{% extends "base.html" %} {% block title %}About {{ config.title }}{% endblock %} {% block h1title %}

About {{ config.title }}

{% endblock %} {% block body %}

Searching for recipes, or reading almost anything on the internet for that matter, has turned into a dreadful chore over the last decade. Each time you go to most websites, they are loaded with unnecessary javascript, cookies, trackers and other useless and in most cases even harmful things. This website aims to provide for a better alternative to the thousands of JS-and-ad-riddle cookbook websites out there.

Anybody is free to share their recipes on this website or even contribute to the development of saucesource. If you are interested on sharing your recipes or just helping, keep on reading to know how to contribute.

Formatting the recipe

Recipes on this site are stored in Markdown files. Markdown files are nice to read in plain text and are widely known on the internet and in programming circles, so chances are you are already familiar with the format.

However, the markdown files for the recipes in this site contain some additional information at the beginning of the file that is called the "front matter". It looks like this:

+++
title = "Spaghetti alla carbonara"
date = 2021-03-07T20:00:00Z
[extra]
author = "Yaroslav de la Peña Smirnov <yps[at]yaroslavps.com>"
website = "https://www.yaroslavps.com/"
donate = "https://www.yaroslavps.com/donate/"
+++

author, website and donate all need to be under the extra section.

The first picture (if any) and paragraph should be separated from the rest of the text by a line containing <!-- more -->. This will allow the picture and paragraph to appear as a short description in the main list of recipes.

The rest of the text is just plain Markdown. For an example take a look here

A guide on keeping the quality high

In order to keep with the site's theme and assure that the site is not bloated with unnecessary information, there are some rules as to what a recipe should contain and how it should be structured:

  1. There shouldn't be much text not related to the making of the recipe at the beginning of it. You can have a small introduction paragraph, but it shouldn't be a whole essay detailing your whole family story. It should be short and concise, so as not to distract or annoy the reader with information that is not necessary for them.
  2. If there is something that you wish to tell that is a little bit too long to be at the beginning, put it at the end of the recipe. It still shouldn't be way too long.
  3. It's okay to add links to other sites inside your recipes, but the content inside the link should be related to your recipe. For example a footnote link, or a link to a video with instructions on a video hosting site like YouTube.
  4. The recipe should contain at least the following two sections: Ingredients and Instructions/Directions. You can add one or two sections more, for example, with tips on choosing ingredients or serving your recipe.
  5. I recommended that you at least add one picture of your recipe. If you add pictures, at least one of them should be of the prepared dish and it should be at the very beginning of the recipe so that it can be displayed on the list of recipes. If you don't have a picture of your own authorship or that you have the rights to, don't submit it. Absolutely no stock images.
  6. You can add as many pictures as you like, but the total sum of the pictures' size shouldn't exceed 3MB.

These rules may change a bit in the future, but not much.

Tip on optimizing pictures

So that the website and your recipe are lighter on bandwidth, it is recommended you optimize your pictures by compressing them. The (JPEG) settings I recommend for a pretty good size/quality ratio are:

If you're using ImageMagick, the command looks something like this:

convert "$input" \
    -strip \
    -interlace plane \
    -define jpeg:dct-method=float \
    -sampling-factor 4:2:0 \
    -resize 1200x800 \
    -quality 80 \
    "$output"

If you prefer using a GUI program like GIMP or Photoshop, (most of) these settings should be available when you export your image to JPEG.

Publishing recipes

There are three ways to publish. The only thing that is required in order to publish is that you have installed a plain text editor that can output text in UTF-8 and an email address from which to send the recipe.

If you are not very tech-savy or don't know just what in the name of god is git, no worries, there is still a way for you to share your recipes on this site. Check the plain text email instructions to learn how.

Git over email

The main repository for this website is hosted at https://git.sr.ht/~yaroslav/saucesource.cc. The main and recommended way for you to publish your recipes is to send a patch using git send-email to the project's mailing list. This doesn't require to make an account on any service and only requires that you have git installed on your computer properly configured with your email address.

If you are not very familiar with this way of collaborating, I recommend that you read this guide and you'll be ready to collaborate the way git was meant to be used in no time.

Github Pull Request

If you are more familiar with Github's pull request system, and you can't or don't want to send patches by email, the project has a mirror repository on Github where you can open a pull request to get your recipe added.

The Github mirror is located at https://github.com/Yaroslav-95/saucesource.cc.

Plain text email

If you are not familiar with git you can still send your recipe to me to my personal email address for me to review it and add it to the website. Just make sure that your recipe is properly formatted and send it as an attachment along with any pictures in your recipe to yps@yaroslavps.com.

Important: If you send me an email to my personal address, make sure to add it to your whitelist, or check your spam folder. Especially if you are using something like gmail or outlook.

Other ways of contributing

If you like this website, you can donate some money for the maintenance of the website over here.

You can also donate money to the author of a recipe you liked, if that author provided a donation link in their recipe.

Roadmap

This is just a short kind of to-do list for the short-term:

License

Everything that is presented in this site is published under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. By publishing your recipe in this site, you retain authorship of your recipe (unless you post anonymously), but the recipe is published under the same license as the site.

The "code" or functional part of the site (such as templates, stylesheets and so on) is published under the AGPLv3. By contributing any improvements or modifications to site, they are automatically licensed under the same AGPLv3 license as the site.

{% endblock %}