reid@decwrl.DEC.COM (Brian Reid) (11/28/86)
As I sit here digesting my Thanksgiving dinner, I realize that it was one year ago today that mod.recipes began. I started it out with some recipes that I had cribbed from net.cooks, and with some of my own recipes. We began with 2 recipes a week; within a month it was up to 4 recipes a week, in March of 1986 I increased it to 5 recipes a week, where it has been ever since. I am really quite pleased with the way it has gone this first year. There have been 299 recipes submitted, of which 258 have been sent out and 41 are still in the works, either being checked out, being proofread, or waiting in the queue. There were 139 different people who contributed recipes (a list of their names is at the end of this message). About half of the 139 people submitted their recipe in troff form, which saved me a huge amount of work. The archives currently occupy 1.08 megabytes of disk space, and the printed version of the cookbook is almost 400 pages. The software seems to work pretty well, though as the collection gets bigger it is clearly necessary to release a new edition of the cookbook software that can cope with various schemes for saving file space and organizaing a large number of recipes. Many people have sent in suggestions; 5 or 6 have sent in completely rewritten versions of the recipe software that are an improvement in one way or another. Because the recipe software must be kept simple (so that it can be installed and used by non-programmers) I have been quite reluctant to send out any of the improved and more-complex versions. It is very important to me that mod.recipes remain accessible to biologists and technical writers and administrative assistants and receptionists as well as programmers and computer scientists. I am delighted by the number and diversity of mod.recipes readers. There are about 9300 online readers worldwide, and if you include the spouses and friends who get paper copies of the recipes, I estimate that about 15000 people read or collect these recipes. I can't claim that everything is positive. Because of the huge rush of contributions in March, there were 4-month waits in getting some of the recipes out. Some people are offended when I rewrite their words or change terminology; I do this to nearly every recipe to one extent or another. Some people are annoyed that I don't reject frivolous or trivial recipes. I have made a few mistakes in the metric conversions, usually by misunderstanding the word "ounce". The proofreading is uneven: just tonight, for example, I let a spelling error get out in the fruit-tart recipe (it's not worth retransmitting a recipe worldwide to fix a 1-word spelling error). After 6 months of talking about it, I still don't have the archive server set up (I can't do it in the obvious way because I need to do per-site volume limits and flow control.) Sometimes I worry that I'm putting too many of my own recipes in to fill out "theme" batches, thereby monopolizing more than my share of the airwaves. Nevertheless, I think mod.recipes is a lot of fun and worth continuing. If it ever stops being fun I will give it up and ask for a new moderator. If you ever think that I'm falling down on the job, then stage a palace revolt and install a new moderator. Until then, let's keep going. Special thanks to the 139 first-year contributors listed below (the number in front of each name is the number of recipes submitted by that person, not all of which have been sent out yet). With 9300 readers and 139 contributors, that means that only 1.5% of the mod.recipes readers have ever submitted a recipe. That's 1 out of 60. Let's hear from some more of you. Brian 1 King Ables 2 Andy Albert 4 Paul Asente 1 Colin Atherton 2 Sharon Badian 5 Suzanne Barnett-Scott 1 Dave Bartley 1 Pete Bellas 1 Chan Benson 1 Maurice Bizzarri 1 Steve Bjork 2 Patricia Boren 1 Bill and Joyce Bulko 1 Theresa Campbell 1 Andy Cheese 4 Anita Cochran 1 Rita Coleman 1 Tina Coulson 1 Delight Covill 1 Karen Curran 1 John Daleske 1 Dave Dameron 1 Harry Delugach 1 Bob Devine 1 Robert Diamond 1 Bill Dow 1 Susan Eisen 1 Andrew Elliott 10 Daniel Faigin 2 Mike Foster 14 Aviva Garrett 1 Charles Geiger 5 Mike Gigante 1 Peggy Gillenwater 1 Jeff Glasson 1 Brian Gordon 4 Ed Gould 1 Paul Green 6 Marcus Hand 1 Betsy Hanes Perry 1 Mike Hawley 1 Kate Hedstrom 1 Anne Hill Wiebe 2 Graeme Hirst 2 Tovah Hollander 3 Rob Horn 1 Nike Horton 2 Byron Howes 2 Jonathan Hue 1 John Hughes 4 Pat Iurilli 1 Richard Johnsson 2 Jim Johnston 5 Christopher Kent 2 Karen Kerschen 2 Heinz Kindlimann 1 Jeff Konopka 1 Bob Kummerfeld 1 Bob Kunz 1 Kriton Kyrimis 1 Angi Lamb 5 Evelyn Leeper 10 Jeff Lichtman 3 Geoff Loker 3 Sandra Loosemore 2 Kevin Maciunas 1 Stavros Macrakis 2 Moira Mallison 7 Alan Marcum 3 Peter Maxwell 11 Pamela McGarvey 1 Jane Medefesser 1 Carole Miller 3 Steven Minneman 1 Martin Minow 10 Nancy Mintz 1 Jeffrey Mogul 3 Jeff Mogul 1 Kathy Morris 1 Duane Morse 5 Richard Newman-Wolfe 10 Vicki O'Day 4 Julian Onions 1 Carol Orange 1 Dave Osborne 1 Alicia Parmiter 1 Mukesh Patel 2 Alex Patison 2 Deborah Pedersen 1 Joe Petolino 1 Rob Pike 1 Paul Pomes 2 Martin Prime 1 Lou Ann Puetz 1 Conor Rafferty 1 Margaret Reek 1 Betty Reid 19 Brian Reid 2 Loretta Guarino Reid 2 Elaine Rich 1 William Roberts 2 George Robertson 2 James Roche 1 Simo Salanne 3 Rich Salz 2 Calvin Sambrook 1 Ratna Sarkar 1 David Scarbro 3 Gary Scott 2 Andrew Scott Beals 1 Sid Shapiro 2 Gregory Sharp 3 Andrew Shore 1 V. Snyder 2 Liz Sommers 2 Joseph Sotham 1 Sam Spitzner 1 Bob Statsinger 2 Hal Stern 1 Sandy Swier 1 Larry Tepper 1 Spencer Thomas 1 Wayne Thompson 2 Nigel Titley 2 Mike Trachtman 1 Glenn Trewitt 2 Bill Turner 1 Krister Valtonen 5 Mary-Claire van Leunen 2 Helen Anne Vigneau 1 Chi Vu 1 Arun Welch 2 William Westfield 2 Rod Williams 1 Jeff Winslow 3 Stephen Withers 1 Dennis Wombough 2 Kathy Wright