Frequently Asked Questions

31 December 2010

Q: What happens if Mealfire crashes? Will I lose all my recipes? Can I back them up on my computer?

First off, if the server hosting Mealfire were to spontaneously combust, you would probably lose any recipes that you created in the last 12 hours or so, but that would be it. Backups are made of the entire site daily and stored on Amazon’s S3 servers. It is also very unlikely that I would ever shut down Mealfire.com. The site is actually pretty efficient, so it doesn’t cost much at all to host.

If you’d like to back up your recipes, there isn’t currently a great way to do it, but it can be done. Mealfire has an API that can be used to download all your recipes. It’s all undocumented, but the link below will do the trick:

All my recipes in JSON

If you have hundreds of recipes, it could take a while (or just bring down the whole server, I’m not really sure), but if you save the resulting file, you’ll have all your recipes in a very computer-readable format.

Q: It would be really nice if the iPhone app had [some feature].

I don’t have plans to add any new features to the iPhone app in the near future. I had fun building it, but I don’t have the time to continue working on it. Instead, I’ve transitioned my mobile development efforts to http://m.mealfire.com (Github). There you can find an app that has more features than the iPhone app, yet also works on Android devices (and probably Blackberries and Palm devices too, though I haven’t tested those). Mealfire just isn’t intensive enough to require a native app for every single platform.

Q: I imported my Mealfire calendar into another service but new recipes aren’t showing up.

This is most likely due to the time it takes the other service to update their cached, external calendars. Most services can take up to a day to bring in new events.

Q: Can I add small side dishes to my meal plans?

You sure can!

Q: Why can’t I upload an image to my recipe?

There are two reasons for this. First off all, you’re using Internet Explorer, and secondly, I’m too lazy to figure out why image uploads are broken in Internet Explorer. I swear I’ll get to it soon, but the only Windows machine I have in the house is hooked up to my TV, and remoting is a pain, and adding features is much more fun than fixing bugs, etc. Until then, just use any other browser on the planet: Chrome, Safari, and Firefox all work great.