why are car break lights binary? why aren’t they set up to become brighter as more pressure is applied?

I was reading yesterday about faceted classification, here and here. I like the wine.com vs. Best Cellars examples. I was trying to think of other industries that could use this kind of revamp to get more customers. Of course, any industry selling varieties of things could do with an organizational rethink. Super markets (Bread & Circus has about 20 varieties of apples right now, as well as hundreds of cheeses), cigar shops, and book stores come to mind (amazon.com has addressed this in one way with the rating system / reader comments.. but how about books classified by how “fast” of a read they are? etc.). The nice thing about selling stuff online is that you can slice the data any way you like. The Best Cellars web site could offer searches on vintage and winery if you really knew what you were doing, and seaches by flavor (mild, fruity, medium-bold, etc) if you didn’t.

Also thinking about recipes today, and how I never have my cookbook when I need it: on my way home, when I’m walking past the store. So I went online and looked around at cooking sites.

My ideal cooking site would have:

• a fast and easy way to find and build your own online collection of good, high quality recipes, complete with background info, etc!
  
• a place to learn and discuss techniques with others.
  
• an encyclopedia of equipment and ingredients. Something that can tell me what mirin is, with a brief history, nutritional info, how to store it, how long it lasts, and people’s comments on their favorite mirin.
  
• perhaps an area for beginners, about how to stock your kitchen in the first place, the virtues of (and sources for) good ingredients, etc.
  
• a periodic “newsletter” bit about food (not recipes).
  

Here’s my take on a sampling of them:

foodtv.com is more about the channel and its celebrity chefs than it is about cooking, and while they have some nice recipes, the organization and UI is not great, and the site is slow with too much gratuitous graphical content.

Epicurious has a nice collection of recipes that they’ve culled from (conde nast?) magazines and cookbooks. I love this approach because the quality is bound to be higher on average. The recipes I looked at were thorough and well explained. The downside is, they haven’t incorporated community/ratings systems very well. Each recipe has a score (from one to five forks) and comments from other visitors, but you can’t sort or search recipes based on the score, so unless I look at all of the roasted lamb recipes, I won’t see which one is favorite.
They also have a food dictionary and etiquitte guide, but it’s definitely not the best content— no community features, no illustrations of anything, no passion! Kind of boring overall.

Cooks Illustrated’s site looks really bad, I’ve always been turned off by it, so I won’t subscribe to find out if the membership reveals something great. I’m surprised by their failed approach to the web, because their magazine and books are so good.

allrecipes is chock full of ads. Pop up, pop under, flashing all over the damn place. They have some useful features: ratings for recipes, conversions to metric, printing for recipe cards. In fact, my biggest complaint is that there’s too many features and too much crap getting in your way. Just give me what I want: a set of known good recipes. What alllrecipes.com wants to do is set up an infrastructure and let all the visitors do the work, and while that might be a good approach, their design has caused unmitigated content to take over. At least it’s rated.

Top Secret Recipes is kind of ghetto but I love it. It’s a very simple site, but the focus is finally on the food! A simple interface. Thanks to these guys for not spending tons of money on web development; no need for it. And finally I know how to make those Waffle House Waffles!

RecipeSource is one of the oldest and largest recipe archives (formerly known as SOAR). Recipes on this volunteer site are nicely categorized, and it definitely qualifies as vast. How does the novice chef know which among 15 variations of Chicken Paprikash is best?

RecipeLand looks like a slightly less cool version of RecipeSource that wanted to be more cool (a pay service), but can’t pull it off. I admit I didn’t get very far into this site.

Of course I cannot leave out Outlaw Cook. John Thorne is one of the best food writers out there, who cares if he’s not also the best web designer. Check out his article In Defence of the Savory Breakfast. When I’m retired, I’m going to stop eating Eggos. Thorne’s site may not be a recipe archive in the traditional sense, but with someone so passionate about food, who cares?

Maybe the Internet just isn’t the place for recipes right now. I bought my first real paper cookbook recently, called A New Way to Cook by Sally Schneider, and I’m very happy with the recipes in it. They are all clearly well thought out and well explained, with interesting variations that get you thinking more like a real chef (and less like a line cook, just following orders), and she has some great chapters on techniques and ingredients. I just wish I could access the book from work.