As reported last month, I realized that people were occasionally messaging the 'recipe' account about additions to one of the metanodes, and that these messages were not always processed in a timely manner. I suggested that we might replace them with categories. The idea got a bit of support, but one of the recipians worried that the categories might not...

... have the flexibility to replace all of the recipe metanodes? There are often sub-categories and descriptions, which I don't think we ever got round to building in to Categories?

A fair point, as some of the metanodes are quite complex. I took a stab at converting two of the recipe metanodes to categories, to see how that would go. First I straight-up converted Pastry Recipes which was very a simple metanode without subcategories or other detail. Then I tackled Bread Recipes which had more material and a bit of structure. If you go there you will see that I turned the three existing subsections into four categories ('corn bread' seemed to warrant its own so I added that). For now I left the original metanode intact underneath, so anyone who is concerned can compare the before-and-after. You can see that we lose the ability to annotate as with the "(allergy safe recipe)" indicators in the original metanode. It also appears that categories do not make soft links. I don't know if that's deliberate?

Categories can be placed in other categories so I also made Bread Recipes Too* to demonstrate how that would look, which is pretty much like any other category. It could replace the current Bread Recipes metanode, if reception is positive. If not I will discard it. It would be nice if there was a way to make contained categories expand in-place, but that's way beyond my level of perl-fu. It can go on the wish list but AFAIK we don't have an active coder base working on categories.

The primary benefit of converting to categories is that the leaf-node categories are assigned to 'Guest User' which means any noder of level 2+ can add a writeup to the category, thus making them self-serve for additions. If you've been longing to link your pastry or bread recipe writeups to the metanodes, now's your chance! I'm also open to requests for which metanodes to tackle next, if reception to this experiment is positive.

A second question has emerged: For noders who are long fled (10 years plus) is it acceptable to change writeups from type '(thing)' to type '(recipe)'? There was no '(recipe)' type in the long-ago time. I think yes but I've been surprised before.

And as a side bonus I rediscovered the wonderful work of sneff, a long-ago user who added many fabulous recipes to our site.

(I also discovered that I cannot spell 'recipe' correctly, and that categorised recipes was noded with an 's' instead of a 'z' so I can finally remember where it is :).)

Anyway, please let me know if you feel strongly about this undertaking, I will report the results here.


Currently in transition: Cake Recipes. Just finished: Muffin, Scone, Biscuit, Roll and Bun Recipes, Pie and Tart Recipes. (This project takes rather longer than one might think.)


* Yes, yes.

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