The original recipe site grew out of my main Nemeton website almost two years ago now. The Nemeton site is all about the Celtic Gods and ancient Welsh texts and their translations. The texts and aspects of this site covered everything from the late stone age to the late Elizabethan age when the last of the Welsh texts I'm concerned with were written.
Part of knowning and understanding any culture is to understand their cuisines and the kinds of food they ate. As a result I started the Celtnet Recipes to look at the cuisines of the past.
This grew into the following areas of the site:
- Ancient Recipes
- Brewing Recipes
- Roman Recipes
- Medieval Recipes
- Elizabethan Recipea
- Miscellaneous Modern Recipes
- Welsh Recipes
This covered all the major historical periods and cultures I was interested in, but all the code for the website was hard-coded and even adding a single recipe meant making changes across several hundred pages which severely limited the rate at which new content could be added. All this meant that eventually I had to bite the bullet and go for a complete overhaul and re-design of the entire recipes website. I eventually settled on MySQL as the database and PHP as the programming language of choice and I designed a new database for the entire recipes site. What this meant was that I only had to populate the database with a single recipe and it would be distributed throughout the entire site. Now I could properly devote myself to this site, which was becoming a bit of an obsession for me.
As well as the recipe sections above I now added recipe-associated information:
- History of the Spice Trade
- Guide to Spices and their Usea
- Guide to Herbs and their Uses
- Glossary of Food Terms
- Guide to Wild Foods
- Recipe Articles Pages
- Cletnet Recipes Forum
- Celtnet Reviews Recipe Articles
The growth of the recipe site (it's now over 2000 recipes in total) also meant the the site could cover far more of the world than it could previously. It also meant that the recipes in the Miscellaneous Modern Recipes section was growing more rapidly than any other region of the site which meant that the site had to be sub-diveided even further. This led to the breaking-up of the site into the following regions of the world:
- African Recipes
- Recipes from the Americas
- Arabian Recipes
- Asian Recipes
- European Recipes
- Fusion Recipes
- Indian Recipes
- Oceanain Recipes
The recipes in the site now cover the entire globe. But I have a very specific focus on Africa an I'll talk to you about that in the next post.
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