Hi there,

I’m Sean and I blatently stole this intro from Clark. This my fork of the excellent Chowdown project, described as a plain text recipe database for hackers. In Clark’s words:

Over the years, I’ve tried dozens of recipe apps and services in an attempt to eat better and get more organized. With each app came a new format and recipe lock-in, neither of which got me excited.

Chowdown is my attempt at fixing recipe app burnout, by moving my recipes out of closed services and into plain text. For example, here’s a recipe in plain text that I’ve been working on for a while. It’s a broccoli beer cheese soup inspired by Gourmand’s, one of my favorite spots in Austin. Crazy delicious.

Here’s that same recipe processed with Chowdown. It’s a simple layout with a photo, ingredient list, and directions.

The magic comes behind-the-scenes, with recipe microdata via schema.org. This process adds special tags around each bit of content, which is what let’s other apps (list coming soon) read your recipes. Data portability!

I was a pleased user of Chowdown for a couple of years, but I don’t work very much with Ruby and maintaining an enviroment just to use for a couple Jekyll sites every once in a while wasn’t something I’m a fan of doing. I recently transitioned my personal website over to Hugo, a static site generator written in Go, and I’m porting over Chowdown to keep this recipe goodness going.

Similar to the original project, GoChowdown is definitely a work in progress, and active development is taking place. I’m new to Hugo and Go. Things might break. The recipes, however, are here to stay.

Go cook something rad,

Sean
@_seanlane