It's hard to imagine how and what I was doing before internet came along. How on earth did I search hotels on the other end of the earth, information on anything under the sun without going to a library or knowing somebody who already knew about it?
WORLD WIDE WEB, allow me to pay you my uttermost respect again.
The easy access to information has all the advantages imaginable but it has a downside which I can't get over with, the overflow of information. How do you organize and archive all these information to re-use them again efficiently? Bookmarking with a browser, right, when is the last time that you organize your bookmark lists? It's not that efficient when what you really want is to go back to one particular web post.
Where did I see that before? Is it from Blog A, .com B or .edu C? Even if you remember the site correctly, there is no guarantee that you could find the same post or topic again. Because human memory is notoriously unreliable.
Cue Yumprint.
It all started when I am sick of generating pdfs every time I see something that interest me. I am talking about cooking. Yes, I have a pdf folder which holds recipes I once saw and thought about making it later. I go back to a few of them routinely but I have to say that I have no clues what the rest of pdfs are. I still use recipe books but it's hard to beat google when you just need to type in a couple of ingredients and get a list of all possible recipes which have ever been attempted. Many of my favorite recipes are available online. There must be a better way to organize online information so that I can find things again quickly.
I was with Pinterest for a while. It is a tool to "file" all your favorite links in one place. Although it does work to some extent, it lacks two key functions which I consider important, the ability to annotate/edit any recipe and to upload the ones which are my own creation or from printed materials. You see, I just want one central depository of recipes and I want to annotate those with my own adaptations and thoughts. And I also find it crucial to keep those online links at a more permanent level. Say, if ever a blogger decides to move the site to somewhere else or to remove it completely, your Pinterest pins will no longer be functional.
Yumprint gives me the solutions I was looking for.
It does:
- automatic extraction of a recipe from its original source to a Yumprint file
- allow a user to edit an original recipe and add reviews
- print a pdf (yes!) from your extracted Yumprint recipe for local storage (if you really want)
A really nice feature to have with Yumprint is the full nutritional analysis of a recipe. I use Calorie Count occasionally to scare myself how many calories I am having if I were to cut my cake too big. Calorie Count is another very easy to use website. Simply copy the ingredients from a recipe and paste them into the white box, the detection of ingredient and amount is done automatically. Adjust the serving size and you get a nice nutritional table in the end. My dream would be to attach such table to my recipe. So far, Yumprint indicates suggested Nutritional Points on each recipe. The higher the points, the better the nutritional value it has. This feature is an on-going development. Let's see whether my wish would come true.
This is my Yumprint collection. Maybe I will see you there?
ps. I found this post very helpful, especially the readers' comments. That's how I got to know about Yumprint. Evernote is another hot favorite from the readers, if you are tempted.
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