elise, you go girl! woo, woo, woo!

elise, i just called on your phone and left a message, but i thought id go ahead and test out this blogger stuff.

when i suggested the google docs thing, i had never actually used it. i heard it was great for collaboration, and assumed you could make comments and add markups. after using docs, i feel like the living document idea is cool, in that many people can edit something and it keeps a change-log, but there is no real way to organize the various entries.

ultimately when i suggested we do a living cookbook like this, i wanted to see three things:
1) easy interface for inputting text and adding pictures so people would actually add recipes
2) concise way to make comments/suggestions as others try the recipe and add their personal touch (or even if the contributor mixes things up one night and likes the results)
3) easy organization

in just the 10 minutes i took to compare the two, blogger kicks google docs' rump on all accounts. the interface for google docs is great if youre working on a group paper, but not for having a recipe and letting people make comments. commentors would have to change font/color, in order to distinguish from the original recipe. every time you make a recipe, you need to send an email to everyone telling them that they all have access to your doc (which would rough up inboxes everywhere). and the list goes on but im already tired of hearing myself talk, so ill spare the other reasons why i didnt like it, and just focus on the positives of blogger, and ways we can make it work for us.

the third bullet is, in my opinion, the most crucial aspect of my three "wants" i outlined above. i have seen other nerdy tech blogs and noticed they used the tag/label feature. the bottom of this text input window has a text field called "Labels for this post" where you can add tags. the way i think we should do it (just my opinion, and not the final say, just chime in on the comments if you think it should be done differently) is by adding a set of semi-standard tags. lets use some brownies that annie made recently as an example (recipe to follow). they are chocolate with peanut butter frosting (de-LISH). in this case, the tags would be: dessert, brownies, easy (and if we have any other chocoholics out there, we can tag chocolate too). hopefully this tagging system works. itd be the ultimate cookbook because then you dont have to try to remember which category your recipe falls under in the index - it should just be a keyword away. the standard for tagging could be: meal type (breakfast, lunch dinner, dessert, snack), dish type (soup, salad, pasta, italian, vegetarian...), major ingredients/components (chicken, egg noodles, basil) and difficulty level (easy, medium, hard, or wait till tawn and jacqueline make it). that way we could all search each others' recipes fairly easily. ideally there would be a way to activate a column on the right that has all the tags/labels for easy reference (as ive seen before), but that might be something you, elise, have to activate, being the site creator (i dont know how blogger works). the default timeline is interesting, but i think the tagging will be the bread and butter of organization in this living recipe book.

also, i just want to say thank you elise for doing this. you beat my lazy rear-end to the punch. it looks great, and your nastily titled recipe sounds tasty. i dont think we need to "pretty it up" too much. as a matter of fact, i think a little k-i-s-s (keep it simple stupid) is nice in this crazy world of ours. one thing i will suggest, however, is that we work a "tahini bit" on a new title. no offense, but i want something like moomy (without being moomy) where everyone who knows what the blog title means is "in" and outsiders are left wondering if we are speaking some sort of tolkien language. also, it would be great if it were as absurd/provocative/punny as possible so it could be a convo starter and we would sound cool while we bragged about our familys recipe blog. once again elise, ya done good (food).

just my $0.02.

ps: just in case someone from a major publisher stumbles upon our blog, we might want to put where we got the recipe should we get it from a book or website.