Ever want to add a recipe to your personal recipe collection that you found on the web?  Today, we’re making it much easier.  We’re introducing (1) a web browser button that makes the process simple.  (2) BigOven enhancements to interpret the most common recipe format found on the web, and (3) a Point-and-Click Recipe Importing feature that makes it easy to add recipes for other websites.

By using BigOven to organize your recipes, you’ll be able to add them to menu plans, grocery lists, resize them, access them on the go easily via our mobile and tablet apps, and much more.

PRO Membership Required

These new features require the BigOven PRO membership level (just $1.30/month, billed annually, which removes all advertising and unlocks new features). 

What’s New?

You can now add a recipe by URL! 

For the hundreds of the most popular recipe websites and food blogs that now embrace the hRecipe format, BigOven dramatically speeds up data entry, and preserves a link to the original recipe on the web. 

Where you can find it

Visit the Add a Recipe tab on www.bigoven.com.  You might have noticed that we’ve just added a new box to the top of the page:

Simply paste in a URL of a recipe on the web, and BigOven will go out and try to fetch the recipe details for you, and fill in the form.  It will create a new private recipe.  (Private recipes can only be seen by you, and only when you are logged in.  We respect that other websites have businesses to run, and will not display directly imported recipes publicly – they are shown only to you.)

But it gets even easier than that! 

Are you a BigOven PRO member?  Install our NEW Bookmarklet!

Drag-and-drop this onto your browser’s Favorites toolbar:

(Go ahead and try it!  It works on our blog too.)

Then, visit a recipe page on a popular recipe website. 

Just click the button to save a recipe.  If BigOven can find a recipe in a format that it understands, it’ll do nearly all the work for you.  If it cannot, you’ll be taken to a Point-and-Click page, where you can enter the recipe information yourself easily.

Point and Click Importing

Those of you who BigOven for Windows users know about a handy feature called “Screen Import” that lets you quickly and easily enter recipes into the software.  We’ve just introduced it for the web!  We call it QuickImport, and it’s available for PRO members here:  http://www.bigoven.com/recipe/quickimport. 

Watch It in Action

BigOven’s founder Steve Murch has pulled together a couple demonstration videos of the new enhancements.  The first video shows the handy add-by-button method for a recipe site that BigOven knows how to interpret, and the second shows an example of point-and-click recipe importing.

Watch them here:

Demonstration #1: Create private recipes easily from other sites

Demonstration #2: Point and Click Recipe Importing with BigOven

BigOven PRO Members Only

These new recipe organizing features are for PRO members only. 

PRO members enjoy an advertising-free experience, the ability to post private recipes, a smart grocery list that synchronizes across mobile devices, a drag and drop menu planner, free RecipeScan credits, and more.  You can try BigOven PRO free for 30 days.

PRO membership costs less than 1 latte per month and it eliminates all advertisement for an entire year.  Give it a try today.

How it works

There’s a new recipe format spreading across the web called hRecipe.  It’s a hidden way of marking up a recipe page to tell the search engines and organizing services like BigOven how to interpret a recipe.

Just like Google, Bing and other search engines, BigOven now knows how to read and interpret hRecipe format, and can import the recipe details for you privately.

Now, recipe websites change their formats all the time, and we cannot guarantee that this feature will always work to perfection 100% of the time with 100% of the recipe websites out there – much of this is out of our control. But we do guarantee that over the course of many recipes, you’ll save a huge amount of time.

Benefit to You

By organizing your recipes in BigOven, you get a lot of benefits:

• Y
  ou’ll never forget anything at the grocery store again
• You’ll save time
• You’ll have easy access to your favorite recipes at the grocery store
• Create a grocery list, sorted by aisle that goes with you on our mobile apps
• Create a menu plan (and generate a grocery list for any date range you want!)
• Build a Favorites or Try Soon list
• Rate the recipes and calculate nutrition facts
• Resize recipes easily

BigOven PRO was just awarded the Parent-Tested, Parent-Approved Seal of Approval.

Recipes and Copyright

BigOven is designed to be the ultimate recipe organizational software for cooks around the world. 

We design, develop and deliver web, mobile and desktop platforms for recipe storage, sharing and discovery, and handy tools like a Menu Planner, Grocery List, Mobile Apps, Nutrition Calculator and more.  Our goal is to help you get organized and inspired in the kitchen and on the go.

It is up to users to understand and abide by the appropriate copyright and fair use laws. 

We respect that other food websites have businesses to run.  All imported recipes are kept private to you.  We currently do allow a manual override for you to make such recipes public, but we cannot guarantee that they will not be deleted if you do so.  From time to time, we do receive DMCA advisories and we act on them swiftly.

Furthermore, we respect the wishes of third-party recipe sites that contact us and wish to have their content blocked from organization in this manner.  (A note to these third-party sites – all recipes imported retain a prominent link to the original content on the web, so our hope is that this feature does help build links and traffic for you.)  More information on our copyright adherence policy and recipe copyright in general can be found on our copyright page. 

It’s in Beta for PRO Members – Comments and Suggestions Welcome!

Starting today, the “Add a Recipe” bookmarklet, the QuickImport feature and the Add by URL feature are now live on BigOven.

It’s in beta, and we’d love your feedback.  Happy cooking!