Using Delicious for organizing recipes ~ a tutorial

Please welcome guest blogger, Keri from Bread of Angels to my blog today.  I was blog hopping the other day and saw a post that Keri had written about meal planning and she happened to mention that she used Delicious to organize her recipes online.

I’ve used Delicious a bit here and there but not enough to explain to anyone else how to do it.  Yet, since February is recipe month, I definitely thought it was something we should talk about.  So I twittered Keri and begged asked her if she would please write a tutorial explaining how it all works.  She was so kind to do this and she even used screen shots, how cool is that!  Thank you so much Keri!

*****************

Anyone have a messy mountain of recipes ripped out of magazines or printed off websites? Can you find the exact recipe you’re looking for in that pile, or quickly skim through all your soup or chicken recipes?

Here’s a handy way to make your personal cookbook paperless. I used delicious to create a customized, searchable online cookbook and eliminate that pile of paper. Delicious is a social bookmarking tool that stores your favorite sites online. You can see my online cookbook, and I’m going to show you how to set one up for yourself.

If you don’t already have a delicious account, you’ll need to register for one first. It’s also very helpful to have a delicious bookmark tool installed in your browser. Once that’s done, follow these steps to get started on a paperless cookbook.

Creating Your Delicious Cookbook

1. Log into your delicious account. Click on the gray Bookmarks square at the top of the page. Look in the upper right corner and find the blue shaded box under the search bar. Click on the link that says ‘Tag Options’ and then click on the link that says ‘Manage tag bundles’.



2. Click the green ‘Create’ button.



3. Name your cookbook whatever you want in box number one, then type as many recipe keywords as you can think of in box number two.
   • Enter anything you would want to search by, including ingredients (chocolate, fish), cuisines (Mexican, Asian), meals (dinner, breakfast), or other possibilities you use (meatless, slowcooker).
   • Do not use commas; separate each keyword with a space only.
   • If you have keywords you want to use that are more than one word, just smoosh the words together (teaparty).
   • Once you have entered all the tags you can think of, click the green ‘Save’ button.

Adding Recipes to Your Cookbook

1. Now that you have a system set up to organize your recipe bookmarks, let’s start adding recipes to your cookbook. Go to an online recipe you want to add to your online cookbook. Click your ‘bookmark on delicious’ button. (This will vary by the browser you are using, but should have been explained when you installed the browser tools in the first step.)
2. The title of the webpage will be included (you can change this if you want to remember it by something else) and there is a line for tags. Enter as many of your tags as you think you might want to search for this recipe by. As you do this more often, your tags will appear below the ‘Tags’ line under ‘Recommended Tags’ and all you have to do is click on the ones you want to add. Click ‘Save’ when you are done.



3. If you go to your delicious page, your new recipe bookmark will appear under your cookbook heading. Clicking on any of your tags will show you all the recipes you have added under that tag, making it easy to look up soup or cookie recipes.

Adding New Keywords to Your Cookbook

There is one other thing you need to know. Eventually you will tag a recipe with a keyword that’s not included in your tag bundle because you didn’t think of it when you first set this up. If this happens you’ll see those tags listed at the bottom under ‘Unbundled Tags’. To make sure any recipes you tag with the new keyword are included in your cookbook, you need to go back and add them to the tag bundle.

When this happens, all you have to do is go back to step one, but rather than creating a new bundle, click ‘Edit’ next to your cookbook. Add the unbundled tags that you want in your cookbook group and the recipes will automatically be moved into your online cookbook folders.

One More Thing

You can add other delicious users to your network so they can see your bookmarks and see the great recipes you’ve discovered as well. To do this, click on the gray People square at the top of the page and then look for the blue shaded box in the upper right.

Click on ‘Add a user to Network’. Enter the delicious username you want to add and then click ‘Add’. They will then appear under your Network and by clicking on their username you can see all of their bookmarks.

Leave a comment and let us know your delicious username so we can can add you to our networks and see your new cookbooks.