Websites like supercook include recipes where you're missing 1 or 2 flavors. It would be nice to have an ejuice website with a similar feature, or maybe something like "hey, if you buy this flavor, you can make 20 more recipes!" What do you think?
I started on this actually. Told the ELR guys to work on it.
I was using code similar to supercook.com where you click/add ingredients and it shows you what you can make as well as what you're 1-2 ingredients short of.
Sadly I didn't have enough recipes to test the code so I figured let ELR create the same feature set. It's an easy double database lookup.
Typing in recipes is too time consuming but the market doesn't need yet another ignored recipe website.
Did they ever get back to you about plans to implement it?
Dunno. Probably? I don't monitor most recipe sites because IMHO they suck balls from lack of ratings.
If I ever released my site, I would charge for it and offer free subscriptions after people submitted recipes or good reviews for others. No way would I make a valuable site free and let it stagnate.
Or seek out sponsorship/affiliate income from flavor vendors.
It's too much work and DIYers are a horrible customer base to sell to. Worse than vapers because it's so price focused.
I just use ELR to do my mixing. It is pretty good at that, at least from my experience. The main issue, seems to be that a lot of people have no idea what they are doing on ELR. They post a recipe, that they think will be good, and either never make it, or make it and ignore it because it tasted like burnt ass hair.
It would certainly be nice to have a more organized collection of flavours and recipes than the hellhole that is ELR.
I reckon I have the capability, but definitely not the time or resources, but here is what I believe such a site should have:
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A database of flavours from most/all manufacturers. Not just links to buy them, but genuine descriptions. So if I type in blueberry, it comes up with all the blueberry flavours, CAP, TPA, FA, etc. wild, sweet, ripe, whatever. Then user voting on preferred producer, as well as recommendations of single-flavour percentage, to give you an idea of the potency of a flavour before purchasing. Maybe CAP is a nicer flavour, but TPA is much more potent so a juice with only a hint of blueberry can use TPA to avoid ending up with 20-30% flavour concentrates in the mix.
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As mentioned, a 'supercook' style inventory where you can add the flavours you own (linking in to the flavour database), and be given recipes available to you, or things you can nearly make, or even suggestions - consider you have all the right flavours, but from different manufacturers. If the recommended single flavour % of your vanilla is double that of the brand used in the recipe, you might want to double up your % to achieve a similar result.
Recipes that are classified based on ingredients, not name. Calling your recipe 'jumba grunnets' doesn't tell me jack about what it tastes like till I click it, and makes it more confusing when people add similar recipes. By all means give it a name tag but I want to know what type of flavours it'll be before I click. Maybe a mouseover popup? And when a user tries to add a recipe with the same or similar ingredients in similar %'s to an existing recipe, instead of creating another listing, it just adds another entry to the same recipe. Let users vote on/rank these - this also adds an element of crowdsourcing to improve recipes, rather than comments which can be hard to trawl through with no indication of whether that's actually a good idea or not.
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Classification by flavour types that can be tagged by the recipe maker. Jesus. I can't believe this wasn't included in ELR. Fruity, tropical, menthol, tobacco, sweet, sour, confectionary, whatever. A filter menu - I'm after a sweet, fruity menthol juice, whaddawegot?
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More stuff for personal use. To avoid the clusterfuck of unrated recipes that exist on ELR, allow an unlimited number of private recipes, but only let people make a few public, with that number increasing with the popularity of their recipes.
As for financing it I'm not sure. For the majority of DIYers cost is the main point, so I doubt that many users would pay to use it, and a site like this needs a lot of people to work, I think. Perhaps advertising is the only way to go. Allow people to pay to put a link next to a recipe, indicating that they sell this recipe - some people want these fancy flavours without having to go buy 4 different types of cream, 2 vanillas, 3 fruit flavours, graham cracker, and ethyl maltol or whatever just to try it out, instead, just buy a 10ml, prepacked and good to go. Maybe even integrate the sale of this into the site, becoming somewhat of an eBay for flavours, letting the people that put hard work into it get money for their creations. I'm sure there'd be some liability points to work around, but I believe, with fair warnings, the onus of responsibility is between the user and vendor, not the site. Not too sure how well this would work but I'm just throwing ideas out here.
For me cost isn't a huge issue. Sure I moved to DIY to save money but I also want to make juices comparable to store bought. ELR is great don't get me wrong, I just can't trust a whole lot of the recipes. I'd buy a month long or even year long membership to a site that had great recipes or even pay per recipe. As long as my liquids only cost me around 5$ for 120ml I don't see anything wrong with paying for a recipe since I pay for the ingredients. One is no good without the other.
Along with OP's idea, would be great if e-liquid-recipes.com could generate a formula where you could list all the juice and quantity you currently have and it would, in return, tell you what kind of recipes you can make based on the current recipes in the site's database.
Make it happen ELR!
> where you could list all the juice and quantity you currently have and it would, in return, tell you what kind of recipes you can make based on the current recipes in the site's database.
Enter your flavors in your flavor stash, then click "What can I make" :) Just make sure you pick the flavors in your stash that has the highest number of recipes (the green number in the auto complete box)...
it would be nice if you have TFA Vanilla custard and say 5 other flavors that a recipe has but uses cap vanilla custard, that the recipe would still show up. Or just list recipes by flavor name not who makes the flavor. I've made quite a few mixes where some one used all FA or CAP with TFA and they turn out pretty good, of course i tweak them to my liking.
ELR is the best and most complete DIY e-juice site, period! It had made my experience in DIY so much easier, I don't care about someone's else recipes, ratings or recipes flavor profiles, or how much flavoring is left on my fresh cream bottle. Keep it simple and working. If it could be improved? Yes, but then so my recipes.