Snacksby!

like macgyver, but for food.

Snacksby was a recipe site I ran back in 2005ish. It was pretty much a Web 2.0 recipe site, and was centered on the fact that you could type in what was in your pantry - "radishes, 3 onions, 1 cup milk and flour" - and get back recipe results. It looked a little something like this:

Super cute, right?

It got mentioned on lifehacker, Wired, TechCrunch, and the defunct Yahoo videocast the 9. Aaaand a million other places.

It was fun. It was pretty much my personality pasted all over a recipe site.

Tags were snacksonomies (!) a perfectly perfect play on 'folksonomies' courtesy of katy beck, a girl I worked with at the time.

Eventually I sold Snacksby to Revolution Health, worked there for a bit, parted ways, and eventually they gobbled it up into their main RH recipes site. Sigh. Don't sell your children if you love them.

I'll leave you with the absolute best part, the 'no results found' page, which was a rewrite of part of Hamlet:

SNACKSLET
You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot
so inoculate our old chicken stock but we shall eat relish of
it: I found you recipes not.

YOU
I was the more decieved.

SNACKSLET
Get thee to a grocery. Why wouldst thou be a
cooker of nothing? I am myself indifferent honest,
but yet I should accuse me of such things that it
were better my mother had not borne me: I am very
gluttonous, revengeful, ambitious, with more recipes at
my beck than I have cards to write them on,
imagination to give them shape, or time to cook them
in. What should such gourmets as I do crawling
between earth and heaven? We are arrant chefs,
all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a grocery.
Where're your cookbooks?

YOU
At home, my lord.

SNACKSLET
Let the pantry doors be shut upon them, that they may play
fruitless nowhere but in'r own kitchen. Farewell.

YOU
O, help him, you sweet heavens!

SNACKSLET
If thou dost cook, I'll give thee this compost
for thy dinner: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as
snow, thou shalt not escape famine. Get thee to a
grocery, go; farewell. Or, if thou wilt needs
cook, cook for a fool; for wise men know well enough
what illusory meals you make for them. To a grocery, go,
and quickly too. Farewell.

YOU
O heavenly powers, restore him!

SNACKSLET
I have heard of your garnishes too, well enough; God
has given your dishes one face, and you make them
another: you salt, you drizzle, and you accent, and
put ketchup on God's creatures, and make your wantonness
your diet. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath
made me hungry. I say, we will have no more meals:
those that have already, all but one, shall
eat; the rest shall starve as they are. To a
grocery, go.

Exeunt

b-b-b-b-b-back