efoodi Tutorial

Getting around efoodi

Your Profile Page

Friends, Privacy, and Communication

Recipes, Restaurants, Drinks, and Articles

Labels, Links, and Bookmarks

Using the Search Engine

Everything people submit to efoodi is available through the search engine. efoodi tries to guess what kind of item you're looking for (recipe, restaurant, person, etc.) based on what you type in, but you may sometimes have to correct it by clicking on the associated link at the top of the search results.

All other parts of efoodi (sign in, contact, faq, etc.) are reachable by the links at the top and bottom of the page.

You can get to your profile page by clicking on the "My Account" link at the top left of the page when you are signed in. Your profile page keeps any personal information, as well as your friends and bookmarks (more on those subjects below).

You don't have to fill out your profile, but it can be useful to put a bit of information here so your friends can find you easily (see below for adding friends).

You can submit four kinds of items to efoodi: Recipes, Restaurants, Drinks, and Articles. The first three are pretty straightforward, but you might be confused by what an Article is supposed to be.

Articles are meant to be a broad catch-all category for all the food information out there that doesn't fit into one of the other categories. For example, you might add an article about your experiences with a new diet. Similarly, you might write an article about a particular cooking technique or other bits of information you want to record and share.

Articles are also a good way to pull together other pieces of information from efoodi or elsewhere on the web. For example, you could produce an article that describes a four-course meal, and then add links to the various recipes that make it up. Or you could make an article about popular bars in your neighborhood, and link to several restaurant pages for each of those bars.

Your profile page links to all the items you have created with four tabs at the top of the page. To add a new item, just click the "Create!" button near the top of the page.

Every piece of information you provide to efoodi can be edited at any time. Just click the big "Edit!" button and you will be snapped into edit-mode, where you can modify whatever you like.

efoodi provides many fields for various types of information... don't freak out! If you don't want to provide any particular piece of information, just leave it blank.

efoodi makes use of social connections to help you explore the most relevant information with the least hassle. To do this, you need to tell efoodi who your friends are.

When you add someone as a friend, you will see a small link to them on your profile page. Also, if you have enforced the appropriate privacy controls (see below), adding someone to your friends list allows them to send you messages and post comments on the pages you create.

Communication on efoodi takes the form of "comments" at the bottom of pages you create, or "messages" at the bottom of your profile page. "Privacy" refers to what other members you allow to communicate with you.

efoodi offers four levels of privacy, ranging from no communication at all, to allowing all efoodi members to reach you. We recommmend that you allow your friends to contact you (an intermediate level of privacy), but you can change your privacy settings whenever you like so you can see what's best for you.

Non-members are never allowed to communicate with you, so you don't have to worry about advertisers or other unwanted communication.

You can search for people with the search engine. Try using their names, or perhaps search for a particular location or affiliation (e.g. company or school name, the name of a club, church, or other social group, etc.).

When you've found a friend, click the "Add to Friends!" text near the top of the page. efoodi will ask you for some text to describe the friend (e.g. "my best friend", "my roommate's sister"), but you can leave that blank if you like.

You have the option to provide "labels" for your profile page, and all the items you add to efoodi. A label is a short piece of descriptive text that helps people find items with the search engine.

You might try labeling your profile with your various social affiliations (company, school, club), your nationality or ethnicity, or anything else you think describes you. You could label recipes with the associated cuisine, type of dish, and so on.

You have the option to provide links from your pages to other pages on the web. You might want to link your profile to your personal web page if you have one, or to the web sites of any groups you're affiliated with. Similarly, you might want to link a recipe to articles with information about the associated cooking techniques.

Bookmarks are little reminders of items you found particularly interesting or useful; they're displayed on your profile page so you can easily find everything you've bookmarked.

To bookmark an item, just click on "bookmark this item" near the top of the page. As with friends, efoodi will ask you for a short label for the bookmark (e.g. "this pie would be good with dinner", or "I should try this restaurant!"). Feel free not to provide a label, but if you have a lot of bookmarks having some labels can help you quickly remember what they all are.

Just like other search engines, efoodi uses the keywords you provide in the search box to find relevant items. This happens at many levels, including using efoodi's database of food concepts to link words like "salmon" to other words like "fish". While efoodi is fairly flexible in what input it will accept, we recommend that you avoid using full sentences in your searches, unless you're specifically looking for a document containing that sentence. So, try to use phrases like "lowfat diet information" instead of "information about lowfat diets".

Tabs at the top of the search results allow you to switch the type of item you're searching for; efoodi tries to take its best guess at what you're looking for based on what you type in, but it's not perfect so sometimes you'll have to manually change it. Using keywords like "restaurant" or "person" in your search can be useful to ensure that efoodi guesses correctly the first time around.

When you search while you are signed in, efoodi offers to restrict your search to your own items. Similarly, if you have recorded friends in your profile, efoodi will offer to restrict to items from your friends. This lets you explore items in your immediate social vicinity, which you may find more interesting or useful than results from the general population.

The social search doesn't end at your doorstep; you can socially search anyone's account just by going to their profile page. Say you find a restaurant review you found particularly useful from someone you don't know; you can use the social search to explore items submitted by that person, or by that person's friends.

On the side bar, efoodi sometimes offers options to expand or narrow your search. Expanding can be useful if you look for something very specific like "low-fat italian fish soup", and only find a few results. Narrowing is useful if you search for something very general, like "cheese", and get back many results without much in common.

If efoodi doesn't find anything that directly matches your request, it will try to find things that might be "close enough" for you. It will let you know with a small message at the top of the results if it had to use an inexact match, and may offer a suggestion for an alternate spelling if one is available.

If you receive inexact results, please be sure you're searching in the right category, or that your search terms make sense for the category you're searching. For example, if you start searching for "italian recipes", and then decide that you want to find a restaurant that serves italian food, you should change your search terms to "italian restaurants" or just "italian", if you're already viewing the restaurants tab.