Yumbox started off as a complaint. “There are no decent recipe managing websites out there,” I whined. It’s true. All of the popular ones are too bloated with so-called community features. Now I’m not a bah-humbug recluse type of Tina, but I do want to keep things simple. I simply want to be able to collect, catalogue, and organize recipes, without having to field ads on the left, comments on the right, and watch out! a seasonal feature coming right at you overhead. On the other end of the spectrum, we already have many super pared-down, personal-recipe-collection types of web apps, which initially seemed more to my taste—there was even a mobile version of some for iPhone!—but ultimately none of these were completely satisfactory. They either lack essential features, have an inflexible organizational scheme, or just plain don’t look good.

Yumbox seared all of these flaws with its laser vision, plus it has all the lovely corner-rounding CSS that you could ever want.

After four months of grueling hard labor, Yumbox (Personal Tina Edition) is ready for the looking-ats. We’re still ironing out the final bugs in the iPhone version, but in the meantime, you can check it out here!

Yummy features include:

• smartypants parsing of pasted ingredient list into separate table columns for amount, unit, ingredient name, and optional note
• freeform + flexible tag-based organization scheme
• super-fast Ajaxified editing, tag adding, login, etc.
• shopping list that supports drag and drop reordering, automatic ingredient combining, amount specifications, and colored ingredient highlighting (so you can see which ingredient belongs to which recipe)
• iPhone version that fully supports editing and adding new recipes, and most importantly, the shopping (check)list
• ability to choose between a traditional, full-text recipe or a recipe link (useful for bookmarking blogs within your food-centric existing tagging system, so that you do not have to maintain a separate Delicious account or Bookmarks folder for keeping track of interesting recipes)
• background colors and images change according to the seasons, featuring randomized photos of seasonal produce (a friendly reminder to eat locally and seasonally)
• Doubles as a personal recipe-focused food blog and a recipe manager
• Large font for reading off the screen while cooking
• Clean, recipe-focused design

The hope is that someday we can roll this out to be a full-fledged web app so everyone can use it, not just me. In the meantime, I’ll be the guinea pig. =) And from now on, I will post almost all of my new recipes in Yumbox, save for the ones that come with a verbose tale… like Roll Cake (sigh).