While Viewing the Recipe Browser:
- When you first enter or re-enter the Recipe Browser the recipes are sorted in the order they were added to the database. Clicking on a column title will sort the recipes by either Recipe Name, Cookbook Section, or Author.
- The "Sort by Date" link sorts the recipes by the order in which they were entered into the database, although the dates themselves are not displayed. The "Sort by Name" link sorts the recipes by name...duh!
- Clicking on a section name will show just the recipes in that section. When showing just a single section, the column headings will sort by either Recipe Name or Author.
- Clicking on an author name will show just the recipes by that author. When showing just a single author, the column headings will sort by either Recipe Name or Section.
- Hovering over the recipe name will bring up a floating preview of the recipe. Clicking on the recipe name will display that recipe on the right side of the window.
- (The sharp ones among you will notice that when sorting by Section, the "Goodies" section comes after the "Soups" section. This is because the "Goodies" section was originally called "Sweets", which is how the recipes remain in the database. Just in case you noticed.)
- The Original Search Method:
- The Search process is case sensitive. Otherwise, it is rather simple. If you enter "pie", for example, it will find such words as "Krispies", "pieces" as well as "pie", but not "Pie". Because the search process highlights all matches, a search for the word "Pie" will only find recipes with "Pie" in it, but it will highlight all occurances of "pie" or "Pie" or "pieces" that appear within that recipe.
- Using Search to find all recipes by an author, "Mary Monroe" for example, will not work because recipe authors' first and last names are stored separately. The only way to find all of the recipes by a particular author is to find ONE recipe by that author and then click on the author's name either in the "Author" column or in the recipe itself.
- This method works no matter how long the search word is. As stated above, this search will highlight all occurances of the search string wherever it occurs in the recipe.
- The Alternate Search Methods: Boolean or Normal
- These methods are NOT case sensitive. However, they will not find any words of 3 letters or less, so a search for "pie" will find nothing. These two methods show only the title of the found recipes that have a match; unlike the "original" search, they will not highlight the words within the recipe text.
- These methods rank the recipes found that match the search criteria by how well they match, the best ones being listed first.
- 1) Boolean Search - This is the default setting. This mode allows you to alter the way the search words are handled. For example, if you wanted to search for "rice wine" and you wanted the word "wine" to be weighed more, you could use the + operator to enhance the results for that particular word. If you wanted to search all results for "wine" but exclude all of the ones that had the word "rice" in them, you would input "wine -rice" and using the minus operator, any result with that word will be gone!
- This method resolves many of the issues that the above one does not. If you want to find recipes JUST by "Mary Monroe" you would enter "+Mary +Monroe" (without the quotes).
- There are quite a few operators for boolean search:
- None the default (when neither + nor - is specified) the word is optional, but the recipes that contain it are rated higher.
- + a leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in every row returned.
- - a leading minus sign indicates that this word must NOT be present in any row returned.
- > < these two operators are used to change a word's contribution to the relevance value that is assigned to a results. The > operator increases the contribution and the < operator decreases it. See the example below.
- ( ) parentheses are used to group words into subexpressions.
- ~ a leading tilde acts as a negation operator, causing the word's contribution to the results relevance to be negative. A recipe that contains such a word is rated lower than others, but is not excluded altogether, as it would be with the - operator.
- " a phrase that is enclosed within double quote ("") characters matches only recipes that contain the phrase literally, as it was typed.
- Examples for boolean search:
- apple banana Find recipes that contain at least one of the two words.
- +apple +juice Find recipes that contain both words.
- +apple macintosh Find recipes that contain the word "apple", but rank recipes higher if they also contain "macintosh".
- +apple -macintosh Find recipes that contain the word "apple" but not "macintosh".
- +apple +(>turnover <strudel) Find recipes that contain the words "apple" and "turnover", or "apple" and "strudel" (in any order), but rank "apple turnover" higher than "apple strudel".
- apple* Find recipes that contain words such as "apple", "apples", "applesauce", or "applet".
- "some words" Find recipes that contain the exact phrase "some words" (for example, recipes that contain "some words of wisdom" but not "some noise words"). Note that the "" characters that surround the phrase are operator characters that delimit the phrase. They are not the quotes that surround the search string itself.
- 2) Normal Search - This mode simply takes the user input and performs a search against it. Nothing too fancy compared to to the other mode.
- The code for the Alternate Search Method came from phpfreak at www.phpfreaks.com.
