I follow the USENET newsgroup alt.food.vegan for recipe ideas, making a .txt copy of any recipe I think might be interesting to use. Over the years, I've amassed quite a collection of these (well over a thousand), and it's becoming very difficult to organise them and find them. What I decided to do was create a searchable database of sorts, so I could search based on key ingredients, preparation time, number of servings, type of meal, etc. using a web browser based interface (so I can add features like measurement conversion charts, and print out recipes if I need to).

But like many ideas I come up with, it's one of these things in which I don't have the technical ability to implement it. At the moment I don't even know whether it would be better to use Perl or PHP/MySQL to do this. Size is not really a consideration, as I don't see it being made available online in the forseeable future, unless I put so much work into it that it seems a waste not to make it freely available, with the permission of course of those who posted the recipes in the first place. Neither is my ability (or lack of it) in both of the languages, as I'm willing to look upon it as a learning experience :)

Has anymonk ever created something of a similar vein, and if so which way did you approach this? Thanks in advance,
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Rozallin J. Thompson
The Webmistress who doesn't hesitate to use strict;