m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

Last post I mentioned that I’ve been using Penflip for a cookbook. I’ve run into some issues, mainly involving images, but I still find it more convenient for my growing collection of recipes than dealing with SpringPad’s interface. I am especially reassured to have my cookbook checked out of git onto my own computer, where I feel it’s safe from random UI changes like the one that drove me off SpringPad.

This is not an endorsement of Penflip, however. I never got any response from their support email address; the project seems to have stalled after the initial flurry of PR. I don’t think there’s a good open-data solution for making your own online cookbook out there, though there are some nice closed-data apps like Basil and Paprika for iOS, TasteBook for the web, and Blurb for printing an actual book. Lifehackers also recommend One tsp.

If Penflip penflops, it will be relatively easy for me to soldier on—Penflip uses pandoc, and I would, too. I could even build a recipe-only version with better image integration if I had the time. But for the moment I’ve merely worked around Penflip’s issues by retrieving my photos from SpringPad, shrinking them down a bit with ImageMagick, and hosting them here on my own site. If all goes well, I’ll be able to download the PDF from Penflip soon. But I’m not holding my breath by any means…