hRecipeHelper - new Chrome Extension

A little while back Google announced a new Recipe Search function that can search just recipes and then filter the results on various components in the recipe as well as cook time and calories. Now that's how you can rapidly dissolve the agonizing question of "What's for dinner?" into immediate action! To do this Google is relying on a nifty standard called microformats and specifically in this case the hRecipe format.

What hRecipe provides is a standard of coding HTML which reveals to bots or other programs the exact meaning of the web pages content, specifically the data values it contains. As a programmer who has written website scraping programs more then once in the past, this sort of formatting is a wonderful and accessible way to publish data. Unfortunately HTML is not exactly everyone's best skill, in fact I am willing to bet that most people don't know HTML and would very much like to avoid ever knowing HTML. Honestly, those people are perfectly reasonable, why should they?

I started thinking of people I know who are advanced computer users who simply don't have the time or interest in learning to write web pages and realized that while microformats are freaking awesome to a developer they are still a bit demanding to the cook that just wants to share her favorite recipes with the world. I saw this as a chance to give a little something back to the blogging world and perhaps selfishly get even more great recipes turning up in Google's search. I've written a nifty Chrome Extension called hRecipeHelper to help recipe bloggers easily post nice looking; hRecipe (and Google) compliant recipes by simply filling out a recipe card and copying the code into their favorite blogging site. All the site needs to do is support posting of basic HTML which Blogger, LiveJournal and most other blog platforms support.

Click to get it now!

I hope this will help get even more recipes on the web and further the microformats cause.