A very quick feature tweak. I’ve noticed that a few members had been adding recipes with no star ratings at all and deduced they were doing so in order to index them. So I’ve made this a new feature.
When you add a recipe you can click ‘Index Only’ and just put the name and page number (or URL if it’s from a website). This means you can find the recipe again when you need to, but there will be no review for it. This should be helpful if you want to make note of recipes you’ve not tried yet.
I’ve also made another usability tweak, increasing the number of results displayed in pages such as cookbook title pages and user bookshelf pages, so there’s less clicking of the ‘next’ page link required.
I am new to your site, and look forward to making use of it.
Despite my “newbie” status, may I add some requests to the feature wish list?
1. IMPROVING BROWSE TAB. I have several suggestions about your Browse tab.
a. It is difficult to find your lists of All Books and All Magazines. Instead, when you click “Browse”, the resulting page prominently lists what are probably the least-used features of this area of your website: Most-Owned Books, Most Popular Websites, and Top Members. This is nice information to have, but is probably something your readers will on a less frequent basis — at least in my humble opinion!
b. In contrast, the “All Books”, “All Magazines” and “All Websites” areas will probably be used far more often, yet their links are in tiny print on the bottom of the information in (a) above. These links should stay, but IN ADDITION, I would suggest that each one of these categories should be seen on the page that you initially see when you click “Browse”.
c. Why not add a drop-down list to the “Browse Tab”? It could list ALL the features in the “Browse” section of your website, and I might suggest the following order: All Books; All Magazines; All Websites; All Members; Most-Owned Books; Most Popular Websites; and Top Members.
d. Here’s an alternative to subsection (c) above: perhaps instead, the Browse tab drop-down list could just show All Books, All Magazines, All Websites, All Websites, and All Members. Then, when you click on All Books and enter that webpage, you will also see a link to Most-Owned Books, Likewise, the All Websites page could include a link to Most Popular Websites, and the All Members page could include a link to Top Members.
2. ADDING COOKBOOKS TO ONE’S BOOKSHELF. I have so many cookbooks that it is difficult to add them to my bookshelf on this site just from memory. In browsing through your list of all cookbooks on your website in order to jog my memory, I was hoping that there would be a way to click an “Add to your bookshelf” button right next to each individual cookbook listed. That way, I wouldn’t have to exit the page and go elsewhere to add a book to my bookshelf each time I wanted to do so.
2. ALPHABETIZING ONE’S BOOKSHELF. Is there anyway that the books on one’s bookshelf can be alphabetized? I own over 300 cookbooks, and my bookshelf on your site will rapidly grow quite cumbersome, and of diminishing usefulness, if this list is not alphabetized. Or, if you will permit me to REALLY “dream big”, it would be lovely to have several options for my bookshelf:
1. A default setting “as is” (books are just listed chronologically in the order that you enter them)
2. An option to alphabetize by book title
3. An option to alphabetize by author
I noticed that the website’s master book list is alphabetized by title, so I hope this suggestion is in the realm of possibility!
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Hope these suggestions are useful — and that they made sense! Thanks much for considering them.
Diane Harvey
Thanks for all the suggestions, Diane! I’ll definitely review them for the site. I’m aware that things are still imperfect in several areas – they’re on the list for fixing/improving as I work my way through them… And you have some interesting thoughts for the Browse page. I’ll definitely be looking closely at that one. Adding the ‘add to bookshelf’ link was fairly simple, and I can’t believe I hadn’t put it in before, so it’s there now.
As for the bookshelf, it is alphabetized by title actually. If you click where it says ‘sort by’ you can sort the list by date added, title, and star rating. But the default view should be sorted by title.
Sorting by author is a good idea, and I’m going to work on some ways to show more titles on the page, and organize them better fairly soon.
Right now I’m trying to redo the main page for each book so it is a bit more useful on first glance.
Thanks for wading through all my comments, Andrew! This website is a great idea, and I expect to make good use of it!
Diane
Hi, I have a request as well which is related to the index feature.
Can you make it possible to put the indexed recipes in the recipe folder? These are recipes I want to try and I would like to be able to gather them all in one place. I notice the icon is only visible after a recipe has already been reviewed. Thanks.
Hi Lee: This was a fairly simple tweak – it’s up and running now.
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for responding so quickly. I still can’t find it or figure it out. When I click on the recipes I’ve indexed, all I see is the name of the recipe and the page number and the button that says “review recipe”. I don’t see the recipe folder icon anywhere. I don’t know how to get my recipes into that tab.
Oops – it was working on the test site, but was missing a file on the live site. It should be fine now. You’ll also see an ‘edit title page/number’ link, for correcting typos etc. – that part is not quite working yet, but should be tomorrow.
Thanks Andrew, I see it and it’s working!
Is there a central place on the site where we can request more changes/features??? I have a few more ideas.
Hi Andrew,
I have 55 recipes in my recipe folder. When I try and click on the arrows at the bottom to take me to the second page it take me back to the home page instead. I tried both sets of arrows with the same result.
I do hope to add forums in the near future – just trying to set something up so that people can use their existing logins instead of having to set up a separate forum account. In the meantime, you can go to the beta page http://www.cookbooker.com/beta.php where there’s a place for comments and suggestions that everyone can see.
I’ll have a look at the other issue you’re having. I think I know what’s causing it, and it will probably be fairly simple to fix.
Okay thanks!
Andrew, I am still unable to access the second page of the recipes in my recipe folder. I have reviewed two of the recipes and want to remove them from the folder but cannot access one of them.
Sorry! Try it now, Lee. It turned out to require two changes instead of one, and I’d only made one of the changes.