MeltingWaldo » MeltingFood Releases

MeltingFood – Beech Release

waldo — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 15:24:36 +0000

Keeping to the schedule, it’s been spot on two weeks since the last MeltingFood Beech release. How can we manage it you wonder? Triangles – sine, cosine all that mathematics stuff – easy really, obvious even. Or you can judge it by the length of the list below (we provided less features – but you get them now).

Highlights

Recipe counts – see how many recipes each of your friends have; or for the competitive amongst us, see who has the most.
Popularity of each recipe – see how many times have people “grabbed” their own copy of your recipes.
Sort recipes – just added something and it’s disappeared to the bottom of the list? No more! Sort by latest and it’ll pop back to the top.

A handful of other little fixes, including: sitemaps, so your recipes will be found by search engines; see the latest recipes from everyone; and, pretty (long) recipe urls on the noise page.

Progress

In the last month we had 9 current users (accessed in the last month). And 51 total users referred. This highlights a continued need for improvement – since this essentially hasn’t moved from our figures in May (8 and 45 respectively).

Add a comment here or contact us on meltingfood to join or provide any feedback.

MeltingFood – Ash Release

waldo — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 17:37:27 +0000

Whoosh. That was the sound of the deadlines for the minor 1-2 week MeltingFood releases going by*. However, enough moping as the Ash release of MeltingFood has arrived and it’s for everyone – that’s right, sign-up for all.

Highlights

Tell everyone what you’re cooking / eating with Facebook and Twitter updates.
Now follow anyone who has good taste (no need for both people to agree to a two-way friendship – ala Twitter).
Descriptive (long) URLs so Rox’s Banana Butterscotch Pudding goes from http://meltingfood.com/recipes/397 to http://meltingfood.com/recipes/397-banana-butterscotch-pudding
You can now sign yourself up – no need for someone to invite you.

There are also a couple of other tweaks like: not breaking your saved passwords; better input field alignment; no search engine scamming from dodgy links.

Progress

In May we had 16 unique visitors, June 110 – ah, the fun of Google Analytics. You can spend time slicing and dicing segments and achieving nought.

Add a comment here or contact us on meltingfood to join or provide any feedback.

* – Douglas Adams died so young :(

MeltingFood – Arborvitae Release

waldo — Sun, 24 May 2009 15:53:22 +0000

We’re up to the fourth minor release of MeltingFood (and the second in a week if you’re keeping count). It’s all part of the more rapid 1-2 week release schedule – or 4 days in this case.

We apologise that the last release was substantially broken in Internet Explorer (now fixed).

Highlights

Recipes can now be seen by everyone (no sign-up required).
The recipe layout has been re-jigged to fit things in a little more snugly (hopefully less scrolling needed when your hands are covered in dinner).
For Internet Explorer, the broken javascript is fixed and buttons should look a little prettier too.
Opt out of email has been added – so we don’t disturb anyone.
The recipe list and noise pages are slightly faster (cleaned-up some inefficient code).

There are also a couple of other tweaks, like using your whole name on your recipes – just to make sure people know who to thank.

Progress

We’ve got about 10 current users (accessed in the last month)! Yes that includes us, so back to 8 really ;)

Add a comment here or contact us on meltingfood to join or provide any feedback.

MeltingFood – Apricot Release

waldo — Wed, 20 May 2009 17:05:59 +0000

Just finished off the third minor release of MeltingFood, the recipe / food sharing website for the new millennium (the new millennium line is still good ’til the half way point – 491 years to go, then we switch from ‘new’ to ‘next’).

Highlights

When searching for your friends, auto-complete drops down to help you.
See friends of your friends (if your friends have any friends you can now see a list of those friends – clear?).
More ajax-y responses (for the non-geek, when you delete your recipes, add friends or reject friends, you won’t have to wait for the page to reload).
Slightly smaller pages (for the geeks, javascript framework change from Prototype to jQuery – more conducive to removing in-line js and forms).
Google Analytics – so we get some idea of how people are coming to / using the site.
Rough business plan.

There’s also a bunch of other minor bug fixes and improvements.

Progress

We’ve got about 8 current users (accessed in the last month)! And about 45 total users referred. This is without even resorting to nagging everyone we know (we’re keeping half in reserve ;p). Based on the business plan, this means we’re at 0.008% of the target (100k unique people per month :)).

But keep your eyes open in the next month… we’re eating our words and going public!