Recipe API ("export")

+1 for an export feature as discussed here.

If I'm going to look at CS as a place to share recipes with the world, it's important that the effort I put into structured data entry is not lost to me. Here's what I'd like to see... in a way that models the successful approaches of Stack Exchange and Github.

1. Recipe API (including export feature) that exposes recipes in a structured, machine-readable format. CS should expose a JSON representation of a recipe that closely reflects CS's internal models: master ingredient list, steps, asides, media (img/video) links. In short, everything that you'd need to render the recipe. This is the same format you'd use for building your own clients. For reference, here's an example JSON representation of a "Seasoned Advice" (Stack Exchange) Q&A about gas vs. electric ranges.

2. Update your URL scheme to include an explicit "username" path segment, so that when I create a recipe (or fork someone else's) it lives at "/jmandel/recipe-name". This would make URLs more consistent, readable, and trustworthy. Basically, do what Github does here.

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michaelnatkin

Hey @jmandel. Good suggestions; Re (1) the recipes are already delivered to our frontend app as JSON, so this is very do-able. I guess there is a bit of a question of what we'd do for authentication, or whether we'd allow anyone access to any recipe via the API. Also there would have to be versioning, as we expect this representation to change and get richer over time.

Re (2) that's an interesting idea; we could at least allow that as an alternate path to the recipes.

jmandel_274

Thanks for the instantaneous response on a Saturday night @MichaelNatkin :-)

Regarding auth... I'd leave the "view" portions of the API open -- this is the same content you're serving through your main site, and it's all published under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Exposing structured data would, in my view, align well with your licensing decision by making it easier for the community to reuse and remix content. (Ideally you'd expose more functionality, some user-specific, through an expanded API, and at that point auth becomes critical. No shortage of successful patterns to follow there, though... again you could model on the Stack Exchange approach.)

Regarding usernames in paths... yeah, I'm kind of surprised that the CS staff hasn't run into this before, given that you're "competing" with your users for URLs. (That is to say, for example: when @antoine submits a Croissant recipe, it prevents the CS staff from creating its own "Croissant" recipe.) And the only way for viewer to tell that a recipe is an "official" CS recipe is... the absence of a "by @whoever" notice at the top of the page.

michaelnatkin

You are welcome to play with the json now if you like:

curl -X GET -H "Content-type: application/" -H "Accept: application/json" http://www.chefsteps.com/activities/pickled-onions/as_json

no guarantees that it won't change of course, but the basic structure has been relatively stable for awhile. I agree auth is only an issue if we find people not following the BY-NC-SA license terms.

The URL contention thing isn't a major issue for us because I don't believe most end users care that much about the URL, more the title. So if ChefSteps wants to create a croissants recipe, the slug will just end up being croissants-2 but the title will still be Croissants. The main way of telling user content from CS content, besides the "by @whoever" is which gallery it shows up in (ChefSteps recipes vs. Community Recipes), but certainly we might want to indicate "by Team ChefSteps" in the same place as "by @whoever".

michaelnatkin

@jmandel forgot tag you above

jmandel_274

Oh, that's lovely -- certainly beats trying to scrape content from the rendered pages!

Johan_Edstrom_5586

If you want... I can create type safe objects from this reusable in Java/Scala.

I'm a bit of a hater of loosely typed contracts.

Also - if you want indexing, cassandra, elastic models I could probably whip that up too.

michaelnatkin

@Johan as an old time type-safe guy I've made peace with a world that consists of only two data structures. Just say om.

Johan_Edstrom_5586

@Michael - I so strongly disagree

I put it in the same basin as we can just microwave this.

I just converted 17 services today from a "we do node" - and not a single "thing" happened

And , nah.

bodell1989

I'm a little late to this conversation. I see how to access the JSON of a specific recipe, but is there a way to get a JSON list of all available recipes?