April 1st 2008
Smart Money magazine has an article called 10 Things Celebrity Chefs Won’t Tell You and mentions Recipezaar:
Indeed, free recipe-sharing sites like Recipezaar.com, which offers 271,000 recipes … also threaten to make your favorite chef’s cookbook virtually obsolete.
I wonder if they realize that Scripps, aka The Food Network with all their celebrity chefs, owns Recipezaar. 
And their count is off, Recipezaar now has 286,000 recipes.
April 25th 2006
An order of 10 servers arrived yesterday. This is the largest order of machines we’ve ordered yet. As Gay says, we bought the equivalent of a car from Dell. Now I know how Dell makes so much money while GM and Ford are on the verge of bankruptcy!
When you order one server, Dell ships it UPS. When you order 10, they ship them freight. These went through four carriers to get here: Conway Express to Watkins Motor Lines to Oak Harbor Freight to Vashon Trucking.
These are our first batch of Dell servers. I’ve never been a fan of Dell; I think their desktops are really cheap and their customer service is terrible. But the first server we ever bought back in 1999 when we started was a Dell, and it was suprisingly well-made.
After various problems with servers from our current vendor and the lack of good IPMI support in the machines, I decided to look into other vendors. To make a long story short, Dell’s prices were comparable and have great IPMI support built-in. Even better, Dell assigned us a sales rep who gave us significant discounts on hardware. With that, we could buy 5 Dells for the price of 4 from our current vendor.
Their tech support is still lousy — I had to buy a machine to answer the questions myself that tech support couldn’t answer beforehand. But Dell has so many customers that the community of Dell owners, via mailing lists, forums, etc., who are knowledgeable provide better support than their own tech support. And overall, I’m impressed with the quality of the hardware and Dell’s documentation — I’ve actually had questions answered by reading their documentation! I don’t think that’s happened with hardware or software for me since 1988.
These 10 servers will bring the total number of servers we manage to 38. Yahoo or Google probably throw away 38 machines a day, but I’m amazed at the amount of hardware we manage. And by this time next year, we’ll probably have 60+ servers. I remember thinking years ago that at most Recipezaar would require 5 servers (but then again, I’m also the guy who originally said we could do everything with Microsoft software).
January 13th 2006
Recipezaar is looking for a self-starting, well-organized software developer with 3+ years of experience in software development, specifically AJAX technologies (DHTML, XML, Javascript) in a LAMP environment.
If you:…then this job might be for you.
The Details:
We’d like someone with a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, 2+ years experience with PHP and SQL (preferably MySQL), Ajax technologies (DHTML, XML/XSL, Javascript) and an interest in hardware and networking. You don’t have to be an expert on Apache, but should be willing to become knowledgeable about it. If you don’t know what Apache is, forget it. If you know C, you probably understand what happens behind the higher-level scripting languages of the web. That’s important. If you know C++, you understand OO principles. If you love C++, you’ll fit in.
Recipezaar is a small, dynamic company and requires people who can work independently and manage themselves and their workload efficiently. Small companies require you to wear many hats and be able to adapt quickly to changes and be able to solve problems quickly, and Recipezaar is no different. Being a great chef is not a requirement, but having an interest in helping others to be is. An interest in food and food preparation will make the job more fun.
We are a small distributed company (and we plan to stay that way) focused on building the most powerful web application for cooking and eating and sharing. Recipezaar is profitable and growing at a rapid rate. We’re not yet #1 in our market, so if you’re the type who likes to work hard to become #1, Recipezaar wants to talk to you.
To apply, send link to your online resume or text version in email (NO ATTACHMENTS, except PDF) to jobs@recipezaar.com.
October 22nd 2005
How many people do you know that have been interviewed on Voice of America? Well, you know at least one now. Gay was interviewed this week for VOA’s Our World show which features a web site every week. You can listen to Gay’s pretty voice by downloading the MP3; the segment starts 18 minutes 21 seconds from the beginning. It’s a good concise piece and the show host clearly understands the concept of Recipezaar. If you have Quicktime, you can stream just the segment.
