Cookbooker was born in 2009 as a personal project, and as a result of my own experience as a cookbook buyer and avid home cook. I had an ever-growing pile of cookbooks and food magazines, and was frequently left paging through them, looking for a favorite recipe, but unable to remember exactly where I'd cooked it from, or whether I liked it as it was or it needed tweaks. Post-its didn't help that much!
So, after learning to code and spending innumerable weekends and evenings on it, I launched the site and was delighted to see it catch the interest of a group of people like me. The timing was right... and the timing was terrible. I had young children at home and I made a big job change, and increasingly Cookbooker was the side-project I could not maintain.
I made the reluctant decision to close the site - but a group of users convinced me otherwise and offered to pay a small amount through Patreon to keep the lights on. So I put it into a sort of hibernation: it stayed running and a core group continued to use it, but it was closed to new members. Hence the varying dates of the reviews you'll see on the site.
Then, earlier this year, a friend showed me some of the new coding tools that had been invented, and I realized that I could redesign Cookbooker and keep it running again with a lot less effort than the days of searching through programming books and asking for advice on Stack Overflow.
So here we are! I'm excited to see if the site will be useful for people, and I'll be able to keep developing it and refining its features. On the roadmap, I'm even looking into an App, if that makes sense. There will very likely be bugs along the way, and I'd appreciate you letting me know if you find any: [email protected].
This is a little more expensive than keeping the lights on was before, so I'll be asking for support through Ko-fi every so often. But I'm determined not to abuse my visitors with pop-ups and intrusive ads. This is a labour of love; I'm not trying to get rich from it (as if a cookbook website could even do that!).
So welcome back, former users. And welcome new users. I hope we cook up something good together.
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