Doing Evil Things with Generative AI and Recipes

/ / No Comments
Let me preface this blog post with a very clear and direct message. Do not do what I did. This is a bad use of generative AI. This is pure silliness with no real practical value whatsoever. This is a really, really, bad idea. But it was fun as hell, so here goes. Last year I did two investigations into recipe parsing on the web. As we all know, most recipe sites go out of their way to make the actual recipe, you know, the thing you want to read, obfuscated and buried beneath a lot of stuff that is… well not the actual recipe. I first investigated JSON-LD and using that to parse web recipes into data: Scraping Recipes Using Node.js, Pipedream, and JSON-LD. This worked really well. I then... more →
Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: , , , ,

Scraping Recipes on the Web – Now with Display and Print

/ / No Comments
A few weeks back I wrote up the process of building an API that looks for JSON-LD on a web page containing recipe information, parses it, and returns it as pure data. You can (and should before continuing on) find that post here: Scraping Recipes Using Node.js, Pipedream, and JSON-LD. When I first shared this, someone (I forget your name, but thank you!) asked the natural follow-up question – can we then render this to HTML or PDF? The answer is, of course, I just had to stop being lazy and build a proper web app. I fired up Glitch and created the following little demo. It isn’t the prettiest demo, but it gets the job done – converting a recipe site that’s 90% adds/commentary... more →
Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: , , ,

Storing Recipes in IndexedDB

/ / No Comments
The last two sessions of my show, <Code><Br>, were taken up talking about one of my favorite web platform features, IndexedDB. This is a topic I’ve covered many years on the blog (I even wrote a book on it back in 2016) so I thought it would be a good topic for the show. (I will include links to those episodes at the end of this post.) In the first session, Sue, one of the folks watching the live stream, suggested I use recipes as an example of data to persist in the browser. I thought this was perfect as recipe data can get quite complex. You can see an example of that in the post I wrote earlier this month on scraping recipes. For the context of the live stream, I decided... more →
Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: , ,

Scraping Recipes Using Node.js, Pipedream, and JSON-LD

/ / No Comments
It’s pretty well known now that most, if not all, recipes on the internet are 90% crap and 10% actual recipe, at best. Obviously, there are outliers of course and obviously, if you are sharing your recipes online you are free to do so as you see fit, but speaking for myself, when I click a link to a recipe my assumption is that I’m going to have to "work" to figure out where the actual details are amongst the humorous backstories and other tidbits that don’t actually tell you how to make what you’re trying to make. That’s why I love apps like Saffron. Not only is it incredibly minimal and laser-focused on recipes, it has an incredibly good "recipe... more →
Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: , , , , ,

Use Your Saffron Recipes in the Jamstack

/ / No Comments
Like a lot of people, I took up baking during the pandemic. This was particularly difficult for me as I have a lot of anxiety when it comes to new things. I tend to stress over ensuring I get everything perfect and my worry about cooking is that if I do one thing wrong, I’ll ruin it. While I’m not over that particular anxiety, I have had the chance to try making many things and while I’m not that good at it, I enjoy it, and can make some delicious items at times. Raymond Camden… more →
Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: , ,