Cooktime and Preptime – Rich Snippets Redux

Long time users (bofem) of hRecipe will recall the project started long before Google announced Rich Snippets.

And discerning (or perhaps meticulously obsessive) bloggers might note that Google’s definition for a valid rich snippet doesn’t quite match the proposed hrecipe microformat specification.

For example, one or more durations are specified as optional by the microformat specification, but Google really wants you to specify duration times. Specifically, Google would very much like to have cooking time and preparation time.

In the interest of playing well with others, hRecipe now has both preptime and cooktime as mandatory elements for the hRecipe plugin for WordPress.

Rich Snippets versus SEO

If you’ve been here, to the hrecipe.com website, or to my Website In A Weekend site, you’ll aready know:

I’m big on the notion of “smarten’ you up.”

I hate that dumbing down stuff and I won’t have it. If you’re a blogger and food blogger, you’re by definition smarter than average bear.

Most likely, you’ve already mastered some fundamentals of SEO. Not that hard, right?

Ok, rich snippets aren’t the same as SEO, and rich snippets aren’t any harder than simple SEO, but…

…rich snippets are different than SEO.

Rich snippets are simply a way to package information on the web page you already have.

So what’s the catch?

(There’s always a catch, right?)

The catch is this: understanding rich snippets requires learning about a teaspoon of meta, a swirl of semantic, a small dollop of HTML, and a pinch of CSS.

See, building a web page requires following a recipe for web pages.

In one sense, the microformatting is like seasoning, not really necessary but very nice to have. Think of microformatting as icing the HTML cake which builds your web page. Makes it tastier for search engines.

I’ll be writing a lot more about metadata, microformats, HTML and CSS in the future. And I’m gonna keep it simple. If you can cook, you can understand “meta” and “micro” and “semantic” stuff no problem, I’ll guarantee it.

hRecipe version 0.5.8.x

Welcome to the 0.5.8 series of releases. There has been quite a bit more work done under the hood, resulting in a faster, more elegant, and less buggy hRecipe.

You can find the full changelog on the WordPress hRecipe Plugin page. Here are some highlights:

• As noted above, hRecipe now splits duration into preparation and cooking time for better Google Rich Snippets
• Added some padding before and after the hrecipe div block to help with TinyMCE visual editor to help MS Internet Explorer users.
• Source cleanup, removed superfluous functions, obsolete commented out sections, etc.
• Donations closed for now, and many thanks to those who have donated to date. We’ll reopen donations in the future.
• Saved settings. Extended options handling to save existing user options and merge with newly defined options.
• More UJS cleanups. Started removing custom javascript code in favor of future proofing with WordPress builtin code.
• New screenshots explaining new data entry one per line for ingredients and instructions.

Overall, a more refined hRecipe than ever before.