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Monthly Archives: January 2010

Tasting Table picks EYB as Handiest Website

Eat Your Books is the Handiest Website of the Month according to Tasting Table. Very cool!

And today we have a write-up in The Irish Times which has resulted in a large number of new Irish members. Welcome to you all but I would warn you that initially the site is aimed at the USA so we don't have a lot of British and Irish cookbooks. That will change over the next year though. And we are changing the spelling of Schull on the log-in page!

Eat Your Books on TV

For those of you in the Boston area, I will be demoing EYB on WBZ-TV  wbz38tomorrow for the Consumer Reports feature on the 5pm news. We will put up a link on the Press page when we get it. After today it could be broadcast on any CBS affiliate around the USA. I feel more nervous now waiting to see it than I did doing the interview. Even though I wasn't nervous, my typing and onion-chopping skills went flying out the window when the camera was filming me at close quarters.

Upcoming improvements on EYB

Thank you for all your feedback, we're so grateful to all those who take the time to write to us. We are still a beta website and there are areas of improvement to be made before we remove the beta from the logo. So keep it coming, we love getting it and it will help us improve our service to you and build a better website. I will write regularly on the blog about changes we've made and what our future plans are.

This week we are doing an upgrade that will improve the look and feel of the site and improve general performance and page load times. Our improved code creates a better platform to make more functional changes.

We are listening to what our members want and trying to prioritize accordingly. These are a few of the changes you'll see in the next few months:

•Ability to add your cookbooks that aren't already in the EYB Library
•Bulk import of book data from spreadsheets and CSV files
•Indexing your own personal recipes to create your own 'cookbook'
•Changes to the way emails to EYB work, particularly Index Requests (don't worry if you don't currently see an email, we do get a request every time you click on an RI icon)
We want to thank you for being one of the early members and putting up with some of the frustrations of the site. To compensate for being inaugural members and part of a beta site we have offered a Lifetime membership, which we're delighted to see most people have taken out.

We believe in a two way relationship with our members so we will endeavour to keep you up to date with our plans and look forward to hearing more from you. We appreciate your input and tolerance of any glitches you may experience along the way.

Faster searches coming soon

The huge recent increase in EYB members is wonderful but we have found that searches have slowed down and in some cases been hanging with no results.  This is obviously not a good situation for a recipe search engine, so some major re-coding is going on and a new version of the site will go up next week that will greatly improve search results and page load timings.  Thank you for your patience.

Great reviews = lots of new members!

Some great new reviews of EYB today on Tasting Table and thekitchn.com has resulted in our biggest number of new members in one day. Fantastic and exhausting!

200,000 recipes now indexed!

With the latest indexed books added to EYB, we now have more than 200,000 recipes indexed. Although obviously we don't carry the actual recipes, this is quite impressive when you consider we only launched a few months ago. Epicurious.com which launched 14 years ago, has 142,000 recipes, and AllRecipes, which started up 12 years ago, has 40,000 recipes.

We are adding more of your index requests every day so keep the requests coming. The more requests a book gets, the higher up the list it goes.

More publicity for EYB!

And the publicity keeps coming which is fantastic. The first couple of months after we launched was difficult as we felt like we were almost invisible but now we can't keep up with all the great PR we are getting. We are in the process of putting up a press page so you can see everything.

Publishers Weekly had a wonderful article this week. Which then got tweeted, blogged and chatted about, so spreading around the world. We've gone viral!

There is a really interesting thread running on Chowhound which is worth checking out if you are debating whether to join EYB.

And finally, if you are in the Boston area I am demoing EYB tomorrow for the Consumer Reports feature on the 5pm news on WBZ-TV (Channel 4) (I'll let you know the air date when I get it). I have to get my office looking rather less messy before the film crew arrives. Or maybe mountains of cookbooks everywhere is fitting?