A Recipe for change

Moving a simple recipe website to Quarto while planning to leverage OpenAI Large Language Models for summarization and Github Actions for automation.
Quarto
R
OpenAI
gt
Author

Matt Leary

Published

January 31, 2024

A ChatGPT intro

Hey folks,

Long time no blog, right? Well, guess what got me back into the keyboard clacking game? A combo of needing a push and stumbling onto a pretty cool project. So, here I am, ready to spill the beans on my latest coding escapade.

Confession time: I’ve got this not-so-great habit. I cook up these awesome meals for the fam, and then, poof! Forget how to recreate the magic. It’s like culinary amnesia. Ever been there?

So, a while back, I threw together this simple thing to track recipes, just to keep my kitchen capers in check. Fast forward, and it’s become this cool project that’s dragging me back to blogging – in a good way.

Stay tuned for the full scoop on how I’m leveling up my recipe game, avoiding the “What was in that again?” moments, and diving into a bit of tech fun. Quarto, Google Sheets, OpenAI magic – it’s all in the mix.

Catch you in the next post!

Cheers, [Your First Name]

A new project, migrating to Quarto and exploring OpenAI

First, I had to include the above ChatGPT blog write-up once I read the lines “got me back into the keyboard clacking game” and “It’s like culinary amnesia”. That was just too great not to share. I am excited to kick-off a multiple-stage project leveraging Quarto, Github Actions, OpenAI, and a few other tools. So in case the above ChatGPT summary wasn’t clear, I will give a quick summary.

Years ago, I started a simple personal website to save recipes my family liked. I would never remember which recipe I had used and then would scramble to try and find them again. I setup a simple process leveraging {rmarkdown}, a csv of data, and Github Actions. Fast forward a few years of not updating that process, and I started to get some security warnings from the old code base. At that point, I decided it was time to move the basic recipe website to my personal website (here) and that meant converting it to a new format you can find here.

Initial Setup

My initial focus was just moving the old recipe website to my existing Quarto personal website. I wanted to keep the first iteration simple so I focused on :

  • Instead of saving the data in a csv file in the repo, I moved the data to a Google Sheets page and accessed it with the {googlesheets4} package

  • I upgraded the presentation from a basic table to a “fancier” one leveraging {gt} and {gtExtras}

  • I added the new webpage as a drop down section in my existing personal website.

Future plans

This was just an initial start, focusing on the basic need to move the existing website. I have a few follow-on ideas I want to explore.

  • Leveraging OpenAI to summarize cooking websites

  • Exploring GitHub actions to update the recipes page whenever I update the Google Sheets with recipe data

    • This would be a good chance to test using secrets with GitHub actions, something I have not done
  • Figure out how to make a series of posts with Quarto blog

So a simple first step but I am looking forward to exploring GitHub actions and OpenAI in the coming weeks!