be incredibly useful for existing food bloggers, because nobody knows everything; so this book will be a useful resource.

It isn’t ready just yet, but you can view the ebook overview page for an insight of what will be included. Plus you can sign up to our mailing list to get notified when it comes out. As a bonus, if you sign up to our newsletter, you will get a free chapter before the book is released!

Happy cooking!

GetMeCooking team – Kevin and Paul

by Paul on Saturday, June 9, 2012

Recipe plugin for WordPress – free and premium versions

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 14:41:05 Z

With the overwhelming success of our free recipe plugin for WordPress, we quietly released a premium version of the plugin, which has extra features.

The premium version has been out for a few months now, but we don’t like to shout about things until we know that they have been available for a while and fully tested by several people, in several different environments.

The premium version of our recipe plugin is really an extension of the free plugin – in fact, you have to have the free plugin installed in order to use it.

Today we have added a comparison graph, to clearly show the additional features that the premium plugin gives, as well as pricing.

The free version of the plugin has more than enough features for most food bloggers, but for those who make an income from food blogging, want extra control, or want some additional functionality (such as the ability to create a recipe index page in WordPress), then the premium plugin is ideal.

Plus the premium plugin is a one-off price, with a 60 day money back guarantee, so there is no reason why you shouldn’t try it.

Happy cooking!

GetMeCooking team – Kevin and Paul

by Paul on Sunday, June 3, 2012

GetMeCooking Recipe plugin for WordPress version 1.22 – image upload improvements…

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 09:25:54 Z

Improved ‘Add photograph’ functionality

You can now add photographs from your WordPress Media Library (this was a much requested feature), as well as from your PC and from a direct URL.

Photograph of the Finished Recipe

Added an option to delete it.

Option to hide the recipe title if it matches the blog post title

This used to always be on, but we have now made it off by default and optional.

You can change your preference for this from the ‘Layout options’ menu within the GetMeCooking settings page.

User-defined word for ‘Step’

You can now replace the word ‘Step’ in the recipes with another word.

Bug fixes:

Occasions weren’t being shown in blog posts, they are now

Finally

Thank you for the nearly 7,000 downloads of our free plugin (please rate us)

If you like our free plugin, you’ll love our premium recipe plugin for WordPress – give it a try, with a 60 day, no-quibble money back guarantee!

Thanks - and happy cooking!

GetMeCooking team - Kevin and Paul

by Paul on Friday, June 1, 2012

GetMeCooking Recipe plugin for WordPress version 1.19 – step this way…

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 20:06:46 Z

This version of the plugin introduces a few main things:

Narrow theme support

Some WordPress themes have 3 columns, which doesn’t leave a lot of space for displaying recipes. So we’ve added an option so you can specify if your theme uses a narrow design. When selected, this changes the layout and puts the recipe summary information below the main photo rather than squeezing it to the right.

In addition, if you don’t specify a photograph of the finished recipe, the blog post will automatically display the narrow theme design. This is so the ‘at a glance’ text will no longer be bunched up on the right.

Recipe steps – simplified

Recipe steps can now be ordered by drag and drop (apart from within IE9).

Photographs can now be deleted from recipe steps.

Print icon

It didn’t line up on all themes, but it should do now.

Shortcodes – renamed

Recipe shortcodes have been renamed from the format [recipe 1] to [gmc_recipe 1] to prevent possible conflicts with other plugins/themes.

Example recipe

We’ve added a sample recipe, to help newbies see how to use the plugin. This can be deleted if you don’t want it.

Help tab

A Help and FAQ tab has been added to the add/edit recipe page. Note that we are also in the process of re-styling the help and FAQ pages on www.getmecooking.com to make it faster and easier to find information.

Squashed a bug

Fixed a bug when using a custom course type where the slug was different from the name.

Anything else?

Probably. We are always tinkering with the plugin, but we don’t down all the changes we’ve made. Above is just a list of the important ones.

You cook, we’ll code…

Have fun!

GetMeCooking team.

by Paul on Monday, April 23, 2012

GetMeCooking Recipe Template plugin for WordPress version 1.14 - more enjoyable to use

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 22:50:33 Z

Just 3 weeks after the last release of our Recipe Template plugin for WordPress and we're giving you more features and a nicer interface to play with!

Step grouping

You liked the ability to group ingredients so much that you asked for the same for recipe steps.

Now you can group recipe steps, so you can have the steps for the cake base, topping and filling clearly listed, which makes cooking easier and more manageable.

Recipe ingredients section

This has been vastly improved, so now it is clear, quick and easy to add and manage ingredients for recipes.

Automatic hiding of recipe information

You asked for information such as region, prep time, cook time, etc. to be hidden if you didn't fill them in. So we have done this.

This allows for cleaner looking recipes, which are easier for your visitors to read.

Insert recipe into post

Now lists recipes alphabetically - making it easier to find recipes you've added, to insert into your blog posts.

Other minor improvements/changes

Fixed an ingredient/step duplication issue (caused by pressing save while the page updated)
Help icons (the question marks) have been replaced
Tooltip help above the question marks has been improved
Fixed issue with deleting an ingredient note

Over 3,200 downloads of our plugin so far - thank you very much! :-)

by Paul on Sunday, February 19, 2012