Discolor Online

According to Last.fm I've found my near-perfect musical match: a teenage girl from Brazil who apparently loves Bad Religion, Rancid, Flogging Molly, The Specials, and The Pogues. In fact, I think she'd be an even more perfect match for FreeportPirate, since I'm considerably less inclined toward the Street Dogs, Agnostic Front, or Motorhead than he might be.

According to Last.fm, FreeportPirate and I have only passing musical tastes in common. It's true that I have a broader and more eclectic taste in music than he does but we have a ton of bands in common. I think it's because he's been on a Joy Division kick lately and listening to podcasts.

I've been very much enjoying listening to the "radio stations" of my Last.fm "neighbors" and would love to connect with a few more friends. If you're on Last.fm let me know and let's connect. What are you guys listening to?

Labels: music, networking

This is a plug for GroupRecipes.com, a social networking site for foodies. I signed up a couple of months ago but haven't really had time to poke around with it until today. It's "in beta" but like Flickr and Gmail, I'm finding the "Beta" to be pretty robust.

The interface is a bit of a pain considering I have a lot of my favorite recipes already up on my own recipe pages, and uploading photos that are too big can choke the upload system and screw up your uploads, which I found out to my chagrin. Still, they have really neat features that I can see myself getting a lot of use out of. For example, after you enter a recipe into their system, they give you the option of cutting and pasting the code for the now HTMLitized recipe so you can put it up on your blog or elsewhere. That means if I put a new recipe into Group Recipes first, I can just put in the straight text instead of hand coding the HTML for every recipe in EditPad Lite (which is how I've been doing them all). A definite boon for a clumsy tech-lover like myself.

You can search for other users in your area or search for people who like the same recipes you do or just browse by who is active at the moment. You can watch your friends' activity and automatically see their newest recipe contributions or see comments from other users on recipes you've submitted, delivered to your My Stuff foodie homepage. There's a tastes survey you can fill out so that Roger the Recipe Robot can help predict if you'd like a certain recipe or suggest other recipes that you might enjoy. You can rate the recipes of other users, print them, flag them as interesting or unique, and manage your recipes with their Recipe Manger (including recipes on other sites, so in theory I could just add all the URLs for my own recipes pages and have them all as part of my recipe file at Group Recipes, if I wanted to). You can browse recipes by cuisine, ingredient, or "flavor", by what's popular today or what's new on the site. You can create or join groups like Crockpot Cooking or Cookbook Reviews or Brazil. You can create your own "Food TV" if you've got the ability: I watched Ani Phyo's Raw Food Kitchen's "Mediterranean Dolmas" (made with collard greens) and "Spanish Breakfast Scramble" episodes this afternoon, and learned all about raw food cooking (which is way more interesting than I'd thought). You can also add restaurant reviews (and add photos), so it's not just about cooking but about food in general.

I've only just started exploring GroupRecipes.com but so far I'm really, really liking it. I highly recommend it to my fellow foodies. If you join up, friend me. I'm Nikchick, natch.

Labels: food, networking, recipes