Back in October last year, I wrote a post about creating shopping lists from BBC recipes. Well it’s seems that the BBC Recipe site has been refreshed. It’s awesome. There’s absolutely loads of recipes and the navigation is great, with some really useful urls. The markup of the pages is also vastly improved. They’ve even now got shopping lists! (no, my pleasure) which incidentally, has a broken image, I think you missed 1.4.4 from the url. Oh and more importantly, there is a Mobile version, which looks great.

But, I still think my little experiment has some mileage though. The BBC mobile version of a recipe still doesn’t fundamentally address what happens when I want to cook something. When I go to the supermarket, I want to look at my ingredients list and see:

1. The ingredients I want to buy. Nothing else. Not that I need to soften the butter, or finely chop the onions. Just the ingredients.
2. I’d like to know what I’ve bought and what I haven’t. In the same way you tick things off your list when you write it on a piece of paper.

So these 2 things haven’t been addressed yet, and I’m pretty sure they could be quite simply. So until such a time, you can still go to this url on your phone:

• http://sl.whomwah.com/

Which I have updated to support the new pages.

Oh, and they don’t appear to have a data views of the recipes. Someone correct me if I’m wrong? Again, this seems like it could have been done. Imagine if you had data versions of the recipes pages all interlinked. You could build your own recipe viewing applications, or write apps that would let you curate your own recipe book for friends and family or, oh never mind, just a thought.

This is another case of looking at a BBC site I use frequently, and extending it. Here’s my use case. I found a recipe I’d like to make from the BBC Recipes site, so I first need to buy the ingredients. The ingredients by default are part of the recipe page, and even if I print out the recipe, it’s still got stuff I don’t need. It would be nice if I could just turn that recipe information into this:

It’s a simple list of ingredients, that have a checkbox next to each item to mark when I have put it in my basket.

So I have built myself a simple Sinatra app that does just this:

• http://sl.whomwah.com
• Source Code

If you look at it on your iphone it will look styled, whereas on other devices it will just look simple and standard.

From the site you just need to post the url of a recipe you want the ingredients listed, for example the screenshot above is what happened when I posted this url into it:

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/database/spicychorizopennepas_84044.shtml

It’s very simple, give it a try, see what you think.

Ok, one thing I should note, is that I can’t be sure it will be 100% correct every time. This is a real pain, but out of may hands. The BBC recipe pages look very nice and all, but the most important part of the page “The Recipe” is not only terribly marked up, but it’s not consistent. I suspect this is due to being a free text field in a legacy CMS? but it means that when I get my application to try to look at it, and turn it into a list of ingredients, I can’t be sure of the structure and have to make a bunch of assumptions, which are sometimes wrong.

It would be great if this could be rectified, as we could then see lots of experiments like this out there. In fact with well marked up recipes, and there does appear to be a recipe markup spec:

• http://www.formatdata.com/recipeml/spec/recipeml-spec.html

People could build some great application around all this information.