Inspiration
Recently, I had a geography project in which I had to search for different foods that different cultures make. Once I started, I immediately found myself going back and forth between confusing interfaces, pages riddled with ads, unnecessary details about the dish and tens of paragraphs about how the author's great-great-grandma personally gave him these recipes or how the creator of the recipe was buried...
This experience would definitely discourage anyone who would want to learn about different cultures, their cuisines and make those recipes. To solve that I made Holiday Bites - a down-to-earth app that shows recipes in an easy-to-understand way.
What it does
In a nutshell, the app shows holiday (and typical) recipes from a variety of cuisines and cultures. It features a simplified interface and gets straight to the point with no pre-recipe story. The user can sort by cuisine type, search for a recipe if they have one on their mind, and get accessible details on how to make it.
For the site administrator - there is an intuitive dashboard with password-authentication via Firebase which allows the administrator to edit the recipes or add new ones to Firestore.
How we built it
It is built on NextJS + Tailwind, with DaisyUI used to simplify the interface-building process. The site uses Firebase for data storage and authentication, the recipes are sourced from a couple of LLMs and the images are sourced from Flickr mainly.
Challenges we ran into
- Getting a lot of recipes in a specific format - For this, LLMs came to rescue by authoring a variety of recipes from a variety of different cuisines.
- Getting images for said recipes - I built a small tool to help me search for images and copy their licenses and titles, from there on out I had a script populate the database with recipes.
What we I learned
Surprisingly (or not so much), a decent amount about licensing images... and, of course about different cultures and their foods - seriously, I have actually made a couple of recipes myself now because some of them looked so appetising and there is still plenty of more I'd like to try.
The code
Code is available at the GitHub repo linked. I don't really plan on maintaining it post these holidays but if anyone would like to open an issue or a PR, feel free to.
What's next for Holiday Bites
Hopefully some users pick it up, I sure know I'd continue using it, I made some of the recipes and they are bomb.
External Help
Got some help from:
- NextJS documentation - helped me figure out a stack trace error which was problematic during compiling.
- GitHub Copilot - helped me debug an issue with the administrative panel and with some autocompletion to speed up the coding process.
- Tailwind documentation - helped with an issue during installation.
- DaisyUI documentation - helped with getting familiar with certain DaisyUI components I hadn't used before like the skeletons, also the login card was partially taken from the examples.
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