Thanks Google!
Ever since I started Mealfire I’ve dreamed of the day that every recipe site on the internet would publish recipes with some kind of standard markup to annotate where all the different parts (ingredients, directions, etc.) were. This way, Mealfire would automatically support any recipe you could find. That wasn’t the case back when I started, however, so I had to write a custom parser for every site that I wanted to support. That’s a lot of work, not only in the initial code, but also in future support; every time a site operator changes their layout, Mealfire imports break.
Recently, however, Google decided that it wanted to let people search recipes, and to do it they would require this kind of annotation on any recipe that a site wanted to show up in Google’s listing. Shortly after just about every recipe site on the internet scrambled to add the requisite support and get into Google’s search results. Google spoke, recipe sites listened, and Mealfire gets to ride the wave! As of right now any site following Google’s guidelines can be imported into Mealfire; and that’s just about all of them. There may be some import errors (for example, if the site doesn’t annotate the cooking directions they won’t come in and you have to copy-paste), but for the most part it should Just Work.
Phil Kulak
Mealfire
phil@mealfire.com
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