I have a lot of family recipes collected over the years on paper. More recently, I scanned or took pictures of many of them, so it is less likely that I will lose them. Finding a recipe I need is often not that easy, so I started to gradually convert them into more formal recipes in pdf format and place them on my OneDrive. That gave me the capability to share them with family and friends – if someone asked me for my recipe I would share it with them, by just sending them a link.
My son suggested that if I had a web site all sharing would be much easier and everybody could access it. Soon thereafter he set a domain and website for me and I started publishing my recipes here. I quickly found that converting a pdf or Word document with a recipe to a web post that would look the way I like is way more work.than I expected. So far I did that with two of my recipes, but I decided that it took too much time. However, I found that I can embed a pdf file with a recipe that I had already created in a fraction of the time. Additional benefit of this approach is that the user of my web site can easily download the pdf file and have it on their device, or even print it. Update: I will keep the pdf download option available, but gradually will remove the embedded pdf viewers as this approach is not as practical as I hoped for. Please give me feedback on this, to help me decide if having the pdf availability is useful.
I will continue this approach with the recipes I already have, but I plan to gradually convert all recipes to web-post format. This will give me the opportunity to post some dynamic content – one thing I would like to have are tables of ingredients scale-able to the amount of the dish the user would like to make, like 60 or 90 donuts. or one or two loafs of bread. Some of that I may already have as multiple columns in a table, but let me tell you: we have family stories about preparing a smallest amount of a dish, only making a mistake part way through by reading the amount from the wrong column, and ultimately making two or four times more than originally planned.
NOTE: If you are reading my recipes on a smart phone, the built-in pdf viewer may not display the pdf content, but you will have the opportunity to download the pdf file, then open it on your device. This may also be true on a tablet. If the font is to small to read, you should try to rotate your phone/tablet to landscape orientation and/or zoom in. This applies also if the ingredient tables are squeezed too much.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much is a video worth? Including a video in a post is much easier than attaching it to a pdf file, although the latter can be done. Ultimately I will probably use YouTube as the location for my videos and just link to them, but for now I am struggling with maintaining sufficient resolution. Therefore, currently the videos are playing from my media library on this site, usually in a new browser tab. I found this to be faster and better quality than embedding the video within the post. Please be patient when loading videos – that may take some time.
To contact me with your comments or questions send me an e-mail to [email protected]