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Creating Your Own delicious Cookbook

Creating Your Own delicious Cookbook

If you look up lots of recipes online, and then add them to your favorites, sooner or later your favorites list can get a little unwieldy. The solution? Check out the social bookmarking site delicious.com. I recently started using delicious to keep track of promising links from other sites. My "virtual cookbook" (http://delicious.com/simplyrecipes/) has a ton of great recipes, mostly from other food blogs, and new ones are easy to add.

There are several advantages of using a service like delicious.com to create your own cookbook. One benefit is the extensive tagging capabilities. You can categorize, or "tag", a link with any category you want, whatever makes sense to you. In a way, you are building a subject index for all of your links. I often tag recipes with their main ingredients, so if I want to look up all the salad recipes, that's easy to do. Another cool feature is to see what recipes other people find interesting enough to include in their del.icio.us bookmarks. Here are some of the more currently popular dessert links on delicious.

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Creating Your Own delicious Cookbook

Method

Getting set up with delicious.com is easy, and free.

1 Sign up at http://delicious.com. The sign-up procedure will walk you through the easiest registration on the planet.

2 Click on the "post to delicious" and/or the "my delicious" images and drag them up to your browser's bookmarks bar. It should end up looking something like this:

delicious-toolbar.gif

Now if you find a great recipe online, just add it to your delicious.com collection by clicking on the "post to delicious" button in your bookmarks bar. Assign it some tags. It's as easy as that.

3 Most people who use del.icio.us use it for more than just recipes, clearly. So as to not mix up the recipe links with other links, create a tag "bundle" for your recipes and bundle your recipe oriented tags under that bundle. You can also take the additional step of tagging all of your recipe links with "recipe" or "recipes".

4 If you do set up an "virtual cookbook" at delicious, please add me to your delicious.com network and let me know so I can add you to mine.

5 Finally, I've added a little delicious.com button to the bottom of every post in Simply Recipes. If you click on that button, it will take you to delicious.com and prompt you to add the link to your delicious bookmarks.

30 Comments

I've been using del.icio.us for a while and find it a great place to keep track of whatever I come across on the net. Tags, as you mentioned make it a breeze to trace all the links you need.
Thanks for suggesting using it for a personalized web-based cookbook!

Posted by: Louly on May 18, 2006 11:18 PM

Thank you for your recommendation about del.icio.us. I use it alot and love it. I would like to add one thing though that is a huge help. I use the Mozilla Firefox webbrowser and the toolbar theme noia extreme lets you add the icon for del.icio.us and tag so when you want to add a "tag" just click on the icon and when you want to view what tags you have in del.icio.us just click on the tab in your toolbar. I absolutely love Mozilla Firefox as my browser. Much much better than Internet Explorer.

Posted by: Denise on May 19, 2006 1:39 AM

Hi Elyse!

I have more than a few of your recipes tagged in my del.icio.us profile already. I've added you to my network - inblackink - as well. I have a "culinary" bundle, since I also have articles and pages that are not strictly recipes tagged. But I love the detail you've put into your tags. Thanks for sharing!

Rose

Posted by: Rose on May 19, 2006 4:24 AM

Elise, this sounds like a great idea! Never heard of it...so THANKS for letting us all know.

I may find out the answer to this question once I read the tutorial, but I was wondering if all the recipes I have in my Favorite Email account folder could be added. Sounds like it might be easy to do this on new ones I find but a lot of work to switch all the old ones over. Maybe not.

Posted by: Deb on May 19, 2006 4:39 AM

Thanks for the great tip. Now I can take the 17 places I keep my notes and recipes and organize them.Since your hint was posted this morning I was the 493rd to sign up.

Posted by: Jerry N. on May 19, 2006 4:42 AM

Elise, Thanks for this! I have been wondering how del.icio.us worked for awhile and hadn't taken the time to check it out. I'll be making my own cookbook soon; thanks again for the helpful explanation!

Posted by: Jennifer on May 19, 2006 6:44 AM

This is a GREAT idea -- thanks! I signed up as jessicafm and added you to my network. My cookbook is blank right now, but not for long. :-)

Posted by: Jessica on May 19, 2006 7:34 AM

I've been using Delicious to do exactly this and sharing your bookmarks is quite a boon! Thanks!

Posted by: mimsie on May 19, 2006 9:10 AM

I've been doing the same thing, also!

Posted by: Chris on May 19, 2006 1:08 PM

I'd never heard of del.icio.us but I'll definitely try and check it out. Lately I've been saving all the recipes I'm interested in trying to folders on my desktop but now my desktop's certainly getting cluttered! I must say--documenting which recipes I'd tried and whether or not they worked was one thing that convinced me to start a food blog.
Thanks again for the tip!