- A Note About Both Search Types
- Certain words and characters have been banned from the search entry and use of them as part of a search will result in a failed search. Among the characters are the ":" and ".". There is no point in listing the banned words as they would almost never appear in a recipe anyway.
- The Keyword Search Method
- When you choose this option, you are provided a list of currently used keywords for existing recipes. Clicking a keyword will do a search for that word among all the recipes. Even if that word is NOT a keyword for a particular recipe, it will find that recipe if it has the matching word anywhere in it's ingredientrs or cooking method. For example, a search for "beef" will find all recipes with beef in them whether or not it beef is a keyword.
- You may print individual recipes by clicking on the printer icon
when the recipe is displayed. - You may also print individual or multiple recipes from "Collections" by selecting the "Print Collections" menu option.
- Registered users may select several recipes to print as a "batch" from the "My Favorites" page. When you do this, you will be asked to click a continuation box which will then forward you to the page which displays the recipes you will be printing. Note that the browser page displays all of the recipes on one page, but when printed each recipe will have its own page. (I am working on allowing the user more control over the printed output.)
- REMEMBER: Registered users can add recipes. Register today! "New Users" may not add recipes until they have been changed to "Approved" users by an administrator, usually within 24 hours.
- All users below a certain level have their added recipes placed in a pending file to be reviewed by an administrator, prior to having it displayed. New recipes will normally be approved and posted within 24 hours. Your user level will be increased as you contribute more and more recipes to the site. Higher user levels have their recipes added directly to the site without needing administrator approval.
- When you select a recipe to edit, the recipe will show up in the right side panel while the filled out editing fields are on the left. Once you click "Edit", the edited recipe will re-appear in the right side panel, and the editing fields will be refilled with the edited data.
- When you add a recipe, the right side panel will be empty until you first add a recipe. As you add each new recipe, the right side panel will display the one you just added and the editing fields will be cleared, waiting for the next new recipe. You can edit the just added recipe by selecting the Edit Recipe in the Recipe Options menu.
- In the Recipe Name, Ingredients, Instructions and Keywords sections there are some special words and symbols which you can insert into the editing fields (at the cursor location) just by clicking on them. Once they are entered into the edit boxes they can be edited, erased, etc. as if you had typed them in.
- The "Original Search" page also has some special words and symbols which you can insert into the editing fields. These, however, are always inserted at the end of your text. So if you want to write the word "jalapeño", you have to type the "j-a-l-a-p-e" and then insert the "ñ" and then the "o". Once items are entered into the edit boxes they can be edited, erased, etc. as if you had typed them in.
- On the "Cookbook" dropdown menu there will be a flyout menu labeled "Collections". These are collections of menus that have been put together by the admins or users.
- You may print any or all of the recipes in any collection. Select the "Print Collections" option on the "Collections" menu.
- If you would like to create your own collection of recipes, please contact the admins.
- FLOATING BOXES - Guest users can NOT turn off the floating boxes! Registered users should go to their account settings to toggle their infobox display preference. Remember that turning off the floating boxes will turn off the floating recipe previews also, but it also speeds things up considerably. Cookies MUST BE ENABLED to turn the boxes on and off! See my comments about cookies below.
- It is possible to add the same recipe more than one time to your "Favorites" list. So if you happen to have "Garlic Shrimp", for example, listed as a favorite four times, you will have to delete it four times (or sellect all four copies of it on your "My Favorites" page) to get rid of all of them.
- Some people are terribly paranoid about cookies. I used to be, but now I know that they are very useful and don't pose any risk to your computer if used wisely.
- The Ferguson Recipes sets a total of five cookies. Three of them go away when you close your browser. The other two will go away when you close the browser unless you have selected the "Remember Me" option when logging in. Otherwise they will remain until you log out. These two cookies contain your user name and a user id number which is randomly generated each time you log in and is only good until you log out.
- Your PASSWORD is NEVER included in the cookies, and no other information is saved in a cookie!
- The warning message on the main page appears when you visit the site for the first time after shutting down and then re-opening your browser. It WILL NOT appear if you are a registered user, have selected the "Remember Me" option and remain logged in.
- I have been able to test this site with Firefox 2.0.0.3., IE 7 and Opera 9.2. It should work with other browsers, although the menu may look funky in IE 5.x and 6.x, and perhaps in others as well. Personally I think that people who do not have the most current browsers availabe do themselves a disservice.
- Opera is a cool browser. However, if you choose the "Fit To Width" option (in that browser) then the "Sections" flyout menu will not work properly.
- I am a big fan of Firefox and use it almost exclusively, although I am beginning to love Opera.
