The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/zeekaran on 2024-07-07 18:47:12.
Has anyone saved a bunch of Blue Apron recipes? Whether it's as PDFs, HTMLs, or imported into a recipe manager like Paprika or Mealie, I'm interested in what you've done.
My issues so far:
I have a bunch of paper recipes from as far back as ten years ago, probably ~150 of them. I could scan and save as PDF, but that seems unnecessary as every recipe is still on BA's website, thus already digitized. So I have tried to save them that way.
Mealie cannot import from BA's URLs because it needs to log in. Paprika can because they have a built in browser so I can log into BA, but they export quite poorly to Mealie and the desktop app for Paprika cuts me off at 50 recipes.
After importing from Paprika to Mealie, the recipes get pretty messed up. Every ingredient shows as one item, such as "(1) 3 Tbsp oregano", and the mass parser struggles with this. At this rate it would be faster to just manually copy and paste every single recipe, but I have better things to do with my time.
BA recipes have titles for their steps, like "1 Prepare ingredients and make the base", "2 Bake the tray", followed by a detailed paragraph of the steps. Paprika to Mealie turns the title into step 1, the paragraph into step 2, then the real step 2 ends up as step 3. More manual tweaking is needed on EVERY RECIPE so again, scraping through Paprika, exporting to Mealie just doesn't seem like the right idea.
BA's website also hides the nutrition facts in a popup as an image, so scraping this is quite difficult.
Then I have to manually upload the image because Paprika exports some artifacted, low quality garbage. So yeah, Paprika no good.
I feel like at this point I could write my own damn scraper, if I could figure out a good way to optimize the data to be perfectly imported by Mealie.
Or I could just scan the damn papers, export to PDF, upload the PDF as a book and not use a recipe manager program at all. old man grumblings