Posted by: Lady Amalthea on May 19, 2006 10:25 PM

This is a great idea but I'm a bit old fashioned. For me, special favourites graduate from online into a hand written and decorated notebook.

Posted by: Shani on May 19, 2006 11:42 PM

Hi Elise. Del.icio.us was one of those things I was planning to finally investigate when school gets out (2 more weeks!). Thanks for this great idea. I love the way you've done it.

Posted by: kalyn on May 20, 2006 7:06 AM

Thanks for that information! I just recently added mine but I want to make a whole section of other people's - that macaroni of yours is going in it right away

Posted by: Gabriella True on May 21, 2006 12:48 AM

What an awesome idea. None of the software I've checked out for organizing recipes really seemed to do everything I wanted but this will be awesome. I've signed up as AUSongbird and will start adding recipes immediately.

Posted by: Betty Morgan on May 21, 2006 7:44 AM

What a great idea. I am going to sign up for this. Sounds so simple and yet so useful. Thanks for posting about it.

Posted by: Sylvie on May 21, 2006 10:48 AM

Hi Elise!

What an excellent idea!

I had been experimenting with adding tags to del.icio.us but hadn't tried creating bundles until your suggestions in your post. Awesome!

I have many of my bookmarks saved at my own private site at "savethis.com" and have been transferring them to del.icio.us. Using one centralized storage site makes more sense than using food sites internal "recipe boxes". I have so many food sites with recipes boxes like this that many a time I can't locate or remember which site had the recipe that I needed.

I have added you to my network.

Thanks again for the wonderful suggestion!!!

Posted by: ladykarenlouise on May 22, 2006 12:15 AM

I started a del.icio.us cookbook and added you to my network: del.icio.us/rousejen

Posted by: Jen on May 22, 2006 11:36 PM

Thanks for the tip! What a brillant idea! Sure will reduce the size of my "Recipes" folder in my favourites list :)

Posted by: Krista on May 23, 2006 9:44 AM

Dear Elise,

I've added you to my del.icio.us network. I'm currently re-designing my culinary site. I've truly enjoyed your site and check it everyday.

Posted by: Candy Estacio on May 23, 2006 11:26 AM

Thanks for the instructions on how to work with the bundles in del.icio.us. I added you to my network--arm0110.

Posted by: Andrea on May 23, 2006 12:33 PM

I love this suggestion Elise! I already set up my account and networked to you. I've been using Mag.nolia to keep track of my regular links but I think this is a awesome idea to use del.icio.us for recipes. I posted a few recipes on my blog back during the Thanksgiving holidays because I always misplace them and with this idea I can find them in two places if I need to in the future!

Posted by: Eliza on May 24, 2006 7:42 PM

I'd also like to recommend the new site Dine52.com for collecting recipes from multiple sites. It uses a del.icio.us-like system for saving bookmarks, and allows for easy searches of other member's recipe bookmark collections.

With either site it can become very easy to share your recipes with friends and subscribe to bookmarks of other members. So if you find another Dine52.com or del.icio.us member with similar tastes you can easily discover new recipes you would like.

(Disclosure: I am affiliated with Dine52.com)

Posted by: William Booth on May 25, 2006 1:32 PM

Elise, I also added you to my network at del.icio.us. This is such a wonderful idea.
http://del.icio.us/sylvie1950

Posted by: Sylvie on May 27, 2006 7:33 PM

Hey thanks for the great tip. I added you to my del.icio.us network. Add me to yours please!

Posted by: Ehrik on May 30, 2006 2:18 PM

If someone takes down their blog, or moves their url, presumably del.icio.us will no longer be able to find the recipe, right? This is what has me cutting and pasting...

Posted by: art-sweet on June 22, 2006 8:09 PM

Elise, thanks again for this great idea. I finally got mine done, and I added you to my network. Mine is del.icio.us/kalynskitchen if you want to add me.

Posted by: kalyn on July 4, 2006 8:51 AM

Love your site =) Thanks for the tip. I added you on my network: del.icio.us/carolineveronica

Posted by: Caroline on August 16, 2006 10:48 PM

Thanks, this is helping me so much in getting my bookmarks organized. I usually don't have time to print or copy and paste into Mastercook, this is working out so much better! Your blog is awesome!

Posted by: billie/ca on December 2, 2006 6:01 PM

I've added you to my network - starting my own little cookbook. This is a fantastic idea!

Posted by: amanda on January 8, 2007 2:09 AM

This is a fabulous idea. thank you so much for sharing!

Posted by: kristen on April 9, 2009 8:32 PM

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