Back in April, I was inspired by watching Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution to help people eat healthier. Jamie’s primary goal was to help people focus on eating fresh foods and to stop eating processed foods, and I wanted Foodgeeks to help make a difference in the food revolution.

How can you help?

Have you ever searched and searched for the right recipe to make to impress your dinner guests, only to find a recipe that is meant for more people or less people than you’re serving dinner for?  Or have you ever found a tasty looking recipe, only to find that the recipe is in metric measurements (like grams and liters) instead of the imperial measurements (like tablespoons and cups) you’ve used your entire life?  Sometimes, as you know, there’s nothing worse than having to painstakingly calculate, by hand, the correct ingredient proportions to use in your dish.

We’ve been there, we’ve felt your frustration, and we’ve done something about it:

Foodgeeks now provides the ability to automatically convert any recipe’s ingredients from imperial to metric measurements, as well as the ability to scale recipes from 2 servings to 4 servings, or to scale the recipe to as large or as small as you’d like.

Here’s an example of how the recipe converter would look on the recipe page for DoubleTree Chocolate Chip Cookies (Have you tried them yet?  They’re delicious!):

In order to scale or convert a recipe, simply visit any recipe and click the “scale/convert” link next to the recipe servings amount.  A recipe converter box will appear beneath the recipe servings information.  Insert the number of servings you’d like to scale this recipe to, click the ingredient measurement format that you’d like the recipe to be displayed in, then click “Update Recipe”.  That’s it!  We’ll take care of the rest of the hard work for you!

Thanks for all of your great feedback so far.  Please add any comments or suggestions you may have to our GetSatisfaction pages for Foodgeeks and Winegeeks – we’d love to hear what you think!

Happy New Year from the team at Foodgeeks and Winegeeks!!!

We hope that you have had a terrific holiday season packed with with lots of fun and good eating with you friends and family. We also wish you all the best for 2010 and beyond. We have some exciting things we plan to accomplish with Foodgeeks and Winegeeks this year and we look forward to your continuing suggestions and feedback.

Facebook & Twitter Sharing

Sharing Options

We’re excited to introduce some new behaviors that you’ll see when sharing your recipes and reviews with your friends through Facebook and Twitter. When you select a recipe on Foodgeeks.com, or a wine, grape varietal, appellation or region on Winegeeks.com, you will be presented with option for sharing your finds with your friends and family via Facebook and Twitter. Look for the sharing links near the bottom of the page, as shown here on the left.

Facebook Example

We have taken out some of the extra work out of sharing items with your friends. When you choose the link that allows you to share your item of interest with your Facebook friends, The have a thumbnail (if available) transported into your Facebook entry, and the direct link to what you are sharing. Clicking the  Twitter link will take you to the Twitter site, where a pre-set message containing the name of the item and a direct link back to the original page you seek to share await you. If you choose, you can now replace the long URL with your favorite URL shortener.

Badges

Badge Example

We recently discovered as we talk to people about Foodgeeks & Winegeeks, we’ve been getting questions about the significance of the badges we’ve recently introduced. Our general aim is to help you share your general interests about the food and wine without answering a lengthy survey. The system is not super-scientific, for instance if you review 5 wines from Austria, you earn the Austria badge like the one shown in Ryan’s profile on the left. To find out what each individual badge means, you can hover your mouse pointer or click on the badge to see what it means. Stay tuned because we are publishing new badges all the time, and we intend on keeping them coming. Don’t be surprised if soem special secret badges begin to emerge sometime in the future.

As always, we love to get your comments and suggestions through our GetSatisfaction pages for Foodgeeks and Winegeeks, which helps us shape the things we do with the site with your input. To find others who are interested in Foodgeeks and Winegeeks, you can find our fan page for Foodgeeks.com on Facebook and/or become a Facebook fan for Winegeeks.com too.

Thanks!

You may recall the members of the team making some recent appearances on two Portland-based podcasts  Strange Love Live and PDX Gen-Y. Well if you didn’t get enough of us talking about Foodgeeks.com & Winegeeks.com and the associated subject matter which goes along, then you can tune in to the 30 Hour Day webcast to really get your fill. Hosted by Cami Kaos and Rick Turoczy, 30 hour Day is fast approaching its 24th hour of broadcasting having raised several thousand dollars and a great deal of canned goods and toys for needy families. We’ll be appearing at about 6 PM Pacific time, and maybe closer to 7 PM, to chat about the keys to finding great “bang-for-buck” wines.

We are honored to appear alongside all sorts of great talent who have an will appear on 30 Hour Day. We really excited to help support local charities Free Geek, Toys for Tots, Oregon Food bank and many more. If you visit the 30 Hour Day website, they’ll tell you all about who else you can support, and how to help.

Free TV : Ustream

Thanks!

The new look

The team at Foodgeeks is pleased to announce the new and improved Winegeeks.com!

Inspired by the recent implosion of the harddisk on our server, Winegeeks.com joins Foodgeeks.com with a whole array of improvements. After several harrowing weeks of furious design and coding work, Winegeeks.Com received new features and a requisite a face-lift including a logo which incorporates our new mascot, Mr. Yummy.

