Conor’s Bandon Blog

The totally revamped StructuredBlogging.org site has gone live. Richard MacManus and the gang have done a tremendous job and I think it is now communicating the whole idea in a far more effective way than it did in the past. They explain it far better than I can here so go and have a read.

If you read this blog regularly, you will have noticed some posts which appear to have more structure than others (mainly my reviews and event notifications). It takes no extra effort for me to do the posts in that form and in fact, in some ways, makes it a lot easier. So even if there was no other upside than making reviews easier to write, I would be happy to make use of the Structured Blogging software.

But the long term aim of the effort is to enable new web-sites and services which can make use of that extra structure and create systems we haven’t even dreamt about yet. This is one of those efforts which is very dependent on average bloggers like me generating the content in the first place so I am happy to do my little bit and get my own benefits too.

Richard very kindly mentioned me in his announcement of the re-vamp, but to be honest I did very little and should have helped more. Also, I have been very remiss in not following up on the structured recipe ideas which was tossed around recently. Unfortunately a new work location with a shockin’ commute is chewing up a lot of my time (and the garden is in a brutal state!). I really do want to get started on this again as there is already discussion on the microformats site about a recipe microformat to which I should contribute.

If you have a Moveable Type or WordPress Blog (not wordpress.com), I really really encourage you to install the Structured Blogging plug-in and play with it. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by its utility. And once some of those new services start being rolled out, you’ll find yourself wayyyy ahead of the game!

If you are interested in some of the ideas on where Marc Canter thinks this is all going, have a read of the roadmap.

The Pubsub guys who do a lot of the work on structured blogging have their own announcement here.

Also, if you wonder about the importance of microformats which underpin structured blogging, well a certain Bill G is a fan.

Finally, Bob Wyman of Pubsub has a superb post on the open web vs the closed web and how structured blogging is part of the open revolution. In fact there are many compelling arguments being made on the structured blogging mailing list which I wish were being re-published by their authors on their blogs.

[tags]StructuredBlogging.org, Structured Blogging, Microformats[/tags]

Between this blog and my posting on eGullet regarding the sort of structure people would like to see on recipes in blogs, I received the sum total of zero/null/nada/nialas replies. The world was about as vocal as that time I asked “so do I look good in these speedos?”

In retrospect I should have suggested an initial idea and then asked you all to improve on it. So read on and start entering comments. Critical is good, bitchy is good, offensive is good. Silence is badddddd.

Here are my initial thoughts for “fields” that might be useful in a structured recipe on a blog. My starting point is the RecipeML spec plus fields from Gourmet Recipe Manager and anything else that popped into my head.

From The RecipeML Spec (renamed for clarity):
Title
Measurement System (U.S., Imperial etc)
Creator (Person)
Source (Book Title etc)
Date (Of Creation or Publication)
Rights (Copyright or other)
Summary Description (one liner)
Preparation Time (overall time)
Yield Quantity and Unit (4 pancakes or 5 servings)
Meal Category (Starter etc)
Main Ingredients Category (Pasta etc)
Cuisine Category (Italian etc)
Ingredients (each one a separate “item” rather than block text with count/amount/range/unit broken out too)
Description/Instructions (as free form block text)

Other possibilities:

Picture(s) (either on the blog/site or externally hosted)
Rating (how much you like it yourself!)
Difficulty Level/Experience Required
Notes (e.g. warnings)
Dietary Information (e.g. gluten-free)

Ones from the RecipeML spec which may be overkill:

Equipment
Variations
Recipe broken into parts (pastry vs filling etc)
Subtitle
Version
Breakdown of Preptime into phases
Nutritional Information
[tags]Recipes, RecipeML, Structured Recipes, StructuredBlogging.org[/tags]

If you’ve seen the various posts I’ve done over the past few weeks on structured blogging and it has all been a bit beyond you, please keep reading, this won’t be.

A discussion had started on the structured blogging mailing list about creating a format for structured recipes. The idea here is that all those people who publish recipes on their blogs would hopefully move to using a common format which provides structure where appropriate but still allows for each person to do things their own way. This provides benefits to both recipe writers and those of us who read and use them.

There are two reasons for this. One is that you end up with a nice simple form to fill out when typing up your recipe which will help ensure that you don’t leave out anything critical. But more importantly it will enable a new breed of search tool or recipe web-site which can trawl all of the blogs out there and provide recipes to end-users which are a much closer match to what they want than typing “chicken recipes” on Google.

With any approach which applies structure where there was none previously, the critical success factor is finding the right balance between structured information and free-form information. Add too much structure and it inhibits you, add too little and it provides no gain.

So I am throwing this question out to everyone. It doesn’t matter if you have written your own cookbook or have only ever read how to cook spaghetti from the back of the packet. What information do you think would be useful to have structured in a recipe on a blog or web-site?

To aid the thinking process, I have done some screenshots from a very nice Recipe Management Tool called Gourmet Recipe Manager. Even if you have no interest in this post, I recommend you check the tool out. The screenshots are of the windows it displays to enable you to enter a new recipe. So have a good look at those and let me know which fields you think are important to be kept “separate” from the main recipe description.

One way of thinking about it would be to imagine what you would search for if you were on a recipe search site. Is it “main ingredient” or “overall time” or “ethnicity” or “main vs sweet” or “ballpark cost” or “skill required”. There are a ton of possibilities but the idea is to find the really critical ones and work from there.

So all you lurkers who read this blog (including the 300 who suddenly appeared from the BBC2 web-site last Thursday – and I’m still trying to figure out why), de-lurk and post your opinions. This is one of those cases where no-one is wrong and all opinions are equally valuable.

There are some techie aspects to this which I will only mention in passing. Skip this paragraph if you are not technically inclined: An XML format was developed in 2002 called RecipeML to allow different software packages to swap recipes. Unfortunately, it looks like it never took off but that should not detract from the technical quality of the idea. It may form a strong basis for the under-the-hood aspects of this discussion. Having said that, Troy Hakala (one of the original authors of the format) pooh-poohed the idea of trying to do anything with recipes scattered across millions of blogs back in 2003! He does this as a comment to a post on the OxDECAFBAD Blog. it is worth reading that original post and his reply to see how much things have changed in the blog world since November 2003. Back then, Troy effectively came up with the same idea as Edgeio (but thought it made no sense).

Anyway, techies and non-techies, foodies and non-foodies, have a look at these, have a think and post a comment.

[tags]Structured Blogging, StructuredBlogging.org, RecipeML, Recipes, Microformats, Gourmet Recipe Manager[/tags]