I hope everyone is doing well after the holiday season. We've all been through a lot in the past couple years, and it's more important than ever to do what you need to do in order to stay happy and healthy. For us mixers, that means abstaining from smoking and crafting delicious recipes to share with others! At the end of the year I like to take a look back and evaluate whether I've accomplished anything worthwhile. In 2021, I can confidently say "Yes I have."
In January of 2021, I was given the unique opportunity to take over development of All the Flavors. 50,000 lines of code and a laundry list of to-dos landed in my lap. As a user of the site, I was well aware of the issues people were running into on a regular basis. Bit by bit I started triaging and tackling the biggest, easiest to fix problems. It took a few months to really get a handle on it. I went from getting hundreds of error emails a day to a handful. The site went from having daily uptime issues to going months without any intervention needed. Since January, I have pushed 272 commits touching 33,000 lines.
The features I'm most proud of:
- Brought down the pay wall
- Added dark mode
- Added recipe importer
- Fixed flavor stash import/export
- Brought more variety to front page recipes
- Improved sorting and filtering on the recipe and flavor search pages
- When editing a recipe, pre-fill average use percentages
- Added Search by Flavors page
- Improved recipe/calculator layout
- Added customizable recipe background colors
- Added Low Stock warning email
But the most important aspect of All the Flavors isn't what I have done behind the scenes, it's what you all do on the site! You have created over 2,300 recipes and posted 2,500 reviews in 2021! In addition, we have 4,600 new users!
We also spent a good chunk of last year working on the redesigned All the Flavors. This work will continue into 2022, and we hope to have something to share with everyone as soon as it's ready. The new user interface and backend are already solving lots of the remaining issues we've identified with the site's usability and functionality, so I'm incredibly excited to be a part of this work.
I'd like to take a moment to recognize and thank the moderation team for helping me maintain the flavor database and moderate recipes and reviews:
- /u/apexified
- /u/EdibleMalfunction
- /u/Foment_life
- /u/isuamadog
- /u/kittybit8
- /u/mlNikon
A special thanks to Flavorah for investing their passion, trust, and funding to keep the site alive! Finally, thanks to all of you for the support over the past year, and here's to great things in the future for All the Flavors!
Thank you for all your hard work on this dude. I remember the days when the page would be down all the time and I couldn’t post anything unless I paid for an account on a buggy site. Doing the lord’s work, man.
The investment that Flavorah put into this website and all your hard work and dedication really shows in the last year of some major site improvements and the redesign of flawed features. ATF went from being a buggy recipe website into a flourishing part of our community. I can't wait to see what the years ahead bring to ATF.
I just hope it doesn't become like ELR in the sense of being flooded with thousands of untested and undeveloped recipes that should remain private until further developed.
My recipes still suck. Please fix. 😜
Nah, but for real, just the thought that it is going to get better is pretty insane. ❤️
This was the year that AllTheFlavors became truly alive for me. Uploading my recipes felt like somewhat of a victory after years of mysterious flakiness. Y’all really turned it around, and should feel extremely proud!
Thanks for all the hard work on ATF, Tesla! I used to prefer elr, but find myself using ATF alot more nowadays, thanks to all the improvements You have brought to the site! Shoutout to flavorah too! Might be user error, but the only thing I miss is being able to search within favorites and own recipes? You know, like you can do on elr? Anyways, thanks again!
You can't search the favorite recipes list, but you can search your own recipes. Just go to the Recipes page, click the Filter dropdown, find "My Recipes" and pick "All Mine," "My Private," or "My Public," and it'll only show those types of recipes when searching.
Really appreciate the work, thanks mate. One issue I've been having is if I click on a flavor, all the recipes that use it come up (hugely helpful) but sorting doesn't work. Is this something anyone else has noticed, or has a workaround for?
You have to click the "magnifying glass" icon to the right of the search field, it won't automatically refresh just by clicking on the sort radio button. Unfortunately it's thorny to fix this in the existing code, so that workaround will have to do for now.
Sorting has always worked for me. Are you hitting the search button again?
Not a directly atf improvement, but yeah, dont forget to mention that awesome handy dandy copy to markdown chrome extension. If I haven't said it yet today, thank you.