Oh, I keep forgetting about this, but the “other free weekly” in Seattle did an article last week on Recipezaar. What was supposed to be an article on food web sites in Seattle turned into an incoherent article comparing Recipezaar and AllRecipes and something to do with Generation Y. You can pick up a copy of the Seattle Weekly next to the stands for The Stranger.
It’s amazing how many phone calls we get from the media given that we’ve never spent even 1¢ on PR or marketing. Free advertising is always good.
September 8th 2005
Google has a blog for AdSense, and I just checked it today for only the second time ever and lo and behold, they’re talking about image ads and show a screenshot of Recipezaar. I guess they figure it’s a good demo of using Google image ads.
August 30th 2005
Funny how things work…. on Sunday, Gay and I were talking about how long it’s been since we had any technical issues with the site. I even knocked on the table and said “Watch, something will happen tomorrow”. Today, two days later, our bandwidth provider had a problem with a downstream bandwidth provider’s router owned by WilTel so the site was inaccessible from about 11:10am to 11:53am. Our bandwidth provider got it resolved quickly, but I wonder if we hadn’t known about it how long it would have taken.
These are the worst problems to have because you can’t be notified about them. We can monitor our own hardware (and we do) so we can know when something goes awry. And we can monitor the first-level router from our hardware. But the problem router was in San Francisco, far away from us. So the only way to know when a problem like this occurs is to test the entire line from the outside in periodically, which we also do. But who do you call? Which bandwidth provider is the problem? It takes time just to know where the problem is before you can act on it and get it fixed.
Anyway, Yipes was very helpful.
April 26th 2005
A business acquaintance suggested that we look at Adzaar for advertising on our web site. Adzaar! That’s the first time we’ve ever seen someone use the same naming scheme that we did with Recipezaar. Recipezaar: where the recipes are. Adzaar: where the ads are?
And it turns out that the domain name was registered by MRL Ventures, which is David Galbraith’s venture company and the founder or Moreover.com.
Meaningless to you, but pretty interesting to me. And they have a great idea…. ads on a web site that come from an ad network have a huge problem: the ads don’t come from the site itself. So ad-blocking software in web browsers can easily block the ads completely simply by noticing the domain name is different from the originating site. But Adzaar does it by giving publishers the code to put on their site so ads come from the publisher itself. Web browsers can’t block such ads because a browser can’t know whether content is an ad or is content.
I’m not a big fan of advertising, but it’s a fact of the internet that lots of great sites can’t survive without them. But it’s a great idea for a business.
April 1st 2005
Continuing my training for the marathon, I ran 20 miles today. For the first time after a long run, I actually felt like it was possible to go farther at the end. I am uncertain how much father, because the last 2 miles were not so fun — especially after a huge blister on the bottom of my right big toe popped with a mile left. Very startling. I had been more uptight than usual before starting — I didn’t eat very well last night, I was trying out new shorts, my socks didn’t match. These things are very worrisome when you are about to run for 3 hours or so, and my superstition about the socks was proven with the blister. I think the biggest factor, in what I thought was a great performance, was having something to eat along the way. My running partner, Laura, has reintroduced me to the wonders of gummybears (what is the flavor of the clear one anyways?), and I tried one of those goo packets at mile 10. The sensation of eating something without chewing is completely alien, and not recommended. My mouth really wanted to reject it, but in the end I think the extra energy was really crucial. I’m feeling pretty tapped out now, and it just started hailing, so I’m pretty glad to be done.
We also played a very sucessful April Fool’s Day joke on the site today too.
March 22nd 2005
Answers.com now shows Recipezaar info on their site, using our web services API. For example, search for something food-related like “appetizers” or “desserts” and you’ll see Recipezaar recipes, including the descriptions.
March 18th 2005
A Norwegian fish newspaper, Fiskaren, published an article on Recipezaar, apparently because of our cod recipes (not because I’m half-Norwegian). It’s in Norwegian, of course, so we don’t know what it says. Can anyone read Norwegian and translate the gist of it? Let us know and we’ll send you the article (it’s a PDF).