We added all the new social features like those recently added to Foodgeeks.com, and you can even use your Foodgeeks.com credentials to log in to Winegeeks.com; no additional account necessary!. You can follow friends, receive badges for achieving various milestones on the site and follow activity streams of your friends. Winegeeks.com even sports the same robust back-end shared by Foodgeeks.com, which gets us poised for future growth and a more rapid deployment schedule for new features.

Wine Details

A few former items didn’t survive the update, like wine label images which were lost thanks to the corruption, and the discussion board which suffered from spam attacks. However, the new features and a new path for growth should go a long way to make up for those minor differences.

While Foodgeeks.com allows members to capture their favorite recipes and share experiences with their friends, Winegeeks.comp enables members to share wine tasting experiences, ratings and other information like price, the wine’s flavor characteristics, region, appellation, vintage, grapes used and much more.

We’re very proud to get this launched and into your hands. As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions. We can be reached via Twitter @winegeeks and on our GetSatisfaction page at http://getsatisfaction.com/winegeeks

Thanks!

-Nate

The Foodgeeks.com team recently visited with two local podcasts, Strange Live Live and PDX Gen Y. We were invited to talk about all the changes happening at Foodgeeks.com and Winegeeks.com. We also shared news about our participation in 30 Hour Day, a 30-hour telethon podcast being produced by a group of local volunteers to raise donations for charity. The Foodgeeks team will be doing a one hour segment on 30 Hour Day about Wine, Food and recipes from 6 PM to 7 PM Pacific on Saturday, December 19th, which can be seen streaming live on 30HourDay.org. With all the news that has been going on around here, we’re grateful to have busy folks taking the time to help us tell our story!

Ryan, Crystal and I were thrilled to join Cami Kaos and Dr. Normal for Strange Love Live Episode 150. During the tech edition, you’ll get the scoop on all the raw work that the team managed to cram into 30 days to get the site launched. You’ll also hear about Ryan’s inspiration and philosophy around Foodgeeks.com, Crystal’s favorite pie and my proclivities for meat. We also cover details of the new visual design, and social features like activity streams, badges and friends lists.

I also had the pleasure of paying a visit to another local podcast to tell the Foodgeeks story. PDX Gen Y, which is recorded at PDX.FM studios, explores culture from a Gen Y perspective. Bret, Rachelle and Damien had some great questions for me about several subjects, and you can hear us talk about Foodgeeks.com, Winegeeks.com and 30 Hour Day as well.

Listen now…

…or download the audio here.

Thanks again to the folks at Strange Love Live and PDX Gen Y for taking the time to chat with us. Stay tuned to keep up to date on all the developments coming out of here, fast and furious!

-Nate

The team at Foodgeeks recognize the fact that cooking and dining together is a social experience.  In an age where friends and family are becoming more and more separated physically and our primary means for communicating are via the Interwebs, we decided to explore creating a way to share your cooking activities through Foodgeeks.

We’re excited to announce the release of Activity Streams in both HTML and ATOM formats.   Yay!

What’s an activity stream? Activity streams are lists of actions which have been performed most recently by users of the website.  Activity streams allow you to keep track of what’s new on Foodgeeks, and even more importantly, what your friends have been doing on Foodgeeks.  We think this is important because your social network will help you quickly discern which recipes are worth making because you generally know your friends’ tastes much better than you know anonymous people’s tastes!

If you want to see an example of our activity streams in action, you can find the site-wide activity stream both on the home page and at:
http://www.foodgeeks.com/activities

One of the neat things about activity streams is that you can carry them with you. If you want to share your passion for food with your friends, it’s really easy to publish your activity stream on Facebook or even on your blog. If you look to the right of this post, you’ll see our site-wide activity stream happily displaying the last 20 thinks that happened on Foodgeeks. If you want to find your own personal activity stream, it’s at the bottom of your profile page, or on the page which is dedicated to your activities:
http://www.foodgeeks.com/people/ryansnyder/activities

Just replace “ryansnyder” with your user name in the web address above to find your personal activity stream.

And you can find your friends’ activity stream by following link and replacing my username with your own as above. It’s also accessible from the homepage when you are logged in:
http://www.foodgeeks.com/fans/ryansnyder/people/activities

Atom Feeds

If you’re a super techy geek like myself, you’ll probably be happy to know that you can subscribe to these activity streams through your favorite RSS reader, such as Google Reader.  To subscribe, you may either click the RSS icon on any of the pages mentioned above pages within the URL toolbar of your browser, or you may add “/feed” to any of the above URLs.

http://www.foodgeeks.com/activities/feed
http://www.foodgeeks.com/people/ryansnyder/activities/feed
http://www.foodgeeks.com/fans/ryansnyder/people/activities/feed

Thanks, and we’re listening!

Thanks for tuning in! We’re really excited to make this announcement because we think managing and sharing your recipes and food experiences should be a fun thing, and why not be able to share the fun with friend and family?

As always, we want to hear from you. Share your opinions,  especially anything that you think everyone will benefit from. We use GetSatisfaction to provide support and a way to give us feedback, and we’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Welcome to the Foodgeeks blog!  We’ll be keeping you updated about all the happenings for Foodgeeks, Winegeeks, Beergeeks and Espressogeeks through this blog…  Chat with ya soon!