The date was set as March 23rd 2011… 12:00 midnight Pakistan Standard Time which makes it 3:00 PM here in New York. This means I had to launch the site in the middle of work-day at my day-job. Plus… since I have made a mess updating test and production sites separately… lately due to delays in launch…. the launch was not expected to be a one-button-click event. I had to bring down existing site while copying over selective files/data from test to production.

That’s exactly what I did. I added a subdomain  “comingsoon.pakirecipes.com” with a single webpage that announces the launch. By editing the .htaccess file I redirected all traffic of the site to this subdomain. But I made one exception for a test domain that I added as an alias to PakiRecipes. I did this at 12 midnight ET (USA) and started copying over the files from test to prod. I was done before leaving for work. At 3PM… from work… all I had to do was remove the redirection from my .htaccess file and taadaa… the site is launched.

Of course there were some mistakes, some glitches.. but they were all minor ones and I waited to get home to fix them.

What’s new:

Technologies:
jQuery, AJAX, Open Graph Protocol, Custom JavaScript, Khan Combo, Advance mySQL (Views, Full Text Indexing & Stored Procedures)

Speed:
Server-Side Compression, Chache-Control, Optimized Images, CSS Sprites, Delayed Loading

Seacrh Engine Optimization (SEO):
Permalinks, Open Graph Protocol, MicroData and Advance Social-Network Sharing.

History:

Version 1.0 – November 3rd 2000:

• Started as a test project to implement my newly learned skills of server side programming/scripting.
• Built on CGI/Perl script with flat file (text file) so-called database.
• Designed and maintained with MS FrontPage
• No user management system was in place. Anyone could post recipes and comments (hence the mess).

Version 2.0 – August 14th 2006:
(Occasion: Pakistan’s Independence Day – August 14th, 1947)

• Desperately needed a back-end database, user management and site-wide moderation capability.
• Built around phpBB, the most popular discussion forum, with PHP and mySQL.
• Used phpBB’s user/group management system and the forum system.
• Built Recipes, Tips n Tricks, Video, Meals, Articles, Store, Album, and Search sections on top of phpBB.
• Used Group permissions and authentication to moderate contents (recipes, comments, posts etc.).
• Used cron-jobs to select daily recipe, video, tip/trick etc.
• Used flash animation and XML to show daily picks on home page.
• Created site-map for Google and Yahoo.

Version 3.0 – March 23rd 2011:
(Occasion: Pakistan’s Resolution Day – March 23rd, 1940)

• Gave it a face-lift with modified layout.
• Replaced flash with jQuery/CSS/AJAX based (lighter) home page animation
• Using jQuery, AJAX and custom JavaScript for design, layout and user-friendly interface.
• Using Khan Combo (yes.. that is Nawed KHAN’s combo) for search system on home page that returns live result as you type.
• Optimized database and using Views, Full-Text Indexing and stored procedures for faster and smoother database transactions.
• Using Open Graph Protocol for making content easy to integrate with social networks.
• Using Permalink and SiteMaps for SEO and user/search engine friendly links.
• Using GZip compression on server side and custom cache-controls to speed up the load time.
• Using delayed loading to speed up the page. External widgets (facebook, adsense etc.) loads after the page is rendered.
• Using MicroData for product definition.

www.pakirecipes.com/recipes/Beef
www.pakirecipes.com/recipes/Poultry

Later on I learned how the Mod-Rewrite can be used to read values from query string and pass over to the redirected URL. I implemented this by adding “rtitle” in query string to pass the recipe title. Modified the recipe page to read “rtitle” value and use it to load corresponding recipe. Incase there is nothing found… the user was redirected to the search result page with the title as search entry. This worked pretty well and I generated my site-map.xml to submit to Google and Yahoo. But then I started seeing some issues. Three issues to be precise.
First… Recipes in my database are listed by unique IDs and not unique Titles. Meaning… there were (many) cases where more than one recipe had same title. This was not a big issue because in this case I was redirecting users to the search page where they will see all recipes under the same title.

Second… Special characters in title like ()!-?[] etc. were not really URLencoded. This was causing some recipes to not work also because the sitemap.xml was breaking. I cleaned all titles and removed special characters but the other admins and recipe experts continued to add these characters here and there.

Third… Name change!! Admins and Experts had to be forbidden from changing the recipe title. Why? because if I have submitted www.pakirecipes.com/recipe/Haleem in sitemap and now it is renamed to Easy Haleem… it will not work.

After lots of research and lots of thinking I came up with a solution that addresses all of the above three issues. Here is how…

I made Recipe Title a unique column in MySQL database. Therefore no two recipes can have same title. I produced a list of all recipes that had duplicate names and had the Jr. Admins go through it. They slightly changed names so I can apply Unique constraint.

Instead of using the title of the recipe  I made a new table ‘Permalinks’ to store the permalinks. This table has 3 columns. Recipe ID, Permalink and create date (time-stamp). I populated this table with stripped recipe titles and their IDs. I am using hyphens (-) as separators… not underscores and not + sign. Using a PHP function I removed all special characters and replaced spaces with hyphen from the recipe titles. This solves the special character problem (no. 2 above).

Lastly… since the sitemap contains the permalink and not the actual title… the renaming of title changes nothing. This solves the third problem.

What if Haleem becomes Nehari…. the Haleem permalink will take user to Nehari??? you must ask!!!

A brilliant question. Brilliant because I asked that too, first

That is where the timestamp (3rd) column comes in play. Renaming recipe title creates a new permalink and inserts in the Permalink table with new timestamp. So if Haleem was 23 and now Haleem is renamed to Nehari… the table contains 23:Haleem and 23:Nehari with Nehari having latest date to it.  Now if someone visits Nehari they will get to Nehari (23). If they visit Haleem (from already submitted and popular link) they will get to Nehari… unless there is a new recipe with title Haleem. This technique covers all scenarios and makes everyone happy. I just had to update the Recipe Adding/Editing page to make sure no two recipes had the same title and Recipe ID, Permalink is unique.

So far this have been working as desired. Have submitted my sitemap to Google and Yahoo. Only the newest of two (or more).

 Some links:

www.pakirecipes.com/recipe/Aachari-Aloo
www.pakirecipes.com/meal/Aloo-Paratha-Special
www.pakirecipes.com/recipe/Baked-Macaroni-And-Cheese

Launch date is set to be March 23rd, 2011 – 12:00 midnight Pakistan standard time. Pakistan Resolution day seems a perfect occasion to launch a Pakistan site. I am almost done anyways and the occasion is right around the corner.

Had a major drawback in Nov-Dec  2010 when a server update went bad and made all sites, including PakiRecipes, un-editable. Recovering from that took another month but all is well now.

For the first time in PakiRecipes, since it first launch in Nov 2000, I am using a test setup to accommodate all the changes/updates to the site.  This is both a good thing and bad thing. Good thing because I can take my time making changes and adding features without affecting production site. Bad thing because I have been making, due to emergencies, changes to both servers and can’t remember which is which.

Will list the new features and a little history about PakiRecipes in my future entries. Stay tuned.

Finally, I added the feature as a new section for Ramadan in August 2010. Initially meals were categorized only Under Sehri and Iftar (for Ramadan). Then activated Eid Speacials on Eif-ul-Fitr of course.

We will be adding more meals in soon to be activated categories (Lunch, Dinner, Brunch etc.)

You can view PakiRecipes Meals here.