This is probably going to be very niche and only for technically-minded people, but my wife and I both have eyesight issues. I was sick of squinting at the small text on the recipe cards, so I made a self-hosted site that downloads and formats recipes so they're much easier for us to read.

The source code is available here, but in order to use it, you'll need to know your way around PHP, Laravel and Docker, as it's a Laravel Sail project.

The recipe view

The list of recipes

I work best in dark mode, where there's good strong contrast between text, so the ingredients are on a lighter background to the rest of the page, and each ingredient step is in a big, clearly defined box. The dot points (which all run together and are hard to read) have been separated onto their own lines so when I'm in the middle of cooking something, I don't have to work out where in a big slab of text I was before I took my eyes off the screen.

I'm going to start using it when we get our next shipment (tomorrow), but I plan to keep adding some things to it, like making it quicker to add recipes (there's a bookmark which does most of the work, but it could be a one-click thing), and letting you tap on things to mark them as done / not done so you can very easily see your progress.

I know the Hellofresh website and app offer similar things, but these are tailored for me in particular (who needs strong contrast, dark mode, and clear delineation between text elements), and I thought it might be interesting to share the code / show what I've done, in case anyone else is interested.

I might be able to offer limited support for this, but it's a weekend project, so don't expect many updates or a big rush to support it.

by davidgrayPhotography